Tim Davis doesn't actually have any instance of copyright infringement to complain about; he was able to induce Copilot to /mostly/ recreate his code through careful prompting, but no one has actually deployed the code. By the same token, we don't outlaw ctrl-c and ctrl-v buttons on computers.
There is plenty of space here to discuss developing tools to check for unintentional infringement. I would guess, though, that such tools would sweep up a whoooole lot of non-copilot human usage and make it much harder to deploy anything new.
So, maybe a better discussion to have here is how to make the animal safer, not the total outlawing of the animal. Single-line completions (the majority of co-pilot usage) aren't infringing. Probably true for almost-any few line completion. So, capping the amount of consecutive auto-completed code might be a reasonable 'muzzle' on the model to keep it reasonably safe.
I think we have an ideological disagreement here. I'm not part of the "open source" movement, I believe in free software. Although I'm not prolific, I have authored some free software and shared it widely. I want people to have it, use it, and share it, so long as they extend the same rights to their users.
Now my software has been assimilated into a proprietary blob. Had that blob been free, like my software within it, I would have accepted it, but it's not. It's controlled exclusively by Microsoft and OpenAI, two entities which I place no trust in.
For me the dog has already bitten. The free software I extended to an audience I believe would show the same generosity has instead been made into a proprietary product.
The "copyright" question for me is not a question of "fairness" or ability of Microsoft or anyone else to make a product. For me it's a tool to protect my contribution from proprietary business.
Basically. I dont want the animal safer, I want it free (according to the FSF freedoms).
> The free software I extended to an audience I believe would show the same generosity has instead been made into a proprietary product.
That's exactly my complaint about Copilot. And since all code hosted on GitHub is now subject to this land-grab, my only recourse is not to use GitHub any more if I want to publish a project of mine.
I am not sure your software has been assimilated into a proprietary blob. Rather, it's been sliced into its constituent parts and those parts have been tagged by the proprietary blob.
Your code isn't being run by Copilot, as such; it's been categorized in a way that allows partial retrieval without the license or attribution. This might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it's kind for a ship-of-theseus problem; probably nobody is running any of your programs in their entirety, but it's very possible that bits of your code have found your way into other people's programs. How do you distinguish between contributions that are uniquely yours, and those which are just helper functions or cobbled together from other example code, eg in documentation or from a book or Q&A website?
I am not a lawyer, but I don't think anyone needs to deploy the code in order to infringe copyright: they just need to distribute the code to a third party (hence copyright -- the right to copy). And on the face of it, Microsoft would appear to have distributed Tim Davis's code, in compressed form, as part of the trained language model in Copilot.
But in this case copilot is not equivalent to copy-paste. When doing copy-paste, you are acting with knowledge of the source of the copied code and with intent to copy code.
With copilot, you are not acting with knowledge of the source and not with intent to copy, in fact I'm sure the users would have a reasonable expectation of the tool not copy-pasting existing code verbatim.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that intent matters a lot.
Popcorn time was also just a tool to allow you to stream data from torrents. That didn't seem to help them put up a legal defence (nor should it have, because the intent was pretty clear on that one).
And seriously, if cases exist, where the only thing a tool does (albeit via a VERY complex implementation path) is to strip a license from a piece of code and serve that code up via an API, then that really does sound like the creators of the tool are at fault.
There is plenty of space here to discuss developing tools to check for unintentional infringement. I would guess, though, that such tools would sweep up a whoooole lot of non-copilot human usage and make it much harder to deploy anything new.
So, maybe a better discussion to have here is how to make the animal safer, not the total outlawing of the animal. Single-line completions (the majority of co-pilot usage) aren't infringing. Probably true for almost-any few line completion. So, capping the amount of consecutive auto-completed code might be a reasonable 'muzzle' on the model to keep it reasonably safe.