> Precisely. Would it be okay for me to publish some code as GPL because my buddy gave it to me and promised that it was totally legit and I could use it and it definitely wasn't copy-pasted from one of the Windows source leaks?
But where do you draw the line? What if you accidentally came up with the same or similar solution to something in windows? The code might not be from your friend either, it could be from N steps of copy paste, rework, reformating, refactoring, etc.
> I don’t face any copyright issues from writing code that resembles something in Windows. I never had access to its source code, so any similarities have to be purely coincidental.
> A BSL project could say, hey, look at this guy stealing our code!, even if I’ve never seen it. I could have, and that opens a plausible risk I wish I didn’t have.
By that argument, you could have looked at Windows code too, since Windows source code has leaked multiple times, and 5 minutes of searching will find it.
> If I ask you to reproduce a block of GPL code in my codebase and you do it, you violated the license. It does not matter that I primed you or lead you to that outcome. What matters is the legally protected code is somewhere it shouldn’t be.
This isn't accurate. If I reproduce GPL code in your codebase, that's perfectly acceptable as long as you obey the terms of the GPL when you go to distribute your code. In this hypothetical, my act of copying isn't restricted under the GPL license, it's your subsequent act of distribution that triggers the viral terms of the GPL.
The big question that is still untested in court is whether Copilot itself constitutes a derivative work of its training data. If Copilot is derivative then Microsoft is infringing already. If Copilot is transformative then it is the responsibility of downstream consumers to ensure that they comply with the license of any code that may get reproduced verbatim. This question has not been ruled on, and it's not clear which direction a court will go.
>Would it outrage you for someone else to take your code, put a pretty GUI on top, sell it, and make millions while you make nothing?
If he does it with the same license as mine (i.e. GPL), then no, it wouldn't outrage me (I would even be interested in applying to his company, so he teaches me how she did it). What I care about is the freedom of the users of my software (so I want to seal it to not be proprietary, ever), not about how other developers benefit from my creation.
> You consented to people reading your code and learning from it when you posted it on Github.
And if I never posted my code to github, but someone else did? What if someone had posted proprietary code they had no rights to to github at the same time the scraper bots were trawling it? A few years ago some Windows source code was leaked onto Github - did Microsoft consent then?
> I publish copyrighted code. Some company decides to consume it without purchasing a license. The product they distribute is vastly different from my code itself, but I can still sue them into oblivion.
No you can't. If a company reads your copyrighted code, then writes up a spec and sends it to another team that writes up code that accomplishes what you did, that doesn't violate copyright and you wouldn't be able to sue them into oblivion.
> The only thing I felt a bit dissapointed about was to see a couple of open source projects use snippets of my code without any form of acknowledgement.
Does the original code have a free license? It seems like it doesn't, so these free projects taking the code could be violating the original copyright.
I won't even claim that people must necessarily follow the law. Copyright law is inconsistent at best, and notoriously hard to follow to the letter (and often ridiculous). In practice lawyers assess the legal risk and weigh the outcomes.
I never intended to discuss what we should do, and I definitely did not propose shutting down the internet...
The original discussion was such:
> > They did not copy the implementation, they copied the general idea of what the algorithm should do
> [Citation needed]
You said the original authors did not complain, which is neither here nor there, as I pointed out. There is still some theoretical legal risk if you copy with the owner's knowledge but not express consent. The fact that the burden of proof is on the authors is true but that they have not brought a claim does not mean they cannot prove infringement.
And in case I haven't made it clear, I don't think it's a bad idea to assume the function is under GPL, I just don't think there's a basis for claiming what you originally claimed, and there is still some level of (probably acceptable) risk if you take the purported license of source code as-is.
> Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t there open source licenses that don’t permit unauthorized distribution? If so, couldn’t they safely release the source code without worrying about competition from forks?
They would still be faced with knock-offs that either copy code or violate the license; Paint.net (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.net#History) is an example of this happening for an open source project.
> I did not look at the source code, because of the potential IP issues. What would happen if you looked at the source code and then later worked on another open source project and implemented a bit of code that looks similar?
Could this also be an issue with the GPL? What happens if I look at GPL source code and then author similar code under a non-GPL license? I wonder if a precedent has been set that could be applied to this Fair Source license.
>And if you prompt them in such a way as to strongly hint at a specific copyrighted work you have in mind, shouldn't some of the blame really go to you?
If you, not I, uploaded my GPL'ed code to Github is the blame on you then?
> Regardless! of which license that code is released under, that function is now open source, for the entire world to see and use.
Only if you disregard the law. Copyright law says that no, that is not freely available to the world. It's owned lock, stock, and barrel by the person who wrote it. If you choose not to attach a license to the code, nobody else may legally use it (barring fair use).
What license you attach to it defines how others may legally use it, and with what restrictions.
The law is why you can obtain the source code to Microsoft Windows from Microsoft themselves, but you can't re-release it in any form.
> If I take your hard work that you clearly marked with a GPL license and then make money from it, not quite directly, but very closely, how is that fair use? Or legal?
If I'm Google, and I scan your code and return a link to it when people ask to find code like that (but show an ad next to that link for someone else's code that might solve their problem too), that's fair use and legal. My search engine has probably stored your code in a partial format, and that's fine.
>With high probability, what's happened here is this code is an important piece of code-infrastucture in that it's copied into a fair number of places. Which means humans are copying it without attribution or downstream of someone who did while relevant license is not propagated anywhere near as reliably.
The original poster said it was in a private repository.
>It doesn't change licensing issue but it does mean people are already copying and using copyrighted code without respecting original license and no AI involved.
I don't get the argument. Many people are copying/pirating MS windows/MS office. What do you think MS would say to a company they caught with unlicensed copies and they used the excuse "the PCs came preinstalled with Windows and we didn't check if there was a valid license"?
> We're working hard to remove GPL code in some of our products.
Reading that, I am instantly wondering if you are currently infringing someones copyright and are now working hard to hide the crime?
There is alternatives of course. Are your product a prototype that never got shipped to a customer? Are the product at the moment gpl'ed, witch corresponding source code provided to the customer, and you want to move away to closed source in the future? I know any of the three scenarios could be the situation you are describing.
> I own the modified code and can report you to the DA if you take it and try to sell it somewhere else.
How does this work with the original copyrighted code? If I take 10k lines of an open source project, tack on an echo or a comment or some nonsense, do I suddenly get to claim ownership of the rest of the code? It would make sense that you could own the delta, but you should only own your delta, not the original code.
> So the person copying it to you can be targeted by Microsoft, and if you copied Windows without that user's permission, you are probably going to be charged with a violation of the CFAA.
If I'm given permission to use a computer, and I then use that access to duplicate binaries that are not subject to copyright law and which the level of access I have been greanted gives me access to, which provision of the CFAA do you think I'm violating?
> Edit: The Windows agreement specifically says that using the software is an implicit agreement to the EULA, and Adobe's [2] says the same thing. Thus, even if you copy from someone else's computer, you are under the EULA.
That's something you can enforce if use of the software is controlled by law, and you can refuse me permission to use it if I don't agree to the EULA. If the code isn't copyrightable then you have no ability to do that - I'm entitled to use it without agreeing to the EULA, and asserting that I'm implicitly agreeing to it carries as much weight as me asserting that you agree to pay me $1000 by reading this comment.
But where do you draw the line? What if you accidentally came up with the same or similar solution to something in windows? The code might not be from your friend either, it could be from N steps of copy paste, rework, reformating, refactoring, etc.
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