zlacker

>>belter+(OP)
Copilot is to license violations (esp of copyleft licenses) what cryptocurrency mixers are for money laundering.

My employer (IMHO smartly) forbids use of LLMs in company IP and company laptops, etc. Many others I'm sure are doing the same, and many others will follow.

>>cmrdpo+xh
Nobody uses copilot intentionally to violate copyright law. People do use crypto mixers intentionally to violate money laundering laws.

>>theRea+Co
Nobody affirmatively says “yes, my goal is to violate copyright law, and Copilot is the best tool I’ve found”. But it doesn’t seem impossible to me that the value of Copilot comes partially from the fact that it can copy paste code from copyrighted repositories in ways which would be illegal for you or I to do. I’m not sure it’s proven yet but I wouldn’t be shocked if it is in the future.

>>SpicyL+Cs
It provides the same value as someone who copies and pastes code from Stack Overflow or any of the predecessors without concerning themselves with the license.

I am certain that I can find code from Linux or gcc or emacs on Stack Overflow that is under a GPL license and not compatible with the CC license Stack Overflow uses... and yet it's there. What's more, people will copy that code into their own ignoring the CC license too.

How is that really any different than using Copilot if the original license and attribution are something to respect.

Note that I do think that the original license is something to respect which is why for any of the code that I write that has copyright that matters on it (toy program for home? meh. Hobby project repo that I'm working on that I'll publish? yep. Employer's code for work? absolutely.) I either don't touch questionable sources or run a license check on it when using it.

The key thing is that I don't consider the use of Copilot to be any more controversial than copying from Stack Overflow - which has been done by countless programmers for a decade before Copilot existed and no one got up in arms about it then.

>>shagie+aE
Browsing Stack Overflow and even blindly copy and pasting is an intentional action done by research by the user, and the source of the material pasted is known or discoverable.

Using Copilot is an automated process, and the source of the material used in learning is deeply obfuscated in the learning model.

That's why I make the analogy back to cryptocurrency mixers.