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Comment by jensensbutton | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be the people publishing code written with Copilot that (potentially) violate any licenses? It doesn't seem to be that the tool violates anything, though it may put the _user_ at risk of violating something.

Like, don't use it if you're worried about violating licenses, but I don't see how Microsoft could get in trouble for the tool. It doesn't write and publish code by itself.

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Sorry, we built this tool for you that auto violates licenses. Sure, we're owned by a huge megacorp with billions of dollars, but it's your responsibility to confirm - and yes, we recognize it's impossible to confirm - that what you release using our tool isn't violating the license.

In short, github gets to make the license violator bot and push the violations off onto the small fry who actually use it? No thanks.

Isn't that sortof the justification behind bittorrent and trackers?

I see the difference as BitTorrent being an ignorant tool that just processes the data it receives. If you point BitTorrent to copyright data, it emits copyright data. The fault is on the users. Copilot was built with and "contains" copyright data, which it can produce with non-copyright input.

Microsoft are violating the licenses already when they initially show you the generated code without attribution and ignoring other license restrictions. How you use it yourself is separate from that.

Unless that falls under their Terms of services license grant, which would bypass the code public license...

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