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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

> But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway.

If you do that on your own, it's your (legal) responsibility. If Copilot does it for you, it's GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility.

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You are responsible for your tool use. That's the same discussion as with whether uTorrent is responsible for your torrenting copyrighted stuff or with Tesla's auto-pilot. You buy the tool, you are responsible for what you create with the tool.

Napster was liable for copyright infringement.

True, however, the users have been liable too. If my company gets sued because I used Copilot, it won't matter that much that the plaintiff also sued GitHub/Microsoft.

Napster's raison d'etre was copyright infringement.

Which they were then liable for.

> If Copilot does it for you, it's GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility.

Is this true? It hasn't been tried yet I assume?

>If Copilot does it for you, it's GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility.

GitHub/Microsoft says that it's still your responsibility.

>You should take the same precautions as you would with any code you write that uses material you did not independently originate. These include rigorous testing, IP scanning, and checking for security vulnerabilities. You should make sure your IDE or editor does not automatically compile or run generated code before you review it.

I'm not really sure how am I supposed to go about validating that I can in fact use this code that the magical black box barfed into my IDE using a bunch of different weights.

> GitHub/Microsoft says that it's still your responsibility

If Copilot is fair use, and has no restrictive license, than how is it anyone's responsibility?

If Copilot isn't fair use, it's Microsoft's responsibility.

(For copyright; for patent that's another issue, but you can violate patents by similarity without exposure or copying, anyway.)

Training Copilot is fair use, using Copilot is ???.

Just what a horrible shady behavior.

Give us your money but you are responsible for the code that OUR tool generates.

Let MS buy BlackDuck scanner and integrate in to GitHub/CoPilot. They could then suggest code and also scan it for any license violations, and give you both sides of the equation in the same tool.

Why should be GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility? No one is forcing you to use copilot.

If I use grammarly, are they responsible for what am I aiming to write?

If I pay for grammarly, and it plagiarizes an existing work but represents it as an entirely new, independent work and I am unaware of the existing work that is being stolen, who is doing the stealing?

This makes more sense for text message auto complete: you just take the suggested next word after a one word start deed, it might reproduce a Wikipedia entry. But what did tub expect? The same would be true with grammarly if you somehow got it to produce a bunch of new text. You expected garbage, but somehow infringed on copyright instead. But I guess think the user deserves some responsibility in realizing their expected garbage output isn’t for some reason.

If you pay a shady character to get you a modern laptop for $100 you can't claim that you were unaware that it was most likely stolen and the fact that you paid for it something doesn't absolve you morally.

does shady guy have his name on the side of a building, and run ads: "buy my shady stuff" and then pay taxes and his earning? That kind of shady guy?

Sometimes. Like Amazon, widely known for their workers and 3rd party vendor exploitation practices.

You can no more claim ignorance of where the github copilot code comes from than where the Amazon's low, low prices come from.

Whether you care is totally on you regardless of whether you pay ir not. You pay for product or service not moral absolution.

Are thousands of amazon employees going to be in same docket with me?

So it's my job to check my supplier, to make sure lines from co-pilot are legit.

At the same time when fast fashion companies sell T-shirts made with slave labour, its not the company's responsebility to check what their suppliers are doing.

And if tesla autopilot kills you and your family its not their fault either.

Neoliberal morality - companies are never accountable for anything, it's heresy to suggest they should do their job properly.

Other than the first sentence nothing you wrote is true. If a company doesn’t do due diligence on their suppliers they face fines and possibly criminal charges. The news came out the other day that the NTSB is considering whether to require Tesla to recall all their vehicles with self driving enabled. Companies of all types face huge fines and civil liability for product safety issues.

have you never googled "slavery fast fashion"?

Zara's clothes sometimes have notes in their pockets from people being held as slaves, pleading for help. I havent heard of anyone going to jail

most of our electronic waste end up illegally exported to poor countries, again when was the last tomw someone faced the music for that?

Does Grammarly gerate pages of content for you?

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