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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think copilot is intrinsically a copyright violation, as you seem to be alluding to. Examples like this seem to be more controversial, but I’m not sure there’s a clear copyright violation there either.

If you asked every developer on earth to implement FizzBuzz, how many actually different implementations would you get? Probably not very many. Who should own the copyright for each of them? Would the outcome be different for any other product feature? If you asked every dev on earth to write a function that checked a JWT claim, how many of them would be more or less exactly the same? Would that be a copyright violation? I hope the courts answer some of these questions one day.

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> If you asked every developer on earth to implement FizzBuzz, how many actually different implementations would you get?

Does it matter? If you examined every copyright lawsuit on earth over code, how many of them would actually be over FizzBuzz?

The same rationale applies to any other simple code block, as I elaborated on.

And my point is you don't have lawsuits over one simple code block.

This entire thread is about how copilot committed a copyright violation on a simple code block.

That code block is neither "simple like FizzBuzz" nor is it in a lawsuit. I feel like we're speaking past each other at this point.

What makes it not simple like FizzBuzz? You will not be able to come up with a reason why this one single function is copyrightable, but a FizzBuzz function isn’t. It’s one function in 15 lines of code. Get 1,000,000 developers to implement that function and you’re not going to have anywhere near 1,000,000 substantially different implementations.

For one thing FizzBuzz is like... 5-6 statements? This function has 13. FizzBuzz has a whopping 1 variable to keep track of. This function has so many I'm not even going to try to count. I'm not going to keep arguing about this, but if you want to believe they're equally simple then you'll just have a hard time convincing other people. That's all I have left to say on this.

It doesn't seem that far off to me. Copyright makes more sense in a larger context, such as making a Windows clone by copy pasting code from some Windows leak.

Without that context, fizzbuzz is not that different from a matrix transpose function to me.

SCO v. IBM[1] included claims of sections as small as "…ranging from five to ten to fifteen lines of code in multiple places that are of issue…" in some of the individual claims of the case.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Internation....

The "..." part you redacted out explicitly said "it is many different sections of code". It was (quite obviously) not one or two 5-line blocks of code, let alone "simple" ones like FizzBuzz.

So your claim is that the code in the OP tweet is actually not copyrightable, and it would only become a copyright violation if you also copied many additional code blocks from the same copyrighted work?

Google v. Oracle ended with a six line function not being granted de minimus protection. What you're talking about is arguably common sense, but not based on current case law in the US.

I think the issue people have is that every developer trying to implement FizzBuzz will not have studied all the existing public copyrighted implementations. They will likely be reinventing the solution with maybe never having seen an existing FizzBuzz implementation or having only seen one or two at most, and probably won't be re-implementing it verbatim.

But the machine learning model has studied every single one of them.

And maybe more preposterous, if its dataset had no FizzBuzz implementation would it even be able to re-invent it?

I feel this is the big distinction that probably annoys people.

That and the general fact that everyone is worried it'll devalue the worth of an experienced developer as AI will make hard thing easier, require less effort and talent to learn and thus making developers less high demand and probably lower paid.

> If you asked every developer on earth to implement FizzBuzz, how many actually different implementations would you get?

Thousands at least. Some of which would actually work.

There’s a finite number of ways to implement a working FizzBuzz (or anything else) in any given language, that aren’t substantially similar, is my point. At least without introducing pointless code for the explicit purpose of making it look different.

I suppose whoever wants to pay the fees would “own” these things ?

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ61.pdf

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