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Comment by mldq | Hacker News Reader

This is the standard content display license that everyone uses. Even in your quoted text I don't see any hint that snippets can be shown without attribution or the code license.

It also says they can't sell the code, which CoPilot is doing.

Also, in a very high number of cases it isn't the author who uploads.

Repeating your line of argumentation (which occurs in every CoPilot thread) does not make it true.

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It's irrelevant whether it's standard or not. Again, the terms in the code licence (including attribution) do not apply to Github, because that is not the licence under which they are using the code. You grant them a separate licence when you start using their service.

If someone who isn't the author has uploaded code which they do not have a right to copy, they are liable, not Github. This is also clear from the Github Terms: "If you're posting anything you did not create yourself or do not own the rights to, you agree that you are responsible for any Content you post"

It's almost as if these highly paid lawyers know what they're doing.

You grant them a content display license, not a general code license.

> It's almost as if these highly paid lawyers know what they're doing.

Sure, they wrote the content display license long before CoPilot even existed. Any court will see the intent and not interpret these terms as a code re-licensing.

There is no such thing as a "content display licence" or "general code licence". There is copyright (literally, the right to make copies) which broadly lies with the author, who can then grant other parties a licence to copy their content.

I'm afraid I do not believe your legal expertise is so extensive that you are able to accurately predict the judgement of "any court".

> You grant them a separate licence when you start using their service.

And that license explicitly states that it doesn't give them the right to sell your code.

And it explicitly states that it does give them the right to share your code. Copilot isn't selling code; if it were, then GitHub wouldn't let you share the output of Copilot; that would destroy their market. That they allow you to share the output of Copilot with others proves that what they are selling is the service, not the output. The output is, at worst, "shared" code from Github's licensors.

They're selling the service, which is a derivative work of the code.

Which is what the licence is granting them the right to do.

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