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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

It seems a lot of this stems from how the DMCA does not require that these hosting providers actually check for code ownership at submission, or maybe just how they don't have an explicit checkbox for "I affirm that I can license this code to GitHub" every time someone is uploading code.

If it is shown that the license in the TOS is valid, the legal question might boil down to "is the TOS License broad enough to where nobody thought that it allowed their code to be used in for-profit ML models?"

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> how the DMCA does not require that these hosting providers actually check for code ownership at submission

How does one check who owns a work if the work does not include the authorship information? (or if the work has been altered to have incorrect authorship information)

That's the tough part, and the technological infeasibility is probably why the DMCA has no such provision. Even for Video, only YouTube has come up with a system that is "mostly right" for "most content" they have to deal with, that being Content ID, and it takes a lot of horsepower and a lot of money to run (and it requires that every rights holder must upload their content to the service for scanning; quite a feat).

A checkbox would make no difference in the case where the uploaded has not been granted the right to agree to such terms with respect to the code in question, leaving the matter in the same situation.

I'd like to propose a "golden rule" test. If Copilot was truly not at risk of regurgitating large blocks of code verbatim, why didn't Microsoft train it on proprietary Microsoft code as well? Why was it limited to user-submitted code on GitHub? If there is any argument pointing to licensing or copyright or patents, it stands to reason those concerns would apply to any corpus of user-submitted code since users could easily misrepresent the licensing.

Precisely. I made this exact point a while ago, how come Microsoft didn't submit the source code to Windows as part of the training data, that is at least code that they can plausibly claim they have the rights to.

There's a good point made over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34282407 that it might accidentally spit out some kind of secret that is much smaller than a copyrightable piece of code. That's not a risk for code in public repositories.

Perhaps you want to check the comment section here: https://lwn.net/Articles/914150/

user bluca works at microsoft, but i think their opinions are their own.

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