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Comment by tpxl | Hacker News Reader

> The MIT and Apache licenses explicitly allow reuse

> No evidence Copilot [...] violated any licenses

Both of these allow redistribution _if you include the license_. Copilot doesn't include any licenses in the code it distributes. You can argue whether that's fair use or not, but you can't argue that it doesn't respect the license.

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You can configure Copilot to not return code that appears verbatim in public repositories. In that case it at least won't produce code you could legitimately argue would be covered by any individuals' specific license.

But it might well give you the exact same code with a variable name changed (for example), which would be unlikely to hold up in court if a human had done it to bypass the license.

you are assuming some imaginative scenario. "Hold up" in court. It will never happen. Just check how many ways you have to write a method to check if a number is odd or not. If you are using a application using a framework, pretty sure all codes looks similar. Look a ruby on rails application for example. Quite often, the user model, session controller and in some level, all controllers if they are following the "rails way" they look very similar.

It depends on the code. You can’t copyright something functional like a for-loop. What you can copyright is the larger expressive, and arbitrary, structure of that code.

Copyright is not meant for utilitarian purposes. For that there are patents. The non-utilitarian, artistically expressive aspect of software is in how code is organized. You know, the rather arbitrary decisions that spawn hours of bike-shedding.

Copilot is most useful when it makes no creative decisions and instead follows the style and design patterns already established in the code base.

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