Code plagiarization is not a thing by all practical purposes (it's even almost impossible to go to court with that for very obvious reasons). And that's good. Because with that insane lockdown of "Intellectual Property" nothing would ever get done. So, think what you want.
I don't think that's true and, if it was, it would be the death knell for open source.
Code Plagiarism is taken very seriously by every company I have worked with. Multiple companies have been sued for violating the GPL. The SFC is currently fighting Vizio in court for example. While not commonplace, to say it's "almost impossible" is a stretch. Every large company complies with code copyright obligations for a reason. My company publishes changes to GCC and a dozen other GPL projects. Entire products like Protocode and BlackDuck exist to ensure code compliance. Even small code snippets are flagged.
Over the past few years the source code for Windows, SQL server, Bing and Cortana have all been leaked. If someone built a product using that code, how long do you think it would take Microsoft to sue? CoPilot is one rule for mega-corps and another for everyone else.
> Ok, then there doesn't exist a single reputable company with a tech division and we're all unethical. Have a nice unethical day.
I’m deeply disturbed that you think this form of plagiarism is universal — I can assure you that is not the case.
I work at a FANG currently, and plagiarism is absolutely not tolerated.
In fact, plagiarism has been considered a fireable offense at every other company I’ve worked at over my 25 year long career, and prior to that, considered a serious form of academic misconduct in school.
It’s clearly unethical and I’ve never plagiarized in my life.
I’ve only run into one instance of someone else plagiarizing code in my career, and that individual was fired.
> I’m deeply disturbed that you think this form of plagiarism is universal
This thread is an eye opener for me too. Do engineers not get trained on their legal obligations? My company is old and not a tradition tech company but we have been running workshops on the issue for years. Even if they don't, what about their legal teams? Or CI tools to scan for licence violations? Some of the responses here are so naive it's crazy. I hope no one is identifying the companies they work for.
Obviously we do. Don't copy paste 10 pages of source code unaltered and sell it as your own.
But that's something entirely different from small code snippets, changed and adapted to solve the same problem a thousand other people already had. Nothing else are developers doing going on GitHub, StackOverflow or any other website to find answers to their questions. That's not naivety, that's how coding works (partially). If you would have to re-invent the wheel everytime you build something new, good luck.
There isn't a threshold for copyright violation. If you copy a 3 line function from a GPL library, you have to comply with the licence. Tools like BlackDuck will pick it up.
Snippets aren't exactly defined but I see them as more than just a single line like "here's how to flatten a list in Python", it's some functionality - e.g. an algorithm implementation or some task.
> I’m deeply disturbed that you think this form of plagiarism is universal — I can assure you that is not the case.
> I work at a FANG currently, and plagiarism is absolutely not tolerated.
It's universal in any company that doesn't take measures against it. So basically startups, small, medium, and even some large companies.
So, rearranging conditionals or loops or variables then, problem solved. You cannot 1:1 copy paste anyway. That never works. You always have to adapt it to your particularity. So it's "reworded" by default. And CoPilot is doing nothing else. It's not just 1:1 memorising code, it's a tiny bit smarter than that. I strongly believe you're not a developer. Point taken. I understand your considerations. You should write code sometimes to solve a complex problem that uses some libraries and see how far you get without consulting the internet or books.
I absolutely attribute things I find on SO to where I found them. You finished college maybe a year ago and are already making some absolute judgments about what makes other people qualified to call themselves developers simply because they don’t develop as you do.
