I don't see any rights being taken away from me. CoPilot doesn't copy my code, it just learns from it, just as you can. "Others can learn from this" is one reason I release stuff as open source in the first place.
People will quote that John Carmack Doom example where it copies the function verbatim, but as far as I can tell that's a rare thing, and it's a function that's been widely copied around without proper licensing; a human could also get it wrong by copying it from github.com/random-person/mit-project with the wrong license (and since then there's also been work to prevent this kind of thing).
Co-pilot isn't unique, or the first AI/ML project to use copyrighted works; all the GPT models use copyrighted works as their input. Some doubts have been raised over the legality of that too, but it's received nowhere near the amount of criticism that Co-Pilot has, certainly not on HN, and I've never seen anyone doubt the morality of it – only the legality.
If you were to go through my public open source code I'm sure you can find stuff that's very similar to some code from my previous employers or other open source projects. Not because I copy/pasted anything, but because my brain was trained on that dataset: you see or write something that works, you face a similar problem a few years later, you write a similar solution.
"Using existing works as input" is common throughout creative works. As Phil Anselmo once said: "with Pantera we took our five favourite bands and ripped 'em off to hell".
People are already getting sued because "that one melody sounds a bit similar to this other melody"; fair use is already widely ignored/disrespected. Much will depend on the exact details, but any win in this lawsuit has a very real chance of empowering that sort of nonsense.
People will quote that John Carmack Doom example where it copies the function verbatim, but as far as I can tell that's a rare thing, and it's a function that's been widely copied around without proper licensing; a human could also get it wrong by copying it from github.com/random-person/mit-project with the wrong license (and since then there's also been work to prevent this kind of thing).
Co-pilot isn't unique, or the first AI/ML project to use copyrighted works; all the GPT models use copyrighted works as their input. Some doubts have been raised over the legality of that too, but it's received nowhere near the amount of criticism that Co-Pilot has, certainly not on HN, and I've never seen anyone doubt the morality of it – only the legality.
If you were to go through my public open source code I'm sure you can find stuff that's very similar to some code from my previous employers or other open source projects. Not because I copy/pasted anything, but because my brain was trained on that dataset: you see or write something that works, you face a similar problem a few years later, you write a similar solution.
"Using existing works as input" is common throughout creative works. As Phil Anselmo once said: "with Pantera we took our five favourite bands and ripped 'em off to hell".
People are already getting sued because "that one melody sounds a bit similar to this other melody"; fair use is already widely ignored/disrespected. Much will depend on the exact details, but any win in this lawsuit has a very real chance of empowering that sort of nonsense.