---
title: "Re: GH Copilot takes"
date: 2022-07-20T08:55:38-07:00
replyURI: "https://mastodon.social/@humanetech/108677838939825183"
replyTitle: "Fully IANAL philosophical showerthoughts"
replyType: "SocialMediaPosting"
replyAuthor: "Humane Tech Now"
replyAuthorURI: "https://mastodon.social/@humanetech"
---
> They are like workers that are hired.

Laws around "works for hire" come with their own copyright baggage that assumes workers are actual people; for instance, these laws include mechanisms by which workers can claim copyright themselves.

I'm not opposed to the general principle of training a model on copyrighted works potentially being fair use; however, the generated works would need to be sufficiently novel or seemingly "creative" by human standards for it to work. Otherwise, you're in "derived work" territory. This, I think, is a major difference between the likes of DALL-E and Midjourney, and the likes of Copilot.

I personally found all the discourse way too hilarious, and wrote a satirical article on it only to get clobbered by Poe's Law: <cite><a href="{{<relref "/posts/experiment-copilot-legality">}}">An experiment to test GitHub Copilot's legality</a></cite>.