> it’s highly possible Github themselves can end up in how water for facilitating this.
It might be possible, I don’t know about “highly”. Have you checked the license exclusions required to use Github? Their terms already carve out a Copyright exception for Github, because they need it on order to host your code. There’s also no reason Github can’t filter certain licenses, or make it impossible to complete entire functions, or build an option for everyone to opt-in to being autocomplete source material regardless of license, right? Any legal challenges are likely to result in changes to the feature before there are ever any serious repercussions.
I think it’s at least as likely, if not more so, that Copyright Law could evolve in response to the growing number of AI auto completers, and we (society) try to allow it within reason by being more specific about what constitutes automated infringement and who’s responsible for it. Fair Use currently exists but is vague and left up to courts to decide. In the meantime, Copyright is primarily intended to foster a balance between business and freedom of expression, and there’s a lot of open source software on Github that cares about freedom of expression and not about business. In any case, we don’t really want Copyright to represent some kind of absolute ownership land-lock over every string of 100 characters, that is a bit antithetical to both Copyright and the FOSS community.
It might be possible, I don’t know about “highly”. Have you checked the license exclusions required to use Github? Their terms already carve out a Copyright exception for Github, because they need it on order to host your code. There’s also no reason Github can’t filter certain licenses, or make it impossible to complete entire functions, or build an option for everyone to opt-in to being autocomplete source material regardless of license, right? Any legal challenges are likely to result in changes to the feature before there are ever any serious repercussions.
I think it’s at least as likely, if not more so, that Copyright Law could evolve in response to the growing number of AI auto completers, and we (society) try to allow it within reason by being more specific about what constitutes automated infringement and who’s responsible for it. Fair Use currently exists but is vague and left up to courts to decide. In the meantime, Copyright is primarily intended to foster a balance between business and freedom of expression, and there’s a lot of open source software on Github that cares about freedom of expression and not about business. In any case, we don’t really want Copyright to represent some kind of absolute ownership land-lock over every string of 100 characters, that is a bit antithetical to both Copyright and the FOSS community.