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Unless Microsoft is secretly powering Copilot with Mechanical Turk, that isn't what's happening here.


Why not complete that analogy?

What if instead of Copilot, it was a bunch of humans who were searching all the source code they could access and then copying/autocompleting that code, regardless of the license.

Is that still OK? If yes, why?


A paid service where tens of hundreds of people search for publicly available code snippets and send them to you? I believe they call that outsourcing in some circles.


In this case we'd be sending subpoenas to those people to make sure they hadn't been instructed to disregard licenses or copy large pieces of code verbatim.


You're reading too much into my comment. All I'm saying is that Copilot isn't "learning" like a human does.


That wouldn't be ok, I'm assuming that's what you're implying as well? In any case I would say that's not ok.

Copying code, even if its from a mix of many different places, and the results look like a mosaic, would still be copying.

If the Mturk worker just suggested an implementation they came up with that be fine.


Why not make the a ology the other way. If I put massive amounts of code into a database and develop some sort of query language that spits out various parts of the contents of the database based on the query am I covered by fair use?




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