> Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use.
This is a ridiculous conclusion. The ultimate destination of the robot actions' product is its user, i.e. a human. It is a clear corollary of the transitive law. Therefore, all human-focused legal concepts, including infringement, are applicable in such cases.
The absurdness of the conclusion cited above can be easily illustrated, as follows. Suppose that a person owns or rents an advanced robot (say, like Boston Dynamics' Spot, but better). He/she then programs it to break into someone's house and steal something valuable. All goes by the plan, the robot delivers the stolen goods to the rendezvous point and, if rented, gets returned. Now, according to the conclusion's logic, since a robot has done the actual "work", "it's fair use". Nonsense, right?
Just to clarify: I like the concept of GitHub Copilot (even though I have not yet tried this particular product). It offers various benefits, from pedagogical to adopting software engineering best practices to improving engineering productivity. However, I think that IP and legal aspects of this approach and specific product should be carefully studied and resolved in a consistent manner (e.g., prevent the model or system to output exact source code snippets).
I certainly see the value in solutions like GitHub Copilot (if implemented well), at least, from three perspectives: a) 𝐩𝐞𝐝𝐚𝐠𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 (by allowing developers, especially beginners, to see the diversity in different approaches to potential solutions for specific problems), b) 𝐬𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬 [of course, it should be used with care and, generally, the quality of relevant suggestions from this angle is still TBD] and c) 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 (this is especially relevant for programming languages and frameworks with lots of boilerplate code - e.g., C#/.NET, Java). Spending much less time on typing typically very verbose boilerplate code will give software developers much more time to spend on truly valuable and important activities, such as problem solving, architecting, collaborating.
This is a ridiculous conclusion. The ultimate destination of the robot actions' product is its user, i.e. a human. It is a clear corollary of the transitive law. Therefore, all human-focused legal concepts, including infringement, are applicable in such cases.
The absurdness of the conclusion cited above can be easily illustrated, as follows. Suppose that a person owns or rents an advanced robot (say, like Boston Dynamics' Spot, but better). He/she then programs it to break into someone's house and steal something valuable. All goes by the plan, the robot delivers the stolen goods to the rendezvous point and, if rented, gets returned. Now, according to the conclusion's logic, since a robot has done the actual "work", "it's fair use". Nonsense, right?
Just to clarify: I like the concept of GitHub Copilot (even though I have not yet tried this particular product). It offers various benefits, from pedagogical to adopting software engineering best practices to improving engineering productivity. However, I think that IP and legal aspects of this approach and specific product should be carefully studied and resolved in a consistent manner (e.g., prevent the model or system to output exact source code snippets).