Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It's not just the GPL. Almost all open source software licenses require attribution; without that attribution, any copy is a license violation.

Whether or not the result is a license violation is tricky legal question. As always, IANAL.



I did say "for example".


You certainly did! But there are a lot of people who think "OSS license means there are no requirements" and think it's okay to do things like copy without attribution when the license requires attributions. I know you didn't say anything like that either, but some others might think it.

It seems to me an important question is, "is this like a human who learns from examples, or is this really a derivative work in the copyright sense?".I'm not sure how to answer that. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know if many lawyers can answer that question either!


Neither :

https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/1481/

Copilot isn't human and therefore what it does isn't a "work".

The usual issues still apply to users of Copilot - unwitting violations of license terms of the code it was trained on (like non-attribution) are still violations.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: