Consider a junior dev who writes a range check function while working for a company (so they own the copyright) then goes to a different company and writes the same range function because that's just how he writes code.
Has copyright been infringed?
Then the legalities can be argued, but an individual is in any case not remotely comparable to a service like copilot.
Why is this? Copilot in some ways is an automated way to search code & stack overflow. There is a very annoying website that does nothing more than show relevant code samples of various google search terms.
If the manual version of something is okay (eg: googling for code, finding it, fitting for a new and specific purpose that is similar), why would an automated version of that be any different?
Or sending millions of messages in an automated way can be illegal but millions of people sending a message is not.
The million messages example is interesting. Though, what examples are there? In what cases is something legal to do it once, but there is some threshold where you cannot do it many times?
The "sending millions of messages" is only perhaps illegal because it breaks terms of service. Or, the one message is perhaps also illegal but nobody cares to pursue litigation for one instance of an infraction. The point remains though, if an individual does something once that is legal - it makes that activity legal, period and full stop. No?
The reason is always the same. Courts and judges will look at the situation and make a decision about what seems fair and what does not. It is them that need to be convinced that a specific use of a copyrighted work is permitted either through fair use or by a license.
Interesting analogy. "Ripping" something off an only using it for your personal project sounds like the "playing a movie for a few friends". Doing so for the benefit of corporation that then has thousands of daily visitors sounds like the "movie cinema" example. Though, in both cases it was an individual googling and finding how to implement a specific function.
"fair use" in copyright is pretty specific in that it refers to things like "you can play portions of a clip in order to comment on it." Or as another example, you can use clips/portions for the purposes of a review commentary.
"Form and function" is perhaps a very important crux here. Some things you can only do a certain way. For example, quick-sort, there are is only really one way to implement quick sort (or otherwise it is not at all quick sort!).
Personally I feel the copyright line is higher than a function, the copyright is on the collection of functions who together create a specific software. The individual functions IMHO are as copyright'able as-is a cog on a bike cassette, or the chain on a motorcycle.
Practically with an LLM the programmer can focus on the creative part (handler function, react component, etc) while the LLM generates the necessary boilerplate for the ever changing frameworks and infra configurations. The programmer (and QA) would still review and test everything but would save time writing boilerplate and ship features faster.
GPT-style models literally aim to reproduce the input character by character (token by token).
The _only_ escape clause is some random function that says how arbitrary a code block is. Or nontrivial.
A person or AI can absolutely be violating copyright via your example.
yes
now if he had written a specification as to what the function should be, then passed it to someone else that had never seen the function and worked from the spec then he'd be ok
see: IBM BIOS
It's not nearly that simple. No real copyright case is going to hinge on what a single range check function looks like.
This is human law, it's not a programming situation where you can just apply some simple rule and get a deterministic answer. Context plays a huge part, among other things.
you realise this exact extremely famous function was the focus of a billion dollar supreme court copyright battle that went on for years?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...
(the entire basis of GPs joke)
Oracle's position on that was legally incorrect, for the reason I was alluding to: the relevant standard requires that illegal copying involve the core of the creative expression of the original work, which a generic range check function clearly doesn't do.
On a more serious note, there is a question whether algorithms and code blocks can be copyrighted, or if it is the _software_ that is copyrighted. Let's say I use websockets and you crib my usage of websockets for your own application. My opinion is that unless you rebuild the same thing I did, then "cribbing" is the long held art of "let me google how to do that". The artistic creation is the end software product, not really some measly embedded function that is boiler plate (form and function) for anything to work.
The 'form and function' clause of copyright almost certainly makes a range check function not a copyright infringement.
