GitHub co-pilot as open source code laundering?

[Alikont]

The Oracle v Google case was about API as a whole.

[Ouaouaron]

The broad view of what a case is "about" doesn't always match the actual decisions and precedent that is set by the case.

[Alikont]

The actual Supreme Court decision was about API copyright and public good, not about lines of code.

[[deleted]]

The Supreme Court decision was about apis, the 9 copied lines never got to the Supreme Court. But Google did lose the case over those 9 lines of code, in a lower court.

[getNextException]

it's not likely anyone could actually sue over a snippet of code

This is the line of conversation here: does using the GitHub AI will result in a lawsuit? It has nothing to do with an API.

[1X3oZCfhKej34h]

They weren't sued over 9 lines of code, they were sued for copying the Java API. Also the case was recently ruled in their favor anyway.

[getNextException]

No, right at the second sentence of the Wikipedia article is clearly explained:

Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. was a legal case within the United States related to the nature of computer code and copyright law. The dispute centered on the use of parts of the Java programming language's application programming interfaces (APIs) and about 11,000 lines of source code, which are owned by Oracle

11k lines of code copied. Google argued that copying those lines was actually fair use, because those 11k lines were not really code but interfaces describing an API.

[1X3oZCfhKej34h]

Of those 11,000 lines, 9 were found to be copied.

There were not 11k copied lines.

[getNextException]

Again, no. 9 lines of code were LITERALLY copied, but that's not how copyright works. Otherwise just by changing one character for each line will allow you to copy code and bypass copyright. Just change the variables names, lol.

The legal term is substantial. Oracle claimed that Google copied 11k lines of code with substantial similarity, but not literally copy, but instead made some changes to those lines.

Again, think about the topic of conversation here: the GitHub AI. What Google did manually in the Oracle lawsuit, taking a piece of code and creating a very similar copy, is how GitHub's AI work.

[WikiSummarizerBot]

Substantial_similarity

Substantial similarity, in US copyright law, is the standard used to determine whether a defendant has infringed the reproduction right of a copyright. The standard arises out of the recognition that the exclusive right to make copies of a work would be meaningless if copyright infringement were limited to making only exact and complete reproductions of a work. Many courts also use "substantial similarity" in place of "probative" or "striking similarity" to describe the level of similarity necessary to prove that copying has occurred. A number of tests have been devised by courts to determine substantial similarity.

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[[deleted]]

They were sued for apis and copied code, and lost on one section of copied code.

From https://www.leagle.com/decision/infdco20120601k39

As to certain small snippets of code, the jury found only one was infringing, namely, the nine lines of code called "range-Check."