Should a search engine be allowed to get around the copyright on a novel by letting me search for and retrieve every sentence individually in small chunks?
Also, there is a difference here. A fair use quote from another work is a reference. It's not the thing, it's referring to the thing.
When copilot takes a chunk of code from another work to put into yours, it's using the thing directly, or rather, you are by using it.
It lacks citation which a quote would have, and instead of being a quote to discuss the other work "Dr Foo once said <remarkable genius insight>" copilot is like you writing a novel and simply copying Dr Foo's remarkable genius insight.
The size of the snippet doesn't matter, it's the usage and the lack of citation.
Even a cheap-ass totally doable collective citation like getting all the contributors to agree to have their works included, and then having a big list of all contributors somewhwere, and then each user just needs to say "includes code from copilot collective" They don't even have that, which would be good enough.
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You're forgetting transformative use. Think about search engines.
Should a search engine be allowed to get around the copyright on a novel by letting me search for and retrieve every sentence individually in small chunks?
Also, there is a difference here. A fair use quote from another work is a reference. It's not the thing, it's referring to the thing.
When copilot takes a chunk of code from another work to put into yours, it's using the thing directly, or rather, you are by using it.
It lacks citation which a quote would have, and instead of being a quote to discuss the other work "Dr Foo once said <remarkable genius insight>" copilot is like you writing a novel and simply copying Dr Foo's remarkable genius insight.
The size of the snippet doesn't matter, it's the usage and the lack of citation.
Even a cheap-ass totally doable collective citation like getting all the contributors to agree to have their works included, and then having a big list of all contributors somewhwere, and then each user just needs to say "includes code from copilot collective" They don't even have that, which would be good enough.
Right but a search engine takes in web pages and outputs search. copilot takes in code and outputs code.