Analyzing the Legal Implications of GitHub Copilot
The software engineering world has been buzzing in recent days following the release of GitHub Copilot — a machine learning-based programming assistant. Copilot aims to help developers work faster and more efficiently by auto-suggesting lines of code and/or entire functions.
However, the matter of how GitHub Copilot generates these suggestions has been the subject of some controversy. In short, Copilot’s machine learning model has been trained on public code. This raises two questions:
To answer these questions (and to put Copilot in the appropriate legal context), we turned to Kate Downing, an IP lawyer who specializes in helping software companies navigate areas like open source compliance.
Before exploring the license compliance ramifications of GitHub Copilot, we’ll start with a topic that goes to the very heart of whether GitHub can train Copilot on publicly available code without the copyright holder’s permission.
According to Downing, the answer depends to a certain extent on where that code is hosted. If it’s on GitHub, there very clearly would not be copyright infringement.
