>We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.
>This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use
I would say they would have a pretty hard time to justify using the content for AI training (and selling) based on that license. Copilot didn't exist at the time when many agreed to that license, so an argument saying Copilot is part of the service would be difficult to pull off. Moreover they don't even provide copilot to people hosting on GitHub.
Note that MS themselves are not claiming that they are allowed to use the code due to their terms of service. They claim they can do it due to fair use.
I would say they've used code they host to train an AI and they charge for a fraction the GPU time required to train and customize their model. they're selling you their model, not the code it produces.
if this is indeed how they charge for Copilot, and I don't know if it is or is not, then they will need to show that they have done their due diligence in making sure that code is not reproduced verbatim when a user requests that it not reproduce code verbatim.
I'm quite sure that GitHub can defend Copilot in court. That's part of the process of offering a new feature to customers; making sure that it is legal and defensible to do so.
All of the armchair attorneys here who think they know better than GitHub's attorneys when operation of the service puts GitHub's ass on the line is ... I wish I had 1 percent of that confidence. I would be a thousand times more confident than I am now.
>We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.
>This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use
I would say they would have a pretty hard time to justify using the content for AI training (and selling) based on that license. Copilot didn't exist at the time when many agreed to that license, so an argument saying Copilot is part of the service would be difficult to pull off. Moreover they don't even provide copilot to people hosting on GitHub.
Note that MS themselves are not claiming that they are allowed to use the code due to their terms of service. They claim they can do it due to fair use.