Julia Reda – GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright

GitHub is currently causing a lot of commotion in the Free Software scene with its release of Copilot. Copilot is an artificial intelligence trained on publicly available source code and texts. It produces code suggestions to programmers in real time. Since Copilot also uses the numerous GitHub repositories under copyleft licences such as the GPL as training material, some commentators accuse GitHub of copyright infringement, because Copilot itself is not released under a copyleft licence, but is to be offered as a paid service after a test phase. The controversy touches on several thorny copyright issues at once. What is astonishing about the current debate is that the calls for the broadest possible interpretation of copyright are now coming from within the Free Software community.