They might argue that a snippet isn't a "substantial portion" of "the Software", and they're only charging for the service not the content - regardless, I don't like it, this is exactly what certain licenses attempt to prevent.

I would argue that substantial shouldn't be measured in lines of code, it should be measured in importance. Something like the fast inverse square root is substantial even though it's short.

The fast inverse square makes for a poor example when it comes to notions of intellectual property and copyright because there is prior art. The Wikipedia page has a history.

And imagine if Microsoft had been able to copyright the fast inverse square function before Carmack sat down to write Quake!

Prior art matters for patents, not copyrights. Carmack's code is still protected by copyright even if he didn't invent the algorithm.

And copyright doesn't prevent someone else from implementing the same algorithm, only from copying the code. If Microsoft had been able to copyright the fast inverse square root function, Carmack could still have written his own version and even copyrighted that version himself.

Prior art has been used for copyright in plenty of court cases, and increasingly so!

Here’s an example: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=728470765881077...

It seems particularly apt to consider prior art for use in software IP if only for the similarities with the patentable invention of mechanical parts.

What? You are free to reverse engineer any non patented object and reproduce an almost identical object. Prior art for copyright is meaningless unless it is about authorship. You can still do a clean room implementation and ignore prior art.

But the current interpretation is that you cannot claim authorship over things that were already in the public domain. Feel free to read the case notes and follow some of the links in there for more info. Am I not interpreting the court rulings correctly?

——

Considering de novo the evidence before the district court, we hold that the district court did not err in granting summary judgment. Johannsongs failed to offer admissible evidence to rebut Ferrara's analysis, so there is no genuine dispute of material fact as to his conclusions that Söknuður and You Raise Me Up are not substantially similar and most of their similarities are attributable to prior art. Based on these conclusions, Johannsongs has failed to satisfy the extrinsic test and Defendants are entitled to judgment as a matter of law.

but they used all your code to train. that's pretty substantial..

I too have reservations about Copilot, but does the MIT license define a "substantial portion"? I doubt a snippet would fall under either "copies" or "substantial portions"

I doubt many licenses define that kind of terminology. That's left to precedents established by actual cases. My point was just that you're not free to use code from an MIT-licensed project without following the terms of the license. The other details get worked out when legal actions are taken.