Publication of the FSF-Funded White Papers on Questions around Copilot

canopic jug writes:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published five of the white papers it funded regarding questions about Microsoft Copilot. After Microsoft acquired GitHub, it set up a machine learning system to cull through its archive of software, called Copilot. The approach chosen and even the basic activity raises many questions starting with those of licensing.

Microsoft GitHub's announcement of an AI-driven Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) program called Copilot -- which uses machinelearning to autocomplete code for developers as they write software --immediately raised serious questions for the free software movementand our ability to safeguard user and developer freedom. We felt thesequestions needed to be addressed, as a variety of serious implicationswere foreseen for the free software community and developers who useGitHub. These inquiries -- and others possibly yet to be discovered --needed to be reviewed in depth.

In our call for papers, we set forth several areas ofinterest. Most of these areas centered around copyright law, questionsof ownership for AI-generated code, and legal impacts for GitHubauthors who use a GNU or other copyleft license(s) for theirworks. We are pleased to announce the community-provided research intothese areas, and much more.

First, we want to thank everyone who participated by sending in theirpapers. We received a healthy response of twenty-two papers frommembers of the community. The papers weighed-in on the multiple areasof interest we had indicated in our announcement. Using an anonymousreview process, we concluded there were five papers that would be bestsuited to inform the community and foster critical conversations tohelp guide our actions in the search for solutions.

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