We ask a lawyer about GitHub Copilot (Changelog Interviews #458)

This week we’re bringing JS Party to The Changelog — Nick Nisi and Christopher Hiller had an awesome conversation with Luis Villa, co-founder and General Counsel at Tidelift. They discuss GitHub Copilot and the implications of an AI pair programmer and fair use from a legal perspective.

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Featuring:

• Luis Villa – Website, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Nick Nisi – Website, GitHub, Bluesky, Mastodon, X
• Christopher Hiller – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• GitHub Copilot
• OpenAI
• Google v. Oracle
• GNU General Public License
• Fair use
• Lotus v. Borland
• Transformative Use
• Authors Guild v. Google
• Ethical Open Source Movement
• Eleuther AI
• W3C Web Machine Learning Working Group
• Does free software benefit from ML models being derived works of training data?
• Cassidy Plays with GitHub Copilot

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!