GitHub Copilot for Business Launched Amid Copyright Concerns

GitHub Launches Copilot for Business Amidst Legal Questions

GitHub has officially launched its "Copilot for Business" plan, making its AI-powered code suggestion tool available to enterprises. This new plan, priced at $19 per user per month, includes all the features of the individual Copilot tier, plus corporate licensing and policy controls. A key feature for businesses is a toggle that allows IT administrators to prevent Copilot from suggesting code that matches publicly available code on GitHub, a direct response to ongoing intellectual property and copyright concerns surrounding the tool.

How GitHub Copilot Works

Copilot, developed by OpenAI using its Codex model, is trained on billions of lines of public code. It functions as an extension for popular development environments like Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains. By analyzing the context of existing code and developer comments, Copilot suggests lines of code and entire functions, aiming to boost developer productivity.

Intellectual Property and Legal Concerns

The training data for Codex includes code that is copyrighted or licensed under restrictive terms, raising significant legal and ethical questions. Advocacy groups like the Free Software Foundation have criticized Copilot as "unacceptable and unjust." Furthermore, Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are facing a class-action lawsuit accusing them of copyright infringement for allegedly allowing Copilot to reproduce licensed code without proper attribution or licensing.

Addressing Concerns: Filters and Future Features

GitHub has implemented a filter that checks code suggestions against public GitHub code to hide matches. However, this feature has been shown to be imperfect, with instances of Copilot still emitting large chunks of copyrighted code, including license and attribution information, even with the filter enabled. Tim Davis, a computer science professor, demonstrated this issue by prompting Copilot to generate his copyrighted code.

GitHub plans to introduce more features in 2023 to help developers make informed decisions about using Copilot's suggestions, including the ability to identify matching public code with repository references. For business customers, GitHub assures that code snippets will not be retained for training or shared, regardless of their origin (public repositories, private repositories, or local files).

The Road Ahead

Despite these measures, it remains uncertain whether GitHub's efforts will fully alleviate companies' concerns about potential legal challenges associated with using AI-generated code. The ongoing debate highlights the complex intersection of AI, intellectual property, and software development practices.

Key Takeaways:

GitHub Copilot for Business launched: Offering enterprise-grade features and controls.
Pricing: $19 per user per month.
Core Functionality: AI-powered code suggestions based on OpenAI's Codex model.
Legal Controversy: Concerns over copyright infringement due to training data.
Mitigation Efforts: Introduction of a code-matching filter and planned future features.
Uncertainty: The effectiveness of these measures in resolving legal challenges remains to be seen.

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GitHub Copilot Interface