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GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright

This is a slightly modified version of my original German-language article first published on heise.de under a CC-by 4.0 license. GitHub is currently causing a lot of commotion in the Free Software scene with its release of Copilot.

As early as 2001, the EU allowed such temporary, ephemeral acts of copying, which are part of a technical process, without restriction – despite the protests of the entertainment industry at the time. This line of reasoning is dangerous in two respects: On the one hand, it suggests that even reproducing the smallest excerpts of protected works constitutes copyright infringement. Otherwise, copyright conflicts would constantly arise when two authors use the same trivial statement independently of each other, such as “Bucks beats Hawks and advance to the NBA finals”, or “i = i+1”.

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