GitHub has launched a new business plan for its code-suggestion tool, GitHub Copilot. Called GitHub Copilot for Business, the $19 per user per month plan includes all the features of the single-license Copilot tier, as well as corporate licensing and policy controls. One such control is a toggle that allows IT administrators to prevent suggested code that matches public code on GitHub from being shown to developers. This move is likely in response to intellectual property controversies surrounding Copilot.
GitHub Copilot, which is available as a downloadable extension for development environments such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Neovim and JetBrains, uses an AI model called Codex to suggest additional lines of code and functions based on the context of existing code. Codex has been trained on billions of lines of public code and can provide programming approaches or solutions in response to a developer’s desired outcome, drawing on its knowledge base and the current context.
However, some advocacy groups have taken issue with the fact that Codex has been trained on code that is copyrighted or under a restrictive license. In addition, it has been reported that Copilot has been able to generate code from copyrighted sources such as Quake and code snippets in personal codebases. GitHub has argued that fair use protects it from any potential copyright violations, but the Free Software Foundation has called Copilot “unacceptable and unjust.” Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are also being sued in a class action lawsuit that accuses them of violating copyright law through the use of Copilot.
In addition to the potential legal implications, some experts have raised concerns that companies using Copilot could be at risk of unknowingly incorporating copyrighted code into their projects. This could lead to intellectual property disputes and costly legal battles. It remains to be seen how these issues will be resolved and whether the launch of the GitHub Copilot for Business plan will have any impact on these controversies.
