Github Co-Pilot and legal aspects of auto-generated code

We would like to invite you to a seminar in our Software Engineering community. This time we have guests from the Department of Law, who specialize in IPR questions, with focus on software products.

Please spread this invitation to your colleagues. The seminar is online to make sure that all SC companies can attend.

GitHub Co-pilot has changed the way in which modern tools support programmers and designers. With its advanced language model, Co-pilot can generate code from natural language descriptions and it can learn the programming style of individual programmers. It is gaining popularity in the programming community, but one of the aspects that is still stopping its adoption is the legality of the generated code. Since Co-pilot has been trained on code available from open source projects, there is a theoretical risk that the code generated by Co-pilot can violate license terms of the training open source projects. However, this issue is not as simple as it seems.

In this seminar, we problematize the legal aspects of AI-based code generation by exploring how IPR laws regard use of licensed code in commercial products, we explore what kind of issues can arise from the open source community side and we look at a few examples of generated code in order to start a discussion about it.

Agenda:

13.00 – 13.20: Examples of autogenerated code and its legal aspects, Miroslaw Staron, – Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers | University of Gothenrburg

13.20 – 13.40: GitHub Co-pilot and open source systems: Jesper Derehag, Ericsson AB

13.40 – 14.00: Legal aspects of code generation, IPR: Jannice Käll, Merima Brincevic – Department of Law, University of Gothenburg

14.00 – 14.00: Discussions and questions