Video download link | md5sum 167bd0e9358b67c31ac82646e34b49f3 CoPilot SPAM Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Plagiarism-as-a-service is marketed by Microsoft and by Microsoft's marketing drones in a pushy and spammy kind of way; the company must be desperate to actually make some money out of GitHub (it's bleeding to death with many layoffs)

UNDER the guise of (misnomer) "HEY HI" (AI) Microsoft markets a token-spewing monster that boils down to plagiarism of computer code, including copyleft-licensed stuff. The video above explains a story that was passed to us by a reader, albeit it starts with an explanation of why we didn't do many videos this past week (instead we unmasked Matthew J Garrett, who had used about 10 sockpuppets in IRC since last autumn).

The short story is, Microsoft is now sending a bunch of spam (SPAM!) E-mails to many unwanting or unconsenting parties, trying to push them to proprietary code editors and then charge them over $200 per year to help them engage in plagiarism while the legal basis is still the subject of a class action lawsuit.

"Microsoft is a pathetic excuse for a "company"; having engaged in plenty of plagiarism itself, it now tries to profit from facilitation of others doing the same.""Note that college students and employees are being encouraged to pursue plagiarism in their coding," the reader told us. "(Also that UNIX lists are being spammed with Microsoft shit.)"

As noted in the video above, GitHub lacks a business model. It loses a lot of money and had at least two rounds of layoffs so far this year. So now they are selling plagiarism as a "premium". People who are gullible enough to use such disservices can get sued over code which they did not even realise was plagiarised (neither attribution nor licensing information is attached to such code).

Microsoft is a pathetic excuse for a "company"; having engaged in plenty of plagiarism itself, it now tries to profit from facilitation of others doing the same. ⬆