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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#371

Post by dragonwriter »

belter wrote: post #101

One interesting aspect, that I thing will make it difficult for GitHub to argue and justify its not a a license violation would be the answer to the following question: Was Copilot trained using Microsoft internal source code or will it be in the future ? As GitHub is a Microsoft company and OpenAI although a non-profit just got a massive one billion investment from Microsoft (presumably not for free), will it start…

> One interesting aspect, that I thing will make it difficult for GitHub to argue and justify its not a a license violation

They don't claim it wouldn't be a license violation, they claim licensing is irrelevant because copyright protection doesn't apply.

> And if it was NOT trained on Microsoft source code, because it could starting suggesting some of it...Is that not a validation that the results it produces are a derivative work based on the work of the open source code corpus it was trained on ?

No, that would just show them to not want to expose their proprietary code. It doesn't prove anything about derivative works.

Also, their own claim is not that the results aren't a derivative work but that training an AI is fair use, which is an exception to the exclusive rights under copyright, including the exclusive right to create derivative works.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#372

Post by Rapzid »

formerly_proven wrote: post #151
pjerem wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is not if it's trivial or not, but if it is legal or not. You can already technically steal GPLv2 by obfuscating it.

Assuming ML models are causal, then bits of GPL code that fall out of the model have to have the color GPL, because the only way they could've gotten there was to train the ML using GPL-colored bits. It seems to me like the answer here is pretty obvious, it doesn't really matter how you copy a work.

Bits?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#373

Post by DemocracyFTW »

heeton wrote: post #292
wg0 wrote: post #259

If I read a lot of GPL code, absorb naming conventions, structures, patterns, tricks and later when it comes down to writing a P2P Chat server, I happen to recall similar patterns, naming structures, conventions and many of the utility methods are pretty much how they are in the GPL code bases out there. Now is my produced code is also GPL derivative because I certainly did read through the code base to be able to wr…

https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410049195067674625 """ "but eevee, humans also learn by reading open source code, so isn't that the same thing" - no - humans are capable of abstract understanding and have a breadth of other knowledge to draw from - statistical models do not - you have fallen for marketing

> humans are capable of abstract understanding and have a breadth of other knowledge to draw from

this may be a matter of time and thus is not a fundamental objection.

If mankind should fail to answer the perennial question of exploitation of the other and the same, it will be doomed. And rightly so, for mankind must answer this question, it must answer to this question. Instead what we do is increase monetary output then go and brag about efficiency. Neither is this efficient, nor is it about efficiency, nor has the Universe ever cared about efficiency. It just happens to coincide with what Society has decided to be its most looked-upon elements have chosen to be their religion.

It is not my religion to be sure.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#375

Post by easrng »

huragok wrote: post #242
nextaccountic wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case we should be able to work less and enjoy the benefits of automation. We just need to live in an economic system where the economic value is captured by the people at large, and not a minority that owns capital.

Careful now, that sounds like socialism!

Yes, that's the point.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#376

Post by tyingq »

dwheeler wrote: post #251
tyingq wrote: post #76

"We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set" If it's spitting out verbatim code 0.1% of the time, surely it's spitting out copied code where only trivial things are different at a much higher rate. Trivial things meaning swapped order where order isn't important, variable/function names, equivalent ops like +=1 vs ++, etc. Surely it's launder…

It's not just the GPL. Almost all open source software licenses require attribution; without that attribution, any copy is a license violation. Whether or not the result is a license violation is tricky legal question. As always, IANAL.

I did say "for example".

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#377

Post by 6510 »

laurent92 wrote: post #324
yuppiepuppie wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, that got meta super fast. Its like a mobius strip!

The nice thing about co-pilot is that it will suggest to do the same mistakes as in other software. If you accept all autosuggestions in C++ you might end up with Windows.

And eventually you will be forced to do it the way everyone does it.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#378

Post by jordemort »

willseth wrote: post #257
jordemort wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why it would be any less binding than any other license term, except for possibly the ToS loophole that invokestatic points out below.

It's not binding because the other party hasn't agreed. You agree to terms when you use the site. One party can't unilaterally change the agreement without consent of the other party.

I see where you're coming from but it's not quite the same thing; Facebook doesn't encourage people to choose a license for the content that they post there, so there's no expectation that there are any terms aside from those in Facebook's ToS. OTOH GitHub has historically very strongly encouraged users to add a LICENSE to their repositories, and also encouraged users to fork other people's code and and push it to GitHub. That GitHub would be exempt from the licensing terms of the code pushed to it, except for the obvious minimal extent they might need to be in order to provide their services, seems like an extremely surprising interpretation.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#379

Post by izgzhen »

uncomputation wrote: post #337
izgzhen wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t calm to solve the bottleneck either. On the contrary, it clearly states that its mission is to solve the easy parts better so developers can focus better on the true challenging engineering problems as you mentioned.

This reminds me of a startup pitch where it’s always “oh we take care of x so you don’t have to,” but the problem is now I just have another thing to take care of. I cannot speak for people who use Copilot “fluently,” but I know for every chunk of code it spat out I would need to read every line and make sure “Is this right? Is the return type what I want? Will this loop terminate? Is ‘scan’ the right API? Is that st…

The easy part is the copy-paste-from-SO part ;)

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#380

Post by izgzhen »

gotostatement wrote: post #348
uncomputation wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a startup pitch where it’s always “oh we take care of x so you don’t have to,” but the problem is now I just have another thing to take care of. I cannot speak for people who use Copilot “fluently,” but I know for every chunk of code it spat out I would need to read every line and make sure “Is this right? Is the return type what I want? Will this loop terminate? Is ‘scan’ the right API? Is that st…

Upvoted. I think the only good use case for this is spitting out 10-line, annoying, commonly used API boilerplate for commonly used APIs

That is a valid use case despite being small and incremental. I think it will still be helpful to some people.
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