I'm glad that Copilot is bringing the grey areas of copyright into discussion. If I write a book and it is copyright, what's the smallest unit which is covered by that copyright? Each word is obviously not. Some sentences will be fairly generic and I will not be the first person to write them. But some sentences will be characteristic of the work or my own style. Clearly how we apply copyright to subdivisions of an original work is an open question.
I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot
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Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot
#32ok
Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot
#33Anyone publishing anything on the Internet should expect this type of use case. If it is removed from github and republished via another site, there is absolutely nothing preventing another service/company from doing the exact same thing (or 'worse'... i.e. imagine a learning system that can actually understand the code) when scraping the alternative location. It's not unusual for bots to be among the most frequent visitors to low traffic pages these days and they aren't all just populating search engines.
Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot
#34I thought this was a pretty good thread (by an ex-Wikipedia lawyer) on Twitter about the IP meaning of Copilot.
https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410242882523459585...
And this is a longer article about how IP and AI interact:
https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright...
I am not a lawyer, but I am capable of summarizing the thoughts of lawyers, so my take is that in general, fair use allows AI to be trained on copyrighted material, and humans who use this AI are not responsible for minor copyright infringement that happens accidentally as a result. However, this has not been tested in court in detail, so the consensus could change, and if you were extremely risk-averse you might want to avoid Copilot.
A key quote from the second link:
Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use.
Personally, I think law should allow Copilot. As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. An AI should be allowed to do the same thing. And nobody cares if my ten-line "how to invert a binary tree" snippet is the same as someone else's. Nobody is really being hurt when a new tool makes it easier to copy little bits of code from the internet.
Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot
#35Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot
#36People really sign up without reading Terms of Conditions and then complain when GitHub decides to do something with the data that you've given them permission to use under the ToS
Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot
#37While I understand the sentiment wasn’t Copilot trained on code not only hosted on GitHub, but found all over the Internet? Which means hosting your code yourself would not prevent GitHub from using it to train Copilot. That raises an interesting question though - how do you opt out? Is there even a way to do it?
I would like to know this too. I understand that GitHub is a private company and you have to accept their T&C, but surely they aren't allowed to use source code found elsewhere on the internet to train their ML models without asking for permission first unless it's a B2B cooperation such as with Stackoverflow.
According to the discussion at this link, you do not need permission to use copyrighted data to train AI models. Copyright prevents you from copying data, it doesn't prevent you from learning from it.
https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410985742268911631...
Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot
#38I abandoned github when they put code that was not licensed (is: copyright retained) and reproduced it and saved it in their Arctic Vault without the authors consent (mine)
Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot
#39While I understand the sentiment wasn’t Copilot trained on code not only hosted on GitHub, but found all over the Internet? Which means hosting your code yourself would not prevent GitHub from using it to train Copilot. That raises an interesting question though - how do you opt out? Is there even a way to do it?
I would like to know this too. I understand that GitHub is a private company and you have to accept their T&C, but surely they aren't allowed to use source code found elsewhere on the internet to train their ML models without asking for permission first unless it's a B2B cooperation such as with Stackoverflow.
Oh man I can’t imagine the consequences for certain languages and frameworks if it uses SO answers though. Imagine if it trained in all the dumb and ancient answers like “how do I get the length of a string in javascript” and took the first accepted answer of “use jquery”
Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot
#40I never hosted--with quite some prejudice, even--any of my projects on GitHub (for a number of reasons that are off topic right now)... it didn't matter, though: people take your code and upload it to GitHub themselves (which is their right); so you can't avoid Copilot by simply self-hosting your repositories.