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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

#91

Post by PragmaticPulp »

jcelerier wrote: post #61
lacker wrote: post #34

I 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 allow…

> As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. Of course not. Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs - you can't become a wine contributor if it can be shown you ever read Windows source code and most likely conversely. Likewise, you can't ever write GPL VST 2 audio plug-ins if you ever had access to the official Steinberg VST2 SDK. Etc etc... Did people fo…

> Of course not. Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs

That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied.

Those projects could hire people familiar with competitor code and assign them to competing projects if they wanted. The contributors could, in theory, write new code without using proprietary knowledge from their other companies. In practice, that's actually really difficult to do and even more difficult to prove in court, so companies choose the safe option and avoid hiring anyone with that knowledge altogether.

Now the question is whether or not GitHub's AI can be argued to have proprietary knowledge contained within. If your goal is to avoid any possibility that any court could argue that GitHub copilot funneled proprietary code (accessible to GitHub copilot) into your project, then you'd want to forbid contributors from using CoPilot.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#92

Post by boxfire »

lacker wrote: post #34

I 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 allow…

So what happens when someone makes a transformer network that can read fanfics and animate them live trained from the whole collection of MPAA movies? I mean its inevitable. Given the history of the MPAA, I don't think they're gonna lie down and just take it. I feel like we're in a slippery slope to provoke the "IP lords" into brutally draconian measures that will make the Disney copyright extensions look like a tax deferral.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#94

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

All of my open-source stuff on GH is MIT. I don't care whether or not Copilot (or anyone else) uses it.

I seriously doubt that Copilot scans my (very few) private repos. Even then, I don't think I do anything particularly noteworthy.

But that is just me.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#95

Post by croes »

lacker wrote: post #34

I 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 allow…

Looks like more than a minor infringement

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287

And reading is no infringement but writing maybe is.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#96

Post by jhgb »

lacker wrote: post #34

I 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 allow…

> Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use.

But ultimately the human is OK-ing the code and committing it, basically as his own work most of the time. I'm reasonably sure that this may matter to courts.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#97

Post by gfodor »

saurik wrote: post #49
gfodor wrote: post #5

This is a hell of a Pandora’s box that’s being cracked open here. Interesting times ahead. For example, if you believe these kinds of tools will become a huge competitive advantage, and that the inclusion of GPL code is a meaningful force multiplier, it kind of implies the fusion of AI code generation and the GPL will eat the world.

Only if people understand that the result is under GPL; if they don't, then this is a mechanism to slowly "launder" the work people put into GPL code to funnel into non-GPL codebases.

It depends on which "people" you're referring to. I suspect the degree to which the programmer knows this is of little relevance to the question of how the legal + risk management implications will play out.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#98

Post by dmitriid »

wcerfgba wrote: post #66
calvinmorrison wrote: post #38

I 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)

What's wrong with the Arctic Code Vault [1]? Is the only problem that they didn't seek your consent? How is it different to deploying a new availability zone and having your public repos accessible on another server? Your code is preserved verbatim, and it's not possible for GitHub to provide their service without the right to make verbatim copies of your code, which presumably you agreed to as part of their ToS. [1]…

> What's wrong with the Arctic Code Vault

It's nothing more than a publicity stunt whose one and only purpose is to advertise GitHub.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#100

Post by nomercy400 »

wcerfgba wrote: post #31

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 o…

'Some sentences' makes me think of the link tax introduced to prevent aggregating news sources based on only headlines, so even generic sentences fall under copyright in certain cases.
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