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

thelig.ht

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

#141

Post by IncRnd »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #55
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…

> Nobody is really being hurt when a new tool makes it easier to copy little bits of code from the internet. Quite the opposite. We all get a tiny bit better with good information like this. This is what the internet should be for, evolving, learning from past mistakes, information availability. If the discussion was “I clicked this button and got someone’s entire chat platform” that would be different. Words and sen…

> Words and sentences aren’t copy written, books are, so when exactly are a collection of words a book?

If that were true, then 20 people could each steal a single chapter from a book, and one of the people could combine those 20 chapters into a new copyright-free book. That's clearly false.

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

#142

Post by niekverw »

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…

> Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use.

This is silly. Co pilot is not reading by itself, someone pushed buttons telling it to read and write. If I clone the entire github without the licenses I am telling a robot to do it, doesn't make it right.

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

#143

Post by blibble »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #102
henvic wrote: post #21

I really hope this weakens copyright. We can live without it.

Don’t be too eager! Weakened copyright doesn’t necessarily translate to an overall benefit, at least for software. Weakening copyright also weakens copyleft - for example, it seems reasonable to me that the producer of an open-source work should be entitled to require reciprocal openness from people who build upon it. If I can legitimately launder some GPL source code (say, a Linux kernel driver) through an ML model…

> I think everyone loses.

only people who have released their code publicly under a (mostly) open license

so, not Microsoft

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

#144

Post by Yaina »

This is not the first person I've seen that ditches GitHub in favor of some other front-end... and it's not uncommon that they look like this which is often baffling to me.

Say what you want about GitHub's almost monopoly position, but the UX is really great and accessible even to non-technical people. Maybe you don't need that, maybe you don't want the issue-trackers, but it's worth thinking about who you're excluding with these kind front-ends.

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

#146

Post by nomercy400 »

This is exactly why people have issue with Github's Copilot.

It's not the technology, but the fact that any code you pushed to GitHub in the past 13 years is now 'accessible' to anyone.

Private repo? Paid account? Deleted repo five years ago? Deleted repo today? Proprietary code? Embarassing commits? Accidental API keys or passwords in commits?

All 'available'.

It feels like the entirety of GitHub was just 'leaked', and converted into a marketable product.

Would you push your code to a service if you knew it could be read by anyone one to ten years from now? Even if you paid to keep it a secret?

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

#147

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

eCa wrote: post #126
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #94

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.

The license you have chosen requires attribution. You may not care[1] but the other party still most likely will be in violation if Copilot reproduces a significant chunk of your code. [1] I also MIT license my public code on Github, and also wouldn’t care that much.

I don't care about attribution.

The only reason I use MIT, is so some knucklehead doesn't try to sue me, because they cheezed up my code.

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

#148

Post by neolog »

throwaway_egbs wrote: post #67
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…

Just when I thought tweetstorms couldn't get any worse, here's one where every tweet is a quote-tweet of the author. I don't even understand how I'm supposed to read this. > Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. Surely there's a limit to this. If I use a machine to produce something that just happens to exactly match a copyr…

Ctrl-c is a robot, so copyright doesn't apply to it

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

#149

Post by the8472 »

saurik wrote: post #123
the8472 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called prompt engineering. If you find a popular, frequently repeated code snippet and then fashion a prompt that is tailored to that snippet then yes the NN will recite it verbatim like a poem. But that doesn't mean it's the only thing it does or even that it does it frequently. It's like calling a human a parrot because he completed a line from a famous poem when the previous speaker left it unfinished. The…

I don't know if I agree with your argument about GPT-3, but I think our disagreement seems to be besides the point: if your human parrot did that, they would--not just in theory but in actual fact! see all the cases of this in the music industry--get sued for it, even if they claim they didn't mean to and it was merely a really entrenched memory.

The point is that many of the examples you see are intentional, through prompt engineering. The pilot asked the copilot to violate copyright, the copilot complied. Don't blame the copilot.

There also are cases where this happens unintentionally, but those are not the norm.

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

#150

Post by tvirosi »

This huge revolt is interesting but I doubt it makes github very scared. They'll just come out with some new version of it which they'll show takes into account licenses (or uses a 10k or something dataset with hand checked licenses) and that'll be that and we'll forget about all this the week after.
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