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

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

#151

Post by danielbln » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:40 PM UTC

nomercy400 wrote: post #146

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',…

Wasn't Codex (the tech underlying CoPilot) trained on purely publicly available repos?

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

#152

Post by yumraj » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:40 PM UTC

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…

It all comes down to this: this has not been tested in the court. The above opinion, or for that matter any opinion from any lawyer or not-a-lawyer, is just that, an opinion.

As a business it is your responsibility to determine if this code-copying is worth a risk to your business.

Based on my experience, I'm pretty sure all corporate lawyers will disallow such code copying, till it has been tested in the court. It's just a matter of who will be the guinea pig.

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

#153

Post by amelius » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:40 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #70

ezoe wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad news for you. Japanese copyright law, article 47-7 explicitly allow using copyrightable works for data analysis by means of a computer(including recording a derivative work created by adaptation) It should be considered as fair-use of USA except we don't use Common Law system so we explicitly state what exempt from the copyright protection.

Thanks for the bad news! Not glad to hear it but glad to know something I didn't. That said - so they would be able to sell some things in Japan that they couldn't other places.

What if a Japanese software company uses it to write software, which is then sold in the US?

It's still copyright laundering, if you ask me.

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

#154

Post by yashap » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:40 PM UTC

blihp wrote: post #33

Anyone 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 v…

A bigger concern for many is that if you USE copilot, you’ll unintentionally copy code with licences that your company really, REALLY does not want to copy. For example, here’s copilot copying some very famous GPL code: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309?s=2...

And basically every software company avoids GPL like the plague, due to its strong copyleft conditions.

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

#155

Post by _ofdw » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:40 PM UTC

Feels like everyone is missing the point: Copilot will ultimately serve to weaken the arguments in support of software patents and copyright.

That can only be a good thing for society (though perhaps not for rent seekers).

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

#156

Post by dchest » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:41 PM UTC

monokh wrote: post #133

Slightly off topic: Is the git frontend [1] open source? If not, are there some very light self hosting ones like it? [1] https://thelig.ht/code/

This looks like https://codemadness.org/stagit.html

Other popular choices are gitweb and cgit (both dynamic).

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

#157

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:41 PM UTC

meibo wrote: post #77

eitland wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who is this person? One of the beautiful things about HN is that you don't need to be anything, you just have to have something interesting to say.

This isn't interesting though. It doesn't even provide any value. It's a random guy that doesn't like GitHub, it could have just as well been a HN comment from yesterday. It's just posted(not by the guy that made the page, mind you) to farm karma, exploit the news cycle and carve out some more space for discussion of this tired topic.

[deleted]

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

#158

Post by niekverw » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:41 PM UTC

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…

"I am not a lawyer,“

STOP READING

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

#159

Post by prezjordan » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:41 PM UTC

monokh wrote: post #133

Slightly off topic: Is the git frontend [1] open source? If not, are there some very light self hosting ones like it? [1] https://thelig.ht/code/

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

#160

Post by ithkuil » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:42 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #91

jcelerier wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 with…

In this case though we have machine learning model that is trained with some code and is not merely learning abstract concepts to be applied generally in different domains, but instead can use that knowledge to produce code that looks pretty much the same as the learning material, given the context that fits the learning material.

If humans did that, it would be hard to argue they didn't outright copy the source.

When a machine does it, does it matter if the machine literally copied it from sources, or first transformed it into an isomorphic model in its "head" before regurgitating it back?

If yes, why doesn't parsing the source into an AST and then rendering it back also insulate you from abiding a copyright?