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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

#161

Post by robbrown451 »

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…

"reading by robots doesn’t count."

It should be obvious that if the robot is simply scraping web sites and reproducing their text verbatim (without permission and without giving credit) that would be an infringement.

There are a lot of shades of gray between that and the other extreme, which is where it is scraping millions of sites, learning from them, and producing something that isn't all that similar to any of them. Both ends of the spectrum, and everywhere in between, are things that humans can do, but as machines get more capable this is getting trickier and trickier to sort out.

In this case, it sounds like it might be closer to the first example, since significant parts of the code will be verbatim.

Ultimately, I am hoping that such things cause us to completely rethink copyright law. The blurriness of it all is becoming too much to make laws around. We just need better mechanisms to reward people for creating valuable IP that they allow people to freely use as they please.

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

#163

Post by rhn_mk1 »

I would be more sympathetic to the idea of the co-pilot if apart from being susceptible to stripping licensing information from permissive and copyleft projects, it could also inject copyright-stripped sources of the same amount of closed source code.

As it is now, it works towards weakening the copyright of free software while doing nothing (or very little) to closed software.

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

#164

Post by axismundi »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #60
M4v3R wrote: post #8

While 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 guess it goes back to closed source / trade secrets territory. If you have something you really don't want stolen, it is safer to never expose it and never trust that the law will fairly protect you. The irony is that copilot won't suggest its own source code, just everyone else's. It is open source without the benefits.

Smells like Microsoft

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

#165

Post by exolymph »

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.

why are you on an upvote-based aggregator + forum if you're not looking for upvote-based links + commentary?

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

#166

Post by MontyCarloHall »

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…

The legal term for this is scènes à faire[0], and there is quite a bit of legal precedent covering exactly the cases you bring up.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scènes_à_faire

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

#168

Post by lolinder »

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',…

I'm not sold on the product, but it's important to note that GitHub Copilot was only trained on public repos, which means nothing should be out in the open that wasn't already made public by the authors.[0]

> GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, a new AI system created by OpenAI. It has been trained on a selection of English language and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub.

[0] https://copilot.github.com/

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

#169

Post by IshKebab »

danielbln wrote: post #151
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?

Yes. nomercy400 is wrong.

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

#170

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

robbrown451 wrote: post #161
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…

"reading by robots doesn’t count." It should be obvious that if the robot is simply scraping web sites and reproducing their text verbatim (without permission and without giving credit) that would be an infringement. There are a lot of shades of gray between that and the other extreme, which is where it is scraping millions of sites, learning from them, and producing something that isn't all that similar to any of th…

Copyright requires a certain amount of creativity involved in its creation. I strongly suspect most code snippets of a few lines just don't qualify.
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