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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

#181

Post by IshKebab »

eitland wrote: post #51
hashhar wrote: post #15

Why is this noteworthy? Who is this person? Am I missing something? I agree that there needs to be talk about licensing and copyright but with so "less/no content" there can be no meaningful discussion other than aimless banter.

> 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.

Right, but you either need a solid argument or some authority, and this guy has neither. He's effectively a nobody and he has just jumped to the conclusion that CoPilot is illegal.

If he had a good argument for that, fine. But without that he really needs to be someone whose opinion I care about.

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

#182

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by jeroenhd »

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 know that some people have uploaded the Microsoft research kernel or even the leaked Windows source code to github at some point.

I wonder what Microsoft will do when snippets from that code start appearing in your code because of copilot. I'm guessing their lawyers wouldn't accept "the robot did it" as an excuse in that case.

I'm tempted to just throwing stuff like "AWS_KEY=" at the algorithm and see how many working credentials I can steal from private repos.

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

#184

Post by sillysaurusx »

lolinder wrote: post #176
sillysaurusx wrote: post #162

Anyone know how they're hosting their repositories? https://thelig.ht/code/ is actually kind of nice and minimalist; I was hoping to set up the same thing, mostly just for kicks.

Googling a bit of the stylesheet suggests that it's stagit, a static page generator for git repos: https://codemadness.org/stagit.html Contrast these two pages, and you'll see it's a match: https://codemadness.org/git/bmf/log.html https://thelig.ht/code/block-tracing/log.html

Woo! You rock. I was too lazy to do that myself (or at least, lounging around in bed...) so I was hoping a fellow like you would sleuth it.

Thank you. :)

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

#185

Post by moyix »

saurik wrote: post #139
moyix wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used Copilot? I have not, but I have trained a GPT2 model on open source projects ( https://doesnotexist.codes/ ). It does not just pattern match and replicate. It can be cajoled into reproducing some memorized snippets, but this is not the norm; in my experience the vast majority of what it generates is novel. The exceptions are extremely popular snippets that are repeated many many times in the training da…

So, to verify, your claim is that GPT-3, when trained on a corpus of human text, isn't merely managing to string together a bunch of high-probability sequences of symbol constructs--which is how every article I have ever read on how it functions describes the technology--but is instead managing to build a model of the human world and the mechanism of narration required to describe it, with which it uses to write new…

What? I don't think I made any claim of the sort. I'm claiming that it does more than mere regurgitation and has done some amount of abstraction, not that it has human-level understanding. As an example, GPT-3 learned some arithmetic and can solve basic math problems not in its training set. This is beyond pattern matching and replication, IMO.

I'm not really sure why we should consider Copilot legally different from a fancy pen – if you use it to write infringing code then that's infringement by the user, not the pen. This leaves the practical question of how often it will do so, and my impression is that it's not often.

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

#186

Post by burntoutfire »

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…

> 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.

If that's the case, it should be easy to kill a project like wine - just send every core contributor an email containing some Windows code.

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

#187

Post by jollybean »

The argument that 'machines can learn from the code to produce something novel' doesn't bode well given copilot may very well produce code that is straight up cut and paste.

This just seems like a massive lawsuit waiting to happen.

What happens when you discover that you're using '20 lines of code from some GPL'd thing'?

What will your lawyers say? Judges?

It seems to me that if you use Copilot there's a straight up real world chance you could end up with GPL'd code in your project. It doesn't matter 'how' it got there.

I don't understand therefore how any commercial entity could allow this to be used without absolute guarantees they won't end up with GPL'd code. Or worse.

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

#188

Post by DougBTX »

saurik wrote: post #139
moyix wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used Copilot? I have not, but I have trained a GPT2 model on open source projects ( https://doesnotexist.codes/ ). It does not just pattern match and replicate. It can be cajoled into reproducing some memorized snippets, but this is not the norm; in my experience the vast majority of what it generates is novel. The exceptions are extremely popular snippets that are repeated many many times in the training da…

So, to verify, your claim is that GPT-3, when trained on a corpus of human text, isn't merely managing to string together a bunch of high-probability sequences of symbol constructs--which is how every article I have ever read on how it functions describes the technology--but is instead managing to build a model of the human world and the mechanism of narration required to describe it, with which it uses to write new…

One way to look at these models is to say that they take raw input, convert it into a feature space, manipulate it, then output back as raw text. A nice example of this is neural style transfer, where the learnt features can distinguish content from style, so that the content can be remixed with a different style in feature space. I could certainly imagine evaluating the quality of those features on a scale spanning from rote-copying all the way up to human understanding, depending on the quality of the model.

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

#189

Post by city41 »

throwaway_09870 wrote: post #178

Semi-related question, The MIT license template has "Copyright © 2021 ", but don't I have to register copyrights somewhere? I've always been confused by this. Do I just stick "Copyright MyName" in my GitHub repos? It seems like this is what most people do..

In the US, copyright is automatically granted: "Copyright protection in the United States exists automatically from the moment the original work of authorship is fixed"

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf

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