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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

#231

Post by Engineering-MD »

darnfish wrote: post #36

People really sign up without reading Terms of Conditions and then complain when GitHub decides to do something with the data that you've given them permission to use under the ToS

A tiny percentage (less than 1%) [0]of people read terms and conditions- they are long, repetitive and often in legal language. If you expect to read every terms and conditions and privacy policy (and every change there of), you would waste over 240 hours over the year.[1]

[0] Bakos, Y., Marotta-Wurgler, F. and Trossen, D. R. (2014) ‘Does Anyone Read the Fine Print? Consumer Attention to Standard-Form Contracts’, The Journal of Legal Studies, 43(1), pp. 1–35. doi: 10.1086/674424.

[1] McDonald, A. M. and Cranor, L. F. (2008) ‘The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies’, A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, 4(3), pp. 543–568.

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

#232

Post by coliveira »

This is typical Microsoft behavior: embrace, extend, and extinguish. They embraced open source with the intention of controlling (GitHub) and exploiting it. And the interesting thing is that many people fell for this already ancient strategy.

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

#233

Post by dmitriid »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #221
dmitriid wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Github does not own the Arctic Vault, there is an independent company behind it Github are the ones doing all the archiving. So, in essence, they do own that. Piql are just the ones providing the storage: it's a commercial for-profit entity employed for backup by another commercial for-profit entity.

It is technically true, but the Arctic World Archive specifically "accepts deposits that are globally significant for the benefit of future generations, as well as information that is significant to your organisation or to you individually" [1]. So it doesn't accept any data (at least as far as I see) and the Github archive should also have met this criteria. By the way, my initial statement that it may qualify for c…

> but the Arctic World Archive specifically...

...provides prime-rate marketing bullshit in its marketing materials

> Thus I think it's actually a Github's generic usage grant in the ToS

If you refer to Section D.4, then:

- Arctic Vault is not "for future generations", but for GitHub only, since that section doesn't permit GitHum to just make copies willy-nilly for anything other than "as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time" and "make backups"

- This specifically makes GitHub "the owner" of that data, and not "some third-party" as you originally suggested

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

#234

Post by owlbynight »

kennywinker wrote: post #211
owlbynight wrote: post #201

Has this person been in a coma? If I utilize a free service on the Internet, I'm trading for some kind of convenience with the knowledge that I am in some way being boned in the backend by teams of people, all of whom are likely more clever than I am and using my patronage to some kind of nefarious end. The Internet isn't really a place to exercise an inflexible moral code. His new repository probably can be traced b…

> His new repository probably can be traced back to slave labor somehow And you're ok with that? It doesn't HAVE to be like this. Just because you've chosen nihilism, doesn't mean that's the only choice, and it certainly doesn't help anything.

Of course I'm not okay with that, but I'm also not disillusioned about my lack of control over the technology in which I've chosen to build my life around. We parasites can't complain really complain that our hosts smell like shit when we're riding them to the bank, can we?

It doesn't HAVE to be like this, it just is, and all of the alternatives suck. If you want to choose to inconvenience yourself in order to pass a morality test that doesn't exist, go ahead I suppose.

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

#235

Post by erhk »

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…

An AI isnt learning from it. Its effectively copying prior work when it solves a problem. There is no novel out of bounds data generation by modern ai approaches

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

#236

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

pubby wrote: post #79
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…

The issue isn't an AI reading copyrighted code, the issue is an AI regurgitating the lines of copyrighted code verbatim. To be clear, humans aren't allowed to do this either. And sure, nobody cares about your stupid binary tree, but do they care about GNU and the Linux kernel? Imagine someone trained an AI to specifically output Linux code, and used it to reproduce a working OS. Is that fair?

> the issue is an AI regurgitating the lines of copyrighted code verbatim. To be clear, humans aren't allowed to do this either.

That's a little broad. There's a wide range of licenses for software that explicitly allow precisely this.

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

#237

Post by emerged »

daenz wrote: post #129

I think it's clear that Copilot pushes boundaries...technological and legal. It makes people uncomfortable and challenges a lot of assumptions that we have about the current world. But this is exactly what I expect from the next revolutionary change in computing.

Yeah we need to work through all the issues this exposes. It’s going to be complicate and messy but it’s been inevitable for a long time.

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

#239

Post by na85 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #229
_ofdw wrote: post #155

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).

It is certainly fascinating to see people start running away from " information wants to be free " and other Free Software principles full tilt when, all of a sudden, it's their livelihoods that are on the line. Unless my recollection is off, the GPL was never the goal of the original Free Software movement; it was merely a tool to get to the end state where all code becomes available for use by anyone for any reason…

>It is certainly fascinating to see people start running away from "information wants to be free" and other Free Software principles full tilt when, all of a sudden, it's their livelihoods that are suddenly on the line.

Indeed. Everybody is a leet haxors when they're 14, it's 1998, and we're vying for +o in #warez on DALnet. We believed information really did "want to be free".

Unfortunately some of those same kids grew up to create today's data barons and that old saying about getting someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding comes into play.

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

#240

Post by pmarreck »

judge2020 wrote: post #26
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.

They're not particularly popular on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thelig.ht (except for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133450 ) And their only huge project on GitHub is dbxfs, a userspace dropbox filesystem with 687 stars https://github.com/rianhunter?tab=repositories&q=&type=&lang... I think this is just a post meant to continue the discussion of CoPilot past the first 2 days of news.

I'm glad the post showed up because I've been in the hospital for 3 days and I was like HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THIS? ;)
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