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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

#251

Post by sillysaurusx »

saurik wrote: post #217
sillysaurusx wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think that you are allowed to just go download any old image and train on it. My understanding as a two-year student of ML is that you are allowed in the US to go download any old image, train on it, and then release the model as long as the outputs are "sufficiently transformative." That last phrase is the key part, and has never been tested in court. It's entirely possible that either I'm mistaken here, o…

To be clear: "transformative" not meaning merely "altered" but really meaning "repurposed"; if the new work is something people could feasibly use instead of the old work (harming the author's original market), it isn't "transformative".

Yes. For example, arfa ran into this question when launching https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/. Lots of furry artists had exactly the same concerns with his work there, but that work is decisively transformative.

Copilot seems ... well, less transformative. I'm still not sure how to feel.

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

#253

Post by snickerbockers »

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…

I can't speak to whether or not Richard Stallman was trying to make some 4-dimensional chess move to remove software restrictions by adding software restrictions when he wrote the GPL back in the 80s, but his original intentions are irrelevant in most cases since most people who license their code under the GPL do not consult with him or consider his opinions when they choose to do so.

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

#254

Post by stingraycharles »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #246
saurik wrote: post #40

I never hosted--with quite some prejudice, even--any of my projects on GitHub (for a number of reasons that are off topic right now)... it didn't matter, though: people take your code and upload it to GitHub themselves (which is their right); so you can't avoid Copilot by simply self-hosting your repositories.

Github is just the begining, they will crawl any open source code, crawling npm, pypi, cpan, public gitlab... If your code is open source, they will get it. That's kinda the point of open source.

I’d argue that this new use case is very interesting to open source and how it relates to the various licenses, and not necessarily “the point of open source”.

I can imagine people being OK with their code being used as-is, and/or being modified, but not used completely out of context to train some corporate AI to inject code into commercial code based.

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

#255

Post by lifthrasiir »

dmitriid wrote: post #233
lifthrasiir wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ser…

If you insist the term "owner" for copyright grants, you have a faulty understanding of copyright. The terms of service, much like software license, only allows for the licensee to do some specific things (in this case, including backups) under certain circumstances agreed upon in advance. Copyright assignment, which is akin to the ownership transfer, is much harder.

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

This one is my fault though, I've used the "Arctic Vault" as an archival site, but as I later realized it is a Github's archive stored in the Arctic World Archive. So yeah, it's (only) Github that can retrieve the data.

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

#256

Post by Dylan16807 »

eitland wrote: post #86
meibo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it sparks the necessary discussions I don't care if it was written by Joe Random Nobody or Joe Biden. > It's just posted(not by the guy that made the page, mind you) Others would complain if the author himself had posted this.

The necessary discussion was already sparked.

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

#257

Post by pvaldes »

burntoutfire wrote: post #186
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…

> 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.

Nobody could grant if that thing is really windows code or a fake. Not without the sender self-identifying as a well known top MS employee having access to it. In that case the sender would be doing something illegal and against MS interests.

The result would be WINE having an advantage to redo the snippet of code in a totally new and different way and MS being forced to show part of its private code, that would expose them also to patent trolls.

Would be a win-win situation for Wine and a lose-lose situation for MS.

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

#258

Post by visarga »

dTal wrote: post #196
ithkuil wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Whe…

>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? You've hit the nail on the head here. If this is okay, then neural nets are simply machines for laundering IP. We don't worry about people memorizing proprietary source code and "accidentally" using it because it's virtually impossible fo…

This is not such a big problem in reality because the output of Copilot can be filtered to exclude snippets too similar to the training data, or any corpus of code you want to avoid. It's much easier to guarantee clean code than train the model in the first place.

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

#259

Post by exo762 »

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. An AI should be allowed to do the same thing.

This is a very false equivalency. AI and humans are different. First, AI is at best a slave, and likely a slave of a capital. Second - scale makes difference.

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