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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

#301

Post by chrisseaton »

dahart wrote: post #294
chrisseaton wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said it was a law?

Which “it” are you referring to? @lacker was talking about copyright in the comment @jcelerier replied to.

Yeah... but they didn't say it was the law that got you excluded from working on some projects from reading copyright code. It's corporate policy that does that - it's not a law but they do it based on who owns the copyright. Not everything that impacts you is a law.

They said

> Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs

And they're right. It's because of corporate policies. They never said it was because of a law - you imagined that out of nothing.

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

#302

Post by adamtulinius »

ta1234567890 wrote: post #289

It seems like the most fair way to go would be for Copilot to be completely open sourced and hosted on GitHub. That way they’d be subject to the same terms/conditions they are imposing on everyone else’s code/repos.

The problem isn't the source code of Copilot, but the code it is outputting.

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

#303

Post by Dylan16807 »

eitland wrote: post #291
Dylan16807 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The necessary discussion was already sparked.

Well, a lot of the people with voting rights here obviously thought otherwise.

An upvote doesn't mean you think something is new or needed sparking. There are very often redundant posts on a topic.

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

#304

Post by bnjemian »

saurik wrote: post #266
moyix wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The argument I was responding to--made by the user crazygringo--was that GPT-3 trained on a model of the Windows source code is fine to use nigh unto indiscriminately, as supposedly Copilot is abstracting knowledge like a human engineer. I argued that it doesn't do that: that GPT-3 is a pattern recognize that not only theoretically just likes to memorize and regurgitate things, it has been shown to in practice. You t…

I think a crucial distinction to be made here, and with most 'AI' technologies (and I suspect this isn't news to many people here) is that – yes – they are building abstractions. They are not simply regurgitating. But – no – those abstractions are not identical (and very often not remotely similar) to human abstractions.

That's the very reason why AI technologies can be useful in augmenting human intelligence; they see problems in a different light, can find alternate solutions, and generally just don't think like we do. There are many paths to a correct result and they needn't be isomorphic. Think of how a mathematical theorem may be proved in multiple ways, but the core logical implication of the proof within the larger context is still the same.

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

#305

Post by teflodollar »

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.

Cgit

https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/

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

#306

Post by axismundi »

josefx wrote: post #81
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…

> Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. So wait, if I write my own AI, lets call it cp, and train it on gnu-gcc.tar.gz with the goal of creating a commercial-compiler.tar.gz then I can license the result any way I want? After all most of the work was done by the computer.

Sorry, you can't. You are not rich enough to get away with it.

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

#308

Post by dahart »

chrisseaton wrote: post #301
dahart wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which “it” are you referring to? @lacker was talking about copyright in the comment @jcelerier replied to.

Yeah... but they didn't say it was the law that got you excluded from working on some projects from reading copyright code. It's corporate policy that does that - it's not a law but they do it based on who owns the copyright. Not everything that impacts you is a law. They said > Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs And they're right. It's because of corporate policies. They neve…

> They never say it was because of a law - you imagined that out of nothing.

@jcelerier flatly contradicted the statement that copyright doesn’t prevent you from reading something.

You’re right that @jceleier didn’t say their example was law, that’s because the example is a straw man in the context of what @lacker wrote.

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

#309

Post by cj »

ta1234567890 wrote: post #289

It seems like the most fair way to go would be for Copilot to be completely open sourced and hosted on GitHub. That way they’d be subject to the same terms/conditions they are imposing on everyone else’s code/repos.

They aren’t using private repos in their training data.

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

#310

Post by shadowgovt »

zmmmmm wrote: post #287

Seems to me like they need to back out of this fast and at very least limit it such that it is only trained and then used on "license compatible" projects. eg: train it in isolation on MIT licensed projects and then have the user explicitly confirm what license the code they are working on is to enable it. Possibly they even need to auto-enable a mechanism to detect when code has been reused verbatim and enable some…

Alternatively, they'll take it head-on, pay their lawyers to argue fair use, and blaze a new trail through the understanding of copyright application that allows this ML model (and others like it) to exist.

This is ultimately a Microsoft project, and they have Microsoft money and Microsoft lawyers to defend their position.

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