I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by breck » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:30 PM UTC

cnma wrote: post #336

breck wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. You realize it doesn’t make any sense. All ideas are shared creations, by definition. If you’ve created something that has meaning for other people, the meaning comes from the ideas you are incorporating into your own tree. There is no defending copyright. It is indefensible from first principles. It makes no logical sense. Though it sure has proven to be a profitable con.

Nonsense. Above a certain level of creativity people do produce novel or exceptional things that are worthy of protection. Because naked men are a shared concept Michelangelo's David is not protect-worthy? I'm very worried that such opinions are up-voted so highly when Microsoft leeches open source code (but not its own ...). People have no respect for other people's creations. Perhaps it makes them feel better becau…

> Above a certain level of creativity people do produce novel or exceptional things that are worthy of protection.

Name your very best example that will prove me wrong. It should be so simple. One example, that's all it takes. Take your time, make sure you've got a good one. I'll tell you that not once, not a single time in over 17 years, have I ever seen a single example of this argument hold up under scrutiny.

Oh wait, you already did:

> Because naked men are a shared concept Michelangelo's David is not protect-worthy?

Ah yes, Michelangelo's David. A work free of copyright built under commission! Thank you for again pointing out the futility of the defense of copyright.

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

#382

Post by stale2002 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:30 PM UTC

calvinmorrison wrote: post #109

wcerfgba wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the Arctic Code Vault [1]? Is the only problem that they didn't seek your consent? How is it different to deploying a new availability zone and having your public repos accessible on another server? Your code is preserved verbatim, and it's not possible for GitHub to provide their service without the right to make verbatim copies of your code, which presumably you agreed to as part of their ToS. [1]…

I guess copying my code to microfiche is basically reprinting it without my permission.

> is basically reprinting it without my permission.

What if I were to tell you, that in order to publish any code, on the internet, that code has to be "reprinted" to many different computers and places?

In fact, whenever you yourself need to even access that code, that code is copied over to many different computers along to way, as is necessary to send it to you.

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

#383

Post by astrange » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:31 PM UTC

blibble wrote: post #89

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…

there's a nice example here of it reproducing carmack's famous inverse square root function from Quake 3 (sans GPL, of course) https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 this is clearly copyright infringement, and if it isn't: it should be

Calling it Carmack's rsqrt is an attribution issue already since it seems to have been invented a decade earlier and used at SGI.

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

#384

Post by Quekid5 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:31 PM UTC

lamontcg wrote: post #174

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…

I'm more concerned with all the poor code and security issues that Copilot has been trained on. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Hit the nail on the head, at least as far as my concerns go.

Security is a constant issue with humans writing code. Do we really want an "AI" that understands neither code nor security spitting out snippets of code to pasted into network services?

If Copilot ever becomes truly popular it's going to be an absolute security nightmare both from the code it suggests (just bad code, GIGO as you say), but also because adversaries will be gaming it by posting bad code for it to pick up and "learn" from.

It's insanity.

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

#385

Post by johnday » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:34 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #354

johnday wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the person you're responding to already releases their code under a non-commercial license. The problem with Copilot is that it may allow commercial enterprises to avoid such a license by copying the code verbatim from their repositories, possibly without any party involved knowing that it's happened.

Where are you seeing that they are using a non-commercial license? (And non-commercial licenses are not open source: https://opensource.org/osd )

To me, the sentence

> I have a lot of open source code that I love to share for things like education or private stuff, but if you want to use it for something real, you need to hire me.

implies that they have code which they are sharing under that proviso. Do you read it differently?

You are right about the technical distinction of open source from source-available. I think that the GGP (and myself) were both using it colloquially as a shorthand for source-available.

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

#386

Post by ralph84 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:37 PM UTC

41209 wrote: post #80

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…

Copilot is lifting entire functions from GPL code. Legal technicality aside , I know I'd be upset if I gpl'ed some code and someone stole large parts of it.

Why would you GPL the code in the first place if you didn't want other people using it? It's perfectly within the license for someone to do basically whatever they want with GPL code as long as they're not redistributing it. That includes using it for the internal operations of a Fortune 500 company, using it to run a dictatorship, or building a SaaS business on top of it. If you don't want people to "steal" your code, the GPL isn't the right license.

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

#387

Post by caconym_ » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #375

caconym_ wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right , to their respective Writings and Discoveries. What better way to promote said Progress than by making sure said Authors and Inventors can make enough money off their work to keep doing it? As written, it's a roundabout way to get at the instrumentality of capital, but if that's not what t…

> What better way to promote said Progress There are a lot of better ways. Having more information being public and free, and usable by tools like this sounds like an excellent way of promoting progress.

Well, this is the current status quo. Automated scraping of copyrighted material for (arguably) transformative applications like Copilot is generally allowed under fair use, while non-transformative copying is considered infringement.

If you want to strip creators of (default) exclusive rights to their work, that's a different conversation than the one around whether Copilot and similar applications fall under fair use. Both have been touched on in this subthread, but your comment seems to be conflating them in a way that doesn't follow directly from the discussion above it.

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

#388

Post by breck » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:44 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #355

breck wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. You realize it doesn’t make any sense. All ideas are shared creations, by definition. If you’ve created something that has meaning for other people, the meaning comes from the ideas you are incorporating into your own tree. There is no defending copyright. It is indefensible from first principles. It makes no logical sense. Though it sure has proven to be a profitable con.

> There is no defending copyright. It is indefensible from first principles. It makes no logical sense. What does that even mean? The intent from the beginning of copyright was to allow people to live off of intellectual works by claiming legal rights over the work. There are no “first principles” from which basically any societal agreements like these are derived. Even something as simple as “murder is illegal” isn’…

> The intent from the beginning

We know that there was a written intent that it was "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". However, who knows whether or not that was the true intent of all those who signed off on it. We see that lots of written intent, (Exhibit A: Purdue's "Partners Against Pain" Oxycontin promotion), may not match the mathematical reality on the ground. Also, we know that there was plenty of places in the Constitution that were good to amend (the three fifths clause, for instance).

This site (http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/index.php) has lots of fascinating old docs where you can come up with your own impressions about the early days of copyright. My general impression was that while it didn't ever actually promote the progress of science and useful arts, it absolutely did in the early days serve as a super smart free hack for the new federal government to build a central intelligence and library of all the latest and greatest inventions from throughout the land.

> What does that even mean?

It means that if you analyze it using logic and put all assumptions on the table (start high up on the tree), you deduce that this is a system of intellectual slavery, not of intellectual "property". You deduce that if there is such a thing as stealing ideas, then all ideas with any value are majority stolen and but a fraction novel.

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

#389

Post by shakna » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:46 PM UTC

ralph84 wrote: post #386

41209 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot is lifting entire functions from GPL code. Legal technicality aside , I know I'd be upset if I gpl'ed some code and someone stole large parts of it.

Why would you GPL the code in the first place if you didn't want other people using it? It's perfectly within the license for someone to do basically whatever they want with GPL code as long as they're not redistributing it. That includes using it for the internal operations of a Fortune 500 company, using it to run a dictatorship, or building a SaaS business on top of it. If you don't want people to "steal" your cod…

> It's perfectly within the license for someone to do basically whatever they want with GPL code as long as they're not redistributing it.

Copilot is redistributing it without the license.

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

#390

Post by breck » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

okamiueru wrote: post #349

breck wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. You realize it doesn’t make any sense. All ideas are shared creations, by definition. If you’ve created something that has meaning for other people, the meaning comes from the ideas you are incorporating into your own tree. There is no defending copyright. It is indefensible from first principles. It makes no logical sense. Though it sure has proven to be a profitable con.

I recognise your comments from several different threads, and I'm wondering if you might not be working against your own ideals. The GPL license is intended to persuade other sources to share their contributions when building on top, which I assume is what you would like to see happen. If everything is GPL then everything is open source, everyone can use anything, including training AI methods, etc. The problem posed…

If we abolish copyright then there is no need for GPL. I am so forever grateful for GPL, as Stallman and the like weaponized copyright against itself, and then gave us crystal clear data that open source software is strictly superior in the long run.

But even if only 1% of ideas were copyrighted, that is still a tax on the use of all ideas. In a world without copyright, I can download any dataset at will and analyze and remix it to my heart's content, and share my findings. But in a world with copyright, if there was one "copyrighted" land mine in there I open myself up to financial ruin. So one must tread carefully when working with any external ideas.