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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

#401

Post by rvnx »

dheera wrote: post #362
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course not. Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied. Those projects could hire people familiar with competitor code and assign them to competing projects if they wanted. The contributors could, in theory, write new code with…

> then you'd want to forbid contributors from using CoPilot I mean, if you used CoPilot on one computer, stared at it intensely for 1 hour, closed that computer, and then typed out code in the other computer that you were contributing from, you technically didn't use it for the contribution, you just used CoPilot for your education only. Intellectual property is itself a flawed concept in many ways. It's like asking…

Intellectual property itself is silly. How can a thought be the property of someone ? Secrecy is the solution if you don't want others to learn from you (like Coca-Cola does).

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

#402

Post by dragonwriter »

rvnx wrote: post #401
dheera wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then you'd want to forbid contributors from using CoPilot I mean, if you used CoPilot on one computer, stared at it intensely for 1 hour, closed that computer, and then typed out code in the other computer that you were contributing from, you technically didn't use it for the contribution, you just used CoPilot for your education only. Intellectual property is itself a flawed concept in many ways. It's like asking…

Intellectual property itself is silly. How can a thought be the property of someone ? Secrecy is the solution if you don't want others to learn from you (like Coca-Cola does).

> Intellectual property itself is silly. How can a thought be the property of someone ?

No category of intellectual property covers thoughts, so the question has no relevance to the preceding statement.

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

#403

Post by userbinator »

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…

if it can be shown

...and the "if" is the important part. This is why Imaginary Property is so absurd.

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

#404

Post by Barrin92 »

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.

it doesn't at all challenge any assumption we have about the current world, unless you've been living with the assumption that you can't automate the process of producing code snippets.

Copilot is no different than stackoverflow with the exception that your selection mechanism is done by an artifical neural net rather than a bunch of people with up and downvotes in front of their screen. The reason people are uncomfortable here isn't some vague PR speech notion about the future, it's that copilot appears to be quite literally ignoring software licenses. Can we not devolve into this Silicon Valley corporate speak of rebranding a company ignoring intellectual property as innovation?

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

#405

Post by Barrin92 »

For anyone who thinks this is even remotely okay, answer me this. Imagine that Copilot is actually just a gigantic PR campaign, and when you send a completion request, they do this:

They send the request off to a sweatshop in Bangladesh where a bunch of mechanical turk workers scroll through licensed codebases, find an appropriate snippet of code, agree on the best one, strip all of the licenses and attributions out, and send it back to you. (turns out they're very quick at their job)

How is this any different than what Copilot does with the purely technical difference that you're pushing code through an artifical neural net instead of a bunch of human ones. Why is that supposed to matter

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

#406

Post by judge2020 »

okamiueru wrote: post #338
judge2020 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if you want to use it for something real, you need to hire me. No I do not. Even strictly proprietary code can be copied and used in a for-profit way without approval as long as it qualifies for fair use.

"Something real" and "fair use" don't get along. I'm also not sure fair use trumps licensing, since one is a copyright issue, and the other is the terms of use. You don't get to copy a snippet of GPL code and get away by calling it fair use. At least, I hope it isn't the case.

> I'm also not sure fair use trumps licensing, since one is a copyright issue, and the other is the terms of use.

Licenses and copyright are strictly related - the 'terms of use' in the form of a license simply is a grant for someone to reuse something in full granted they uphold their end of the bargain which might mean (for the GPL) relicensing code that touches said licensed code; but, if someone doesn't agree to the license or they don't uphold their end (such as by releasing their own code under the same license), the license states that the use is now invalid and they're not allowed to copy it in the permissive form provided unless the use passes the fair use doctrine.

Now 'fair use' is actually a pretty high bar, and most especially for code - feel free to read 17 USC 107 [0] which lays out how this is determined. What's tough for code is that, in terms of for copying code or using a library, it usually doesn't qualify for the initial requirement "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright". Unless you're taking GPL code and writing up how bad it is, or how efficient is is, chances are the use doesn't fit into fair use.

So while I think I was indeed a bit obtuse in saying that code could be used in a fair use way (since that's not what happens in these contexts) it's technically possible.

0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107

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

#407

Post by bogwog »

jefftk wrote: post #244
kuon wrote: post #127

I've given thousands of hours to open source projects, I really think open source is a pillar of modern society. So you would think I am all for something like copilot, but no. At first I thought this was a great feature, because easier access to code, but after some reflection, I am also very skeptical. I am able to make my code open source, because I can make a living out of it, and I have a lot of open source code…

> 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. If you can suck all the code without even I noticing it, that's not fair Co-pilot aside, that's already how it works today. If you make something open source, I can use your code to power my business, and I'm under no obligation to hire you. It's great wh…

> I can use your code to power my business, and I'm under no obligation to hire you.

Make sure you read those licenses. Just because something is open source doesn't mean that you're free to use it for whatever you want.

There are some projects that are open source and free for non-commercial use only.

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

#408

Post by bogwog »

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd think this was just the latest plot by Microsoft to attack open source software.

The only reason open source software is possible is because of the protections offered by copyright. Copilot basically shits all over that.

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

#409

Post by teh_klev »

I see lots of comments blaming MS about this turn of events.

But what did we expect from GitHub....MS or not? This was an obvious survival mechanism for GitHub sans MS. All that coding data there? Let's turn machine learning or AI onto that and make something.

And of MS were treating GitHub as an "at arms length" corporate entity with their own lawyers etc such as to NOT

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

#410

Post by bogwog »

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.

Has Github confirmed anywhere that copilot is only trained with projects on Github?

The OpenAI people seem to grab any bit of data they can get their hands on, regardless of the source. I don't see why they'd limit themselves to Github for something like this.

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