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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

#451

Post by pabs3 »

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #223
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised I had to scroll so far to find this, given how copyleft and straight-up anti-IP so much of the open source community is. I think a lot more people on this site (and in the FOSS community in general) would be on board with Copilot if it respected viral licenses, e.g. if it had a way of inferring that the code it was copying verbatim were GPL-3 and warned the user that including it in their project would requ…

But that's literally the issue. The only form of intellectual property that is being damaged by this is copyleft.

Permissive licenses have requirements too, mostly attribution.

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

#452

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#453

Post by dwild »

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.

Plenty of examples show that it didn't learn that much and copy literal parts of code. At my school that would have been ground for plagiarism which weren't treated lightly.

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

#454

Post by alice-i-cecile »

CameronNemo wrote: post #340
stingraycharles wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. I am considering relicensing all of my permissively licensed code because of this. The fundamental assumptions I had when releasing that code under a permissive license have been violated.

Under GitHub's legal theory (fair use), nothing you put in that license file can stop them from doing so legally.

If copyright applies, they're already in violation by failing to attribute your MIT contributions and could theoretically be sued for infringement (as they did not abide by the terms of the license).

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

#455

Post by korantu »

GhostVII wrote: post #427
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.

If there is no copyright, what incentive is there to ever create anything digital? Adobe would never invest in Photoshop if any random person was legally able to sell copies for $1 each. A production company will never publish a book or create a TV show if anyone can just undercut them by taking what they have produced and resell it. Doesn't seem like a con to me, it sounds pretty critical for any kind of functional…

Most of people who contribute to open source software are not motivated by copyright. I think without copyright we would still have our software, just would have way bigger share of open source software in the world, as well as nastier copy-protection mechanisms. And more services that are online only.

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

#456

Post by oefrha »

johnday wrote: post #385
jefftk wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is Copilot trained on source available code? If not, then whatever restrictions you may want to apply with your source available code isn’t relevant. The debate is about copyleft.

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

#457

Post by _19qg »

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #370
lispm wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stallman did not gave Symbolics his Lisp interpreter. Symbolics had a license for MIT's Lisp system.

I've admittedly based that on what a FSF advocate told me and googling it seemed to support it. If you have some source that indicates this is wrong/biased, feel free to link it. Anyway, that still wouldn't change that the FSF and Copyleft are explicitly anti-proprietary, not intending to be 'no restrictions'.

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_symbolicsLenseSignedPr...

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

#458

Post by oefrha »

saurik wrote: post #447
jefftk wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> open source and free for non-commercial use only That's not open source: https://opensource.org/osd

You have said this multiple times on this thread now, but in addition to how the OSI getting to unilaterally define the technical definition of "open source" being controversial even within the software engineering community, you really need to be looking at the definition of words "descriptively" and most people seem to put even "shared source" (look but don't touch) models as subsets of the class "open source". Reg…

> it picks up any code that has been published under any reason including the large amounts of code that is on GitHub without any license at all or which was literally stolen and leaked onto GitHub.

You are stating a rather arbitrary assumption of yours as a fact, unless you have concrete sources or evidence.

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

#459

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

You're taking the "learning" metaphor too literally. Machine learning models do not learn. They can and do encode their training material into their weights and biases, too. That's what Copilot was doing, regurgitating parts of its training data line for line.

To me, that is not much different from transforming a copyrighted piece of work with, say, compression, a lossy codec or cropping. There are plenty of people who can learn to play Metallica songs really well, but if they copied specifics aspects of their work it would be copyright infringement, as well.

A human being can literally learn. We can understand abstract principles from one copyrighted work and apply them to another without actually infringing its copyright. A ML model does not understand, it is a statistical model. It is inherently a derivative work, and it often encodes the copyrighted work into was trained on into the model itself.

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

#460

Post by ruined »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #91
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…

> 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…

>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.

Okay, so it's not law, it's just a policy compelled by preceding legal judgements. Case law, perhaps.

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