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

Post by chrisoverzero » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 3:36 AM UTC

dahart wrote: post #357

hluska wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So @chrisseaton was correct, you did edit your posts and their question was in good faith. Edit - I’m adding another point as an edit to show another way to communicate. Would any of your points been lost had you done something similar?

> So @chrisseaton was correct No that’s not true. I did not edit my posts after reading their reply, and the false accusation was that I changed my comment after it was replied to. I didn’t challenge whether the question was in good faith, but I’ll just note that the relevant discussion of copyright got dropped in favor of an ad-hominem attack. My question of which “it” was being referred to is a legitimate question…

Post by betwixthewires » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 3:54 AM UTC

bootlooped wrote: post #428

blibble wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That function appears in hundreds, if not thousands of GitHub repos. It's plausible that it's the most famous block of code ever. Are all those repos guilty of copyright infringement? https://github.com/search?q=float+Q_rsqrt%28+float+number+%2... The only ways this argument could be less alarming to me is if people were bothered that it was writing the same Hello World as somebody else, or that it was naming variabl…

Post by swiley » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 4:01 AM UTC

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…

Post by viktree » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 4:33 AM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #456

johnday wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by zarzavat » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 4:40 AM UTC

ruined wrote: post #460

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…

>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.