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

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

#471

Post by heavyset_go »

korantu wrote: post #455
GhostVII wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Most of people who contribute to open source software are not motivated by copyright.

I disagree. License choice is deliberate, and many open source licenses are chosen for the strict stipulations they put on users and developers, like mandatory attribution and terms of distribution or reproduction.

I release some software under the GPL and AGPL. I don't want anyone to use my software that doesn't intend to abide by the terms it was released under.

If I wanted to release software with less stipulations, then I would, and I have.

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

#472

Post by perryizgr8 »

M4v3R wrote: post #8

While I understand the sentiment wasn’t Copilot trained on code not only hosted on GitHub, but found all over the Internet? Which means hosting your code yourself would not prevent GitHub from using it to train Copilot. That raises an interesting question though - how do you opt out? Is there even a way to do it?

> how do you opt out? Is there even a way to do it?

Yeah, don't post your code in the public for everyone to read. If I am musician, and I play my song publicly, people will hum it if they like it. I can't do anything to stop that, except not play the song to anyone.

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

#473

Post by oefrha »

viktree wrote: post #468
oefrha wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The RMS function in Quake Source code exists in the copilot training set (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 ) is covered under GPL which is source available (see https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/master/c... )

GPL is an open source license. Please read the ancestors to understand what’s being discussed here.

Edit: I was clearly making a distinction between open source (as in covered by an OSI-approved open source license) and only source-available, rather than treating source-available as a superset of open source.

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

#474

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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.

and they made those decisions based on the need to be able to argue in court that code was not copied.

>then you'd want to forbid contributors from using CoPilot

Right, the whole thing about arguing if copilot spits out a ten line function verbatim is not really what will be the problem, the problem is a human programmer still needs to run copilot and they will be the ones shown in the codebase as the author of the code (they could of course put a comment 'I got this bit from copilot' but might be cumbersome and anyway would hardly work as proof), although I suppose it would be not just proprietary code but code with an incompatible license.

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

#475

Post by zarzavat »

travisjungroth wrote: post #391
breck wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

Okay, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I’m legitimately trying to understand. Do you think after that book was published it should have no copyright protection? That it should be totally legal for me to print and sell my own copies?

Sure why not? Do you think JK Rowling needs more money?

Maybe the state could grant protection for 10 years after publishing to give the author a chance to recoup their investment. I don't know why the protection extends to the author's grandchildren.

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

#476

Post by M4v3R »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #472
M4v3R wrote: post #8

While I understand the sentiment wasn’t Copilot trained on code not only hosted on GitHub, but found all over the Internet? Which means hosting your code yourself would not prevent GitHub from using it to train Copilot. That raises an interesting question though - how do you opt out? Is there even a way to do it?

> how do you opt out? Is there even a way to do it? Yeah, don't post your code in the public for everyone to read. If I am musician, and I play my song publicly, people will hum it if they like it. I can't do anything to stop that, except not play the song to anyone.

It’s a different thing when random people start humming or even singing your song in private, and an entirely different thing when a big corporation uses your work to train a system that will at some points generate parts of your works and will make them millions of dollars of your and everyone else’s code without attributing anyone in any way.

Plus, to be honest I’m not even sure whether I’m for or against that, I am just wondering if one was against it but still wants to do open source work do they have any recourse?

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

#477

Post by zarzavat »

heavyset_go wrote: post #471
korantu wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Most of people who contribute to open source software are not motivated by copyright. I disagree. License choice is deliberate, and many open source licenses are chosen for the strict stipulations they put on users and developers, like mandatory attribution and terms of distribution or reproduction. I release some software under the GPL and AGPL. I don't want anyone to use my software that doesn't intend to abide b…

You are in a minority though. Most open source I see is BSD or MIT.

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

#478

Post by krono »

jefftk wrote: post #437
krono wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah right, I honestly did not know! Still, if you come across some published source code that does not appear to be licensed and does not specifically define itself as being "Open Source" as defined by the "Open Source Initiative", copyright law applies and you're not allowed to just take it and use it. GitHub specifically uses the words "source code from publicly available sources" when talking about what they used t…

Sorry, I was specifically responding to how my parent views open source. I agree that Copilot was probably trained in part on public code that isn't open source -- GitHub's claim (not saying I agree) is that they don't need a license to train on code.

No need to apologise!

In this post's comment section alone many use the term "open source" but really mean to say "public-source", others use the two terms interchangeably even when they seem to be aware of the distinction, and then there are people who seem to think that by making your GitHub repo public it becomes OSD-spec "open source" and with that free to use.

It's just so confusing and easy to misinterpret each-others' true meaning.

Thanks for making me aware of the existence of that OSD OSS spec btw! Came across the (recovered) blog post where the term was first announced http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html.

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

#480

Post by nilshauk »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #313
nilshauk wrote: post #249

I used to admire GitHub for being a fully bootstrapped company and free to pursue a path in the world they believed in as a company. Since the Microsoft acquisition it’s becoming painfully obvious how unhealthily centralized the dev world has become, and they seem to strive to become ever more entrenched in the name of maximizing shareholder value. I only have a small amount of open source projects on GH but I intend…

What does this have to do with Copilot?

Thanks for the question. Well. I put my AGPLv3-licensed code on GitHub to help other developers. I didn’t do this to help GitHub / Microsoft build a closed-source tool to monopolize the (F)OSS market.

It’s interesting how incumbent companies such as Google and GitHub try to capitalize on their user data with machine learning in any way they can to maximize shareholder value.

GH and MS spend a lot of time talking about how important open source is to them. They didn’t exactly prove this by building Copilot to be so oblivious about licensing. Either they took a gamble and hope they’d get away with it or it didn’t occur to them that this would be a problem at all. Either way, I’ve lost faith in GH's ability to act in the best interest of its users and the larger open source community.

It’s a free market and I hope to see more competition in this space: Both from GitHub-alternatives that respect code-licenses and from self-hosting alternatives.

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