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All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

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Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#321

Post by jeremyjh »

blendergeek wrote: post #181
schneidmaster wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a decent bit of caselaw indicating that computers reading and using a copyrighted work simply "don't count" in terms of copyright infringement -- only humans can infringe copyright. This article[0] does a pretty good job of summarizing the rationale that the courts have provided. My (non-lawyer) take is that GitHub is pushing this just half a step farther -- if computers can consume copyrighted material, and…

> There's a decent bit of caselaw indicating that computers reading and using a copyrighted work simply "don't count" in terms of copyright infringement -- only humans can infringe copyright. I have read variations of "computers don't commit copyright" more times than I can count in the past few days. How is Copilot different from a compiler? (Please give me the legal answer, not the technical answer. I now the diffe…

What if I made a few tweaks to Copilot so that it is very likely to reproduce large chunks of verbatim code that I would like to use without attribution, such as the Linux kernel. Do you really think you can write a computer program that magically "launders" IP?

A compiler is run on original sources. I don't see any analogy here at all.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#322

Post by rambambram »

ralph84 wrote: post #271
rambambram wrote: post #188

I'm a programmer and also studied law for some time. These stories make me - once more - realize the old adage: "Possession is nine tenths of the law." Don't host that code in the cloud (or a better term, someone else's dirty bucket). What happened to developers hosting stuff on their own website!?

GitHub's argument isn't that you hosted your code on GitHub and therefore gave them a license to use it to train their model. GitHub's argument is they don't need a license to train their model because it's fair use. Hosting your code somewhere else doesn't prevent fair use. If you don't want your code used to train ML models, don't host it anywhere.

I get it, but that's already a legal argument. I was trying to zoom out from the unavoidable legal argumentative deadlock: if GH does not have your code hosted on their servers, it becomes way harder for 'them' to grab it and rape it. Your own domain is - of course - also out in the open, but at least you can have more control.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#323

Post by dogma1138 »

hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #156
dogma1138 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would potentially be an infringement of the copyright of the photographer but in any case it’s an infringement of the personality rights of George Clooney. You aren’t allowed to sell someone’s likeness without their permission. You don’t need an AI for this if you create a portrait of Clooney and sell it or make any use that isn’t covered by fair use he can sue you. Depending on the composition of the picture fo…

Satire does not usually fall under libel/defamation, though, right? >For example, in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988), Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, writing for a unanimous court, stated that a parody depicting the Reverend Jerry Falwell as a drunken, incestuous son could not be defamation since it was an obvious parody, not intended as a statement of fact. To find otherwise, the Court said, was to endanger F…

Depends on the legal system in question and the intent and usage.

The US system isn’t the only one on the planet you know, the UK still has political cartoonists despite a very different definition for what defamation is which the example above can fall under.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#324

Post by thinkingemote »

The answer is simple: Github needs to make a tool which can scan all your code to see if it contains code from public code. Its what universities around the world do for students work.

Of course, theres a huge irony in that Github is also making the tool that enables the widespread plagarism....

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#325

Post by cogman10 »

jrm4 wrote: post #261
AaronFriel wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies befo…

You're strongly and incorrectly implying that "Fair Use" is a clear (and relatively immutable) concept within copyright law, which couldn't be further from the truth. Even if this or that particular case sets out what appears to be solid grounds, one shouldn't take that as gospel by any means. This mostly has to do with the nature of the wishy-washy nature of the 4 part Fair Use test, which, unlike decent legal tests…

Most law is wishy washy. There are very few cut and dry answers in the law (If there were, we wouldn't need lawyers and a court system based on deciphering the law).

All that said, the one thing I'd add about fair use is that it isn't permission to use anything you like, but rather a defense in a legal proceeding about copyright. It's pretty much all about being able to reference copyrighted material with the law later coming in and making final decisions on whether or not that reference went too far. (IE, copying all of a disney movie and saying "What's up with this!" vs copying 1 scene and saying "This is totally messed up and here's why".)

That was a big part of the google oracle lawsuit.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#326

Post by rwmj »

So would a way to do this be to train multiple models on each different code license (perhaps allowing compatible licenses to cohabit) and then have Copilot identify the license of the target project and use the appropriate model?

It might have an interesting feedback effect that some licenses which are more popular would presumably have better Copilot recommendations, which would produce better and thus more popular code for those licenses. Although maybe this happens already.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#327

Post by jeremyjh »

sailingparrot wrote: post #304
agilob wrote: post #134

This means that also all illegally leaked codes from Apple, CDPR, Intel, NSA and Microsoft leaks are used in the models? iBoot, Witcher 3? Gwent? NSA backdoors? Does the copilot still learn from new repos? Can I post github enterprise code publicly to let it learn from it? Serious answers only please

No, it's not trained on all public code as the title suggests, it's trained on all GitHub public code (so public repos hosted on GH), none of the things you enumerate are hosted on GH.

There have been leaks of copyrighted code that were hosted on Github before they were taken down. There is also a lot of public code on Github without any license at all, which is not public domain but actually unlicensed for all purposes.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#328

Post by yccs27 »

taywrobel wrote: post #313
fchu wrote: post #307

If a company built a tool like Copilot to help students write essays, is that considered plagiarism? Probably yes, and the reason is that regurgitating blobs of text without actually thinking like a human and writing them anew doesn't feel like actual work, just direct re-use. Same thinking probably applies to GitHub Copilot and copyright

It’s already fairly commonplace for news agencies to generate articles using ML solutions such as https://ai-writer.com/ So by your logic ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC have all been plagiarizing and violating copyright for doing so? I’m not sure if there’s been a legal challenge/precedent set in that case yet, but that seems like a more apples to apples comparison than the Google Books metaphor being used. Disclosure: I wor…

The big question here is: On what data was the model trained? Presumably the news stations trained theirs on public-domain works and their own backlog of news articles, so even with manual copying there would be no infringement. In contrast, Copilot was trained on other people's code with active copyright.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#329

Post by rapind »

keonix wrote: post #185

If the training set contains verbatim (A)GPL code does this mean that Copilot also should be distributed by Microsoft under GPL? Because without it Copilot (as it is distributed by Microsoft) couldn't be built, wouldn't it make it a derivative work of GPL'd code (and obviously every other license)? I see a lot of people comparing human learning to machine learning in the comments, but there is a huge difference - we…

This is pretty interesting for AI in general. Should you be able to train with material you don't own? Can your training benefit from material that has specific usage licenses attached to it? What about stuff like GameGAN?

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#330

Post by AaronFriel »

shakna wrote: post #286
AaronFriel wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence of Copilot producing substantial (100s of lines) verbatim copies of copyrighted works? Absent this, I don't think there's a case. The courts have given extraordinarily wide latitude to fair use and ML algorithms are routinely trained on copyrighted works, photos, etc. without a license. I understand that this feels more personal because it involves our field, but artists and authors have express…

> Is there any evidence of Copilot producing substantial (100s of lines) verbatim copies of copyrighted works? It doesn't need to be substantial. In Google v. Oracle a 9-line function was found to be infringing.

If I recall correctly, the nine line question wasn't decided by the supreme court, but the API question was.

The Supreme Court did hold that the 11,500 lines of API code copied verbatim constituted fair use.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

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