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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

#581

Post by jkaplowitz »

mthoms wrote: post #496
shakna wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all evidence so far shows that it directly recites code very rarely indeed. _Once_ is enough for it to be infringing. The law is not very forgiving when you try and handwave it away.

You sound quite sure that the outlying instances of direct copying wouldn't be covered by the Fair Use copyright exemption. Any particular reason for that? I tend to think it would be covered (provided it there were relatively small snippets and not entire functions).

I'm not the person you're replying to, but one strong reason is that the global reach and standardization of copyright law is far broader than the global reach and standardization of the fair use exception. A single non-US country in which GitHub Copilot is used in a way that would be infringing without the US fair use exception, and outside the scope of any such exception in that law, would be enough to cause GitHub/MS a legal hassle. There could well be more than one such country.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#582

Post by cycomanic »

AaronFriel wrote: post #247
echelon wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. For commercial use and derivative works? Authors won't incorporate snippets of books into new works unless they're reviews. Copilot is different.

Google Books is a commercial site which incorporated the snippets of millions of copyrighted works. And of course, sitting in thousands of Google servers/databases are full copies of each of those books, photos of each page, the OCRed text of each page, and indexes to search them. Even that egregious copying without a license or permission was considered fair use. If anything, the ways in which Copilot is different a…

The Google books example really misses the point, one of the reasons why the judges considered it fair use was because it was pointing back to the original sources (and thus potentially increasing publishers earnings).

Copilot does none of that. If all the ML companies are so sure this is fair use I encourage them to train an AI on Disney movies to generate short cartoon snippets based on some description. There sure would be a court case.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#583

Post by CyberRabbi »

planb wrote: post #464
CyberRabbi wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Movies are “public” too. That does not mean you are allowed to use them for any purpose. The term “Public” does not have specific legal consequences in copyright law outside of something being “public domain” as you say.

The question is: are you allowed to train a neural network on movies (e.g. For an automated color grading algorithm) and then sell that as a service?

The correct analogy would not be a color grading service but instead a service that produces supplementary content for movies their subscribers make.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#584

Post by mostdataisnice »

mikewarot wrote: post #575
fleddr wrote: post #551

To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared…

I have about 300,000 photos that haven't been scanned by AI (unless someone at Backblaze did it without permission). I'm sure there are lots of other photographers out there who miss Picassa, which Google killed off to push everyone's data to their service. (It did really well in matching faces, even across age, but the last version has a bug when there are multiple faces in a picture, sometimes it swaps the labels)…

While interesting, we don't know enough about how models are learning to where we would be able to consider doing this.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#585

Post by alerighi »

lallysingh wrote: post #577
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…

Assuming that Copilot's use of GPL'd code to provide snippets to a developer is fair use, what rights does the developer have to using that snippet?

Can you copy 10 lines of code from a open source project in your software? Yes you an, it's considered fair use. Nobody will ever sue for that. If it was, websites like StackOverflouw where developers post code probably taken by project with some restrictive license and other developer copy it in their projects would not exist.

Copilot will not write an entire software module, it will provide you with snippets. I see using GPL code for training fair use. If a developer reads the source code of a project to take inspiration and possibly copy some small parts does it violate the license?

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#586

Post by cgio »

mikewarot wrote: post #575
fleddr wrote: post #551

To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared…

I have about 300,000 photos that haven't been scanned by AI (unless someone at Backblaze did it without permission). I'm sure there are lots of other photographers out there who miss Picassa, which Google killed off to push everyone's data to their service. (It did really well in matching faces, even across age, but the last version has a bug when there are multiple faces in a picture, sometimes it swaps the labels)…

I am not an expert on the field. But my hope was that this could be facilitated by Transfer Learning. Still don’t know how the scale economies could be achieved. Maybe just out of the sweat and network of passionate people like in the case of open source.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#587

Post by alerighi »

_Understated_ wrote: post #92

Ok, my curiosity has been fired here... I have conjured up two scenarios here: Let's say I use copilot to generate a bunch of code for an app, something substantial, and it regurgitates a load of bits and pieces from many sources it got from GitHub, I'd assume there won't be any attribution in it... it will be as if Copilot made the code itself (I know it sort of does but lets not split hairs!). I'm guessing the prev…

Copying/pasting code from open source projects it's considered fair use. Come on, who doesn't do that?

I mean, sure you don't copy an entire file, but you tend to copy a snippet, or in the end you look at how is done and you done the exact same way (that is the same of copying it!)

I would say there is not a problem in there.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#588

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

fragmede wrote: post #572
joe_the_user wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. If you're asking about the moral reaction here, I think it depends on how one views Copilot. Does Copilot create basically original code that just happens to include a few small snippets? Or does Copilot actually generate a large portion of lightly changed code when it's not spitting out verbatim copies of the code? I mean, if you tell Copilot, "make me a QT compatibl…

A naive developer thinks that they are the source code they write (you're not), and their source code leaking to the world makes them worthless. (Which isn't true, but being that invalidated explains a lot of the fear. Which, welcome to the club, programmers. Automation's here for your job too.) Still, some of the moral outrage here has to do with it coming from Github, and thus Microsoft. Software startup Kite has l…

You've answered your own question. They went under the radar and nobody cared about them. They're not the multibillion company that sued Mike Rowe and keeps ReactOS developers awake at night.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#589

Post by [deleted] »

anonydsfsfs wrote: post #570
bionhoward wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially dumb question from a guy who isn't a lawyer: Does Copilot infringe Google's patent(s) on the Transformer architecture? If so, then Google could potentially sue them for royalties, at least. Further, couldn't this Copilot thing backfire for Github because customer trust is more valuable than AI training data right now? If folks don't feel they can trust Github, seems like they could move their work to othe…

Doesn't really matter, because if Google sued Microsoft, Microsoft would immediately hit back with a countersuit, since they would have little trouble finding something in their 90,000+ patent warchest that Google is infringing on. Software patents have become a matter of mutually-assured destruction for the big players. The only winning move is not to play.

[deleted]

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#590

Post by waterheater »

mikewarot wrote: post #575
fleddr wrote: post #551

To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared…

I have about 300,000 photos that haven't been scanned by AI (unless someone at Backblaze did it without permission). I'm sure there are lots of other photographers out there who miss Picassa, which Google killed off to push everyone's data to their service. (It did really well in matching faces, even across age, but the last version has a bug when there are multiple faces in a picture, sometimes it swaps the labels)…

Yes, you're talking about federated learning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_learning

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