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Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

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Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#81

Post by pbhjpbhj »

judge2020 wrote: post #48
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #44

The larger issue is that anyone using GitHub is donating their work for re-use without attribution through Copilot. In return, you receive hosting from GitHub. The writing is on the wall. You MUST host your own code on a stand-alone website. Here is an example. This Go program (a compiler) generates and serves its own website: https://NN-512.com It runs on a Linode shared CPU cloud instance that costs $5 per month: h…

If you treat copilot like a human, and you ask it a question ( like "#find median of list") that human either (A) will put together all the things they've learned over thousands of hours of simply looking at code in the programming language and how the syntax works, then provide a new code block, or (B) remember "oh, I remember this extract string of text and what comes after it. Here's the next 10 lines from that sn…

the following is my personal opinion, unrelated to my work

>In that B scenario, would the human be infringing on the original's copyright? //

Depends on jurisdiction but in general I'd say no as quoting, particularly an insubstantial portion, is allowed (certainly under USA Fair Use, possibly under UK Fair Dealing).

However, and again depends on jurisdiction, copying a whole work to use for AI training or searching can be restricted (though it's on the GitHub license in this case). The snippet might be allowed but copying into a training corpus may be excluded (I think UK have an exception for AI training, but I may have misremembered, it might be a suggestion??).

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#82

Post by emilengler »

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #44

The larger issue is that anyone using GitHub is donating their work for re-use without attribution through Copilot. In return, you receive hosting from GitHub. The writing is on the wall. You MUST host your own code on a stand-alone website. Here is an example. This Go program (a compiler) generates and serves its own website: https://NN-512.com It runs on a Linode shared CPU cloud instance that costs $5 per month: h…

> The larger issue is that anyone using GitHub is donating their work for re-use without attribution through Copilot.

Wrong. Lets say a GPL project is not hosted on GitHub officially. I can easily setup a mirror for it though on GitHub as the GPL doesn't prevent me from doing it...

Point is that anyone can put my work on GitHub, even if I don't want to.Assuming the project is under a free license though.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#83

Post by ognarb »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

Seems like it's probably a mistake, did you try to contact them? https://opensource.microsoft.com/ https://twitter.com/OpenAtMicrosoft

A 'mistake' they are actually doing since a long time now. Here is the cups equivalent with a license change from apache to mit for the CUPS system.

https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/ad69bcc78bdea3fea3f...

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#85

Post by jen20 »

rustc wrote: post #56
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #44

The larger issue is that anyone using GitHub is donating their work for re-use without attribution through Copilot. In return, you receive hosting from GitHub. The writing is on the wall. You MUST host your own code on a stand-alone website. Here is an example. This Go program (a compiler) generates and serves its own website: https://NN-512.com It runs on a Linode shared CPU cloud instance that costs $5 per month: h…

> The writing is on the wall. You MUST host your own code on a stand-alone website. How would self hosting your code prevent Microsoft/GitHub from using it in the Copilot training dataset? If using content from GitHub irrespective of their license to train Copilot is legal, so is training from code available on your website.

Because it isn’t in compliance with the terms of many popular licenses to create derivative works without attribution. Therefore the only possible claim Microsoft have to do so is via terms and conditions, which would not apply to code hosted on a stand-alone website.

It might be time for popular licenses to update themselves for this new-found threat.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#86

Post by 37ef_ced3 »

emilengler wrote: post #82
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #44

The larger issue is that anyone using GitHub is donating their work for re-use without attribution through Copilot. In return, you receive hosting from GitHub. The writing is on the wall. You MUST host your own code on a stand-alone website. Here is an example. This Go program (a compiler) generates and serves its own website: https://NN-512.com It runs on a Linode shared CPU cloud instance that costs $5 per month: h…

> The larger issue is that anyone using GitHub is donating their work for re-use without attribution through Copilot. Wrong. Lets say a GPL project is not hosted on GitHub officially. I can easily setup a mirror for it though on GitHub as the GPL doesn't prevent me from doing it... Point is that anyone can put my work on GitHub, even if I don't want to.Assuming the project is under a free license though.

Yes, you can "donate" someone else's code, knowing Microsoft will violate a use-with-attribution license.

You can do it, but it's WRONG.

Copilot is trained on public GitHub repositories of any license: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot#Technology

We must all stop using GitHub.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#87

Post by judge2020 »

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #67
rustc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The writing is on the wall. You MUST host your own code on a stand-alone website. How would self hosting your code prevent Microsoft/GitHub from using it in the Copilot training dataset? If using content from GitHub irrespective of their license to train Copilot is legal, so is training from code available on your website.

Microsoft owns GitHub and you accept their terms of service. Copilot is trained on public GitHub repositories of any license: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot#Technology If they scrape your website, that's different.

If it's legally sound to do that, then it's legally sound to scrape code from Stack overflow as well. No special license is granted to GitHub to train CoPilot; the hosting license in the ToS[0] specifically doesn't allow its use outside of GitHub itself[1], so i'd argue that applies to running copilot in VSCode for code not destined for GitHub - and i'm sure MS's lawyers reviewed such a product launch.

0: https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...

1: > This license does not grant GitHub the right to .. otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#88

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

hirundo wrote: post #4

They changed the copyright holder on this fork, but left the MIT license in place. How does this harm anyone?

You can't own something by just saying you do!

Only the copyright owner can license the work to others, or issue under a different license if they like.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#89

Post by phendrenad2 »

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #44

The larger issue is that anyone using GitHub is donating their work for re-use without attribution through Copilot. In return, you receive hosting from GitHub. The writing is on the wall. You MUST host your own code on a stand-alone website. Here is an example. This Go program (a compiler) generates and serves its own website: https://NN-512.com It runs on a Linode shared CPU cloud instance that costs $5 per month: h…

That "issue" is unrelated. You've just hijacked the thread to talk about it.

Also the point you're making is controversial, and definitely isn't widely agreed on. As a human, I can read public code on Github, and use my internal neural network (brain) to regurgitate sections of code, and don't need to attribute anyone (who can say which codebase I'm recalling code from? I certainly can't). So a neural network doing the same thing, but external to a human, is certainly questionanble, but it isn't a cut-and-dry case of copying without attribution.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#90

Post by wongarsu »

xyproto wrote: post #69
gizdan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is fine, and surely an honest mistake. Automation is great, but the way I see it is, how many other projects have been forked and automatically re-licensed, and then profited from without proper attribution? An accident still needs to be flagged, and still needs to be corrected. They also need to be learned from and avoided in the future.

Attribution is nice, but for it to be a requirement, it needs to either be specified in the license or be plain old copyright.

The license clearly states

> Permission is hereby granted [...] subject to the following conditions:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Changing the name in the copyright is a clear license violation.

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