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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#31

Post by antihero »

I mean, if it's autocompleting a fairly simple line, and can do that because it's analysed a lot of lines, I don't really see that as "stealing anything".

If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying.

But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway.

I think the first use case is far more common, and creating boilerplate that is so generic you could never really attribute it anyway.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#32

Post by goerz »

skc wrote: post #16

I get the feeling this entire debate would have been non-existent had this been a Jetbrains product instead. The whole thing is just bizarre when the vast majority of developers constantly look at OSS code daily and lift ideas/patterns/snippets from there regularly without once looking at whatever license is attached.

I am not a lawyer, but my legal intuition / common sense says that “code snippets” are not copyrightable. There’s some sliding scale on when a code snippet would become so non-trivial that a reasonable (!) judge would consider it copyrightable, but nothing Copilot does is anywhere close to that limit, IMO.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#33

Post by XCabbage »

spupe wrote: post #21

If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would you say that this person is selling you other people's code? Is it common or expected for this type of use to be acknowledged?

People I've worked with have different philosophies on this, but personally, if you check in code that is distinctive enough that I can identify the source you copied and pasted it from, and you provided no indication (whether in a comment or a PR description) that you copied it, I will really get quite grumpy at you about it.

Way too often I burn half an hour needlessly during review in one of two ways:

* trying to figure out how the heck someone figured out some "magic" code that achieves something by invoking a bunch of poorly documented library or framework internals, and trying to reverse engineer WTF all the magic does by diving into the framework's source... only to eventually think to google the whole snippet rather than each individual method call, and discover it's copied from a Stack Overflow answer

* trying to figure out why something was written in an unidiomatic or overcomplicated way rather than a more obvious approach, and commenting at length on how I'd simplify it... only to eventually realise it was copied from a Stack Overflow answer

Attribution isn't just about making sure the right person gets credit, or about license compliance; reviewers and maintainers frequently need to be able to see where stuff was copied and pasted from in order to do their jobs effectively, even for snippets of just a few lines.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#34

Post by ben-schaaf »

spupe wrote: post #21

If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would you say that this person is selling you other people's code? Is it common or expected for this type of use to be acknowledged?

If I found out a junior dev had been copying copy-left or proprietary code then I'd have to rip out that code, have a chat with them and figure out what to do from there. Even if the code isn't copy-left it's still someone else's code, sometimes that's ok but sometimes it's definitely not.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#35

Post by whatatita »

spupe wrote: post #21

If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would you say that this person is selling you other people's code? Is it common or expected for this type of use to be acknowledged?

If the solution was made up of ideas from OSS and snippets from Stack Overflow? No; that's fine.

If the solution was copied from an OSS project without proper attribution? Yes. Absolutely. And they'd have words with a senior dev and maybe even legal if the code they copied made its way into production without attribution.

Many copyleft OSS licenses require attribution and distribution of derivative works that we wouldn't allow.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#36

Post by bartq »

JacobiX wrote: post #29

It’s the same problem with those ML models, the other day someone generated a children’s book using GPT3, turned out that there is a real children's book with the same name and a very similar content: The Very Lonely Firefly by Eric Carle.

Other thing I'm worried about: how to retract facts from ML model? I guess it's impossible, you need to retrain from scratch with part X removed from training set. Or... people could invent layered ML models similar to docker - each layer would be marked what data it was trained with. Then at least you'd have some cache of trained model to re-use in next training session. Nasty stuff.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#37

Post by mbreese »

spupe wrote: post #21

If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would you say that this person is selling you other people's code? Is it common or expected for this type of use to be acknowledged?

It depends on the source of that code and the expected license of the code you paid them for. If everything is MIT/BSD (and attributed), no problem. If the code was GPL and I’m making a commercial product, we have an issue.

I’d also expect for any stack overflow code to include a comment with a link to the stack overflow page.

I think one of the key points is to make sure any code taken from another source is cited appropriately. If it isn’t, or the junior dev is passing it off as their own work, then we have problems.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#40

Post by thelastbender12 »

spupe wrote: post #21

If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would you say that this person is selling you other people's code? Is it common or expected for this type of use to be acknowledged?

This is a good thought exercise. I wouldn't call it stealing, though I am not sure how legal liability is assessed, say if they picked up GPL code unknown to the company, and the company is later sued over it.

This isn't derived from principled reasoning, but I think of it as similar to community norms. Not the best example, but you wouldn't mind someone subletting their homes to Airbnb, but if all of your apartment complex does it, it invites regulation. A product like copilot enables copying code (even if inspired, and not verbatim) at a scale that individual developers can't. So respecting software licenses needs to be codified (legally?) while previously it was left unmonitored.

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