Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Copilot sells code other people wrote

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 838 posts

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#201

Post by Sakos »

HumanReadable wrote: post #151

Sorry for the unproductive tone of this comment, but there's something about the attitude of this tweet that really grinds my gears. Any time someone invents something new and incredible, there's always a crowd of negative nancies eager to discredit and explain why the invention is nothing new and a detrement to society. I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly av…

I share my code without a license because I want others to be able to see how I solved things. However, this doesn't mean I'm okay with wholesale copying my code. If it's some random guy, then whatever. If it's a corporation like Microsoft, then yeah, I have a problem with it. Under German law, the code is legally not allowed to be reproduced or used without explicit permission even if it doesn't have a license. I retain ownership of it until and unless I explicitly relinquish my ownership rights.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#202

Post by avereveard »

anonymoushn wrote: post #70
avereveard wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google usage is outright forbidden for work in institutions that care about intellectual property rights, so the brain scrub issue is just arguing at the wrong level. If you're googling solutions around you're already not taking intellectual property seriously enough to care about what happens after you lift ideas around.

Can you name these institutions? I am surprised to hear that some institutions would prevent devs from viewing e.g. documentation of the APIs they are using or academic papers about algorithms for computing the multiplicative inverses of 64-bit integers, if they accessed those things via google

IBM and another I'm currently under nda

I think them being also patent farm has a role in it.

Approved dependencies had api doc linked so no need to Google these.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#203

Post by hansword »

HumanReadable wrote: post #151

Sorry for the unproductive tone of this comment, but there's something about the attitude of this tweet that really grinds my gears. Any time someone invents something new and incredible, there's always a crowd of negative nancies eager to discredit and explain why the invention is nothing new and a detrement to society. I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly av…

If I enter 'Mickey Mouse' into an ML-TTI thing like Craiyon (Dall E mini) do you think I will be able to sell the resulting image on a Tshirt?

No, I won't, because Disney has fancy lawyers, the average open source developer hasn't. What you are saying is: Screw little people, let M$ make their money.

Either copyright is for everyone, or for no one. I prefer the latter, but this is not the world we live in.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#204

Post by csee »

jacquesm wrote: post #192
csee wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how it always works, though. Moderna is standing on the shoulders of centuries of cumulative human knowledge without compensating all the sources of that knowledge. Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers. This is where some modest taxation c…

Yes, but those humans are humans, not machines. With machines the scale changes dramatically. Which, incidentally is something copyright law has addressed explicitly: if you mechanically transform at best you end up with a derived work.

I don't understand the difference between Co-Pilot on the one hand and Moderna (on the shoulders of medical research) or SpaceX (on the shoulders of physics knowledge and cumulative rocket engineering knowledge) on the other. They all heavily use technology, automation and machines. I don't see where the distinction is coming from, and if there is a technical legal distinction, is it an ethically important one?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#207

Post by ThereIsNoWorry »

teakettle42 wrote: post #189
ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #113

1. You most likely agreed to that by using GitHub. 2. Copy&Pasting Code by manual search exists. 3. This is just a smart tool so you don't have to figure out yourself what to copy&paste (in the best case) and save a lot of time. Sometimes I truly wonder how people can genuinely be upset about things like this. What is broken are copyright and patent laws in the 21st century.

> Sometimes I truly wonder how people can genuinely be upset about things like this. Tell me you regularly plagiarize without telling me you regularly plagiarize.

Code plagiarization is not a thing by all practical purposes (it's even almost impossible to go to court with that for very obvious reasons). And that's good. Because with that insane lockdown of "Intellectual Property" nothing would ever get done. So, think what you want.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#208

Post by mojuba »

mistercow wrote: post #164
mojuba wrote: post #38

Can I suggest a hypothesis that if you find Copilot useful it means the problem you are solving is a boring one? I might be wrong of course.

That hypothesis is easily disproven by spending an afternoon on a side project with Copilot. No matter how interesting your problem is, translating it into code is going to involve a lot of grunt work. This isn’t just boilerplate, but also the large portion of your code which is going to be gluing things together. The time you spend working through those menial parts of your code is time when the context of the inter…

I'm very curious to see some examples where Copilot autocompleted something truly useful and saved you time - and that also disproves my hypothesis that you are doing something boring or with the wrong tools/languages/frameworks. Things that a non-ML autocomplete could do don't count.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#209

Post by Hamuko »

coldtea wrote: post #86

> Hector Martin: If you use Copilot, you are basically playing Russian Roulette that the random mashup of existing, copyrighted, hegerogenously licensed code that you get out of it qualifies as an original work, mostly by chance. Or that nobody will ever sue you otherwise. Well, that's already the case with Stack Overflow copypasta enterprise code. If anything, use of Copilot would be an improvement...

If you post content on Stack Overflow, your contribution is distributed using the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#210

Post by cycomanic »

csee wrote: post #187
highwaylights wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems disingenous. People don’t have a problem that AI is being used in some form to provide the service. The complaint is pretty clearly that code is being lifted from repositories without attribution or compensation, and being redistributed into other applications. How impressive the work behind copilot is or is not really isn’t relevant.

This is how it always works, though. Moderna is standing on the shoulders of centuries of cumulative human knowledge without compensating all the sources of that knowledge. Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers. This is where some modest taxation c…

> Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers.

You clearly don't know how copyright around sampling works. Yes rappers are paying shitloads to previous generation musicians for samples they use.

Post reply on HN