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

251–260 of 838 posts

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#251

Post by Hamuko »

zarzavat wrote: post #218
meheleventyone wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They own their code and it either has a license for use or is implicitly rights retained if not. If Copilot regurgitates their code, from a project that is public but with a non-permissive license they are having their IP rights violated so are totally correct in being unhappy about that. Just because you’ve made something cool doesn’t give you the right to harm others in the process. If MS or OpenAI don’t think this…

The entire point of a fair use right is that you don’t need the copyright owner’s permission to be able to exercise it. Fair use allows you to do things that the copyright owner doesn’t like. Is fair use on a massive scale still fair use? Courts generally think so, otherwise Google would have been out of business a long time ago.

What about us that are not Americans?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#252

Post by lin83 »

ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #207
teakettle42 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't think that's true and, if it was, it would be the death knell for open source.

Code Plagiarism is taken very seriously by every company I have worked with. Multiple companies have been sued for violating the GPL. The SFC is currently fighting Vizio in court for example. While not commonplace, to say it's "almost impossible" is a stretch. Every large company complies with code copyright obligations for a reason. My company publishes changes to GCC and a dozen other GPL projects. Entire products like Protocode and BlackDuck exist to ensure code compliance. Even small code snippets are flagged.

Over the past few years the source code for Windows, SQL server, Bing and Cortana have all been leaked. If someone built a product using that code, how long do you think it would take Microsoft to sue? CoPilot is one rule for mega-corps and another for everyone else.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#253

Post by thfuran »

spupe wrote: post #53
XCabbage wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand where you are coming from. However, I think you are making the assumption that this person simply copy/pasted some code with no understanding of it, or that this code is then very different from your codebase and needs to be refactored. If using Stack Overflow did not add to your overall development time but subtracted from it, because it was used as an appropriate piece of a much bigger puzzle - a far m…

No copyright issues in the sense that no entity is likely to ever pursue the matter, sure. But copying and commercially using someone else's nontrivial bit of code that doesn't have a license that says you can is quite blatantly a copyright violation.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#254

Post by Aeolun »

> what github / microsoft is counting on here is that open source developers do not have enough collective power to do anything to stop this

I think it much more likely that they count on everyone liking it way too much to give a shit about their MIT code not being attributed correctly.

I certainly don’t. MIT just seems like the most convenient license for people that need licenses (corporations?), so that is what I use.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#255

Post by Timwi »

tagyro wrote: post #162
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...

Do people really copy/paste from StackOverflow? I feel this is more a meme, rather than reality. I do check StackOverflow, but never have I took an answer verbatim. I try to see if it's the same problem and what was the approach in deconstructing it, which I find more useful in the long run.

It depends on what you need. In most cases the code on StackOverflow is not exactly what you need, so you need to understand it in order to adapt it. But if you're looking for a specific well-defined algorithm (MD5, say) then you can just copy & paste it.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#256

Post by muzani »

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.

Yeah, it's for boring problems. Drawing a circle or detecting a specific format of number in some string, for example.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#257

Post by redox99 »

eloisius wrote: post #234
redox99 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe when you accepted GitHub ToS you gave them permission for your code to be used for ML training.

I can’t say I remember the terms saying anything to the effect of granting Microsoft a perpetual unlimited license in addition to whatever license I package with the code when I signed up. Not doubting it, but I would have expected that to raise some suspicion long before Copilot was around.

It could be something as innocuous as "you allow your code to be analyzed, processed or otherwise handled by Github software" I suppose, which wouldn't raise suspicion.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#258

Post by teakettle42 »

redox99 wrote: post #248
teakettle42 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technically, programmers search, copy and modify code all the time. When following the license terms, preserving the original copyright, etc, sure. However, honest, ethical people (including programmers) do not plagiarize. Copying and pasting code without attribution is plagiarism. Doing it without following the licensing terms is a copyright violation.

I don't consider copying a 3 liner from stack overflow and not writing an attribution plagiarizing (regardless if technically speaking it is or isn't according to the law).

Plagiarism isn’t a legal concept, it’s an ethical one.

You need to either attribute the source, or rewrite it in entirely your own words — just like when writing a paper.

Confirming to the license is also required; iirc, SO requires attribution under the CC-SA license.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#260

Post by scotty79 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #173
scotty79 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pay a shady character to get you a modern laptop for $100 you can't claim that you were unaware that it was most likely stolen and the fact that you paid for it something doesn't absolve you morally.

does shady guy have his name on the side of a building, and run ads: "buy my shady stuff" and then pay taxes and his earning? That kind of shady guy?

Sometimes. Like Amazon, widely known for their workers and 3rd party vendor exploitation practices.

You can no more claim ignorance of where the github copilot code comes from than where the Amazon's low, low prices come from.

Whether you care is totally on you regardless of whether you pay ir not. You pay for product or service not moral absolution.

Post reply on HN