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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#311

Post by coldtea »

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.

>Do people really copy/paste from StackOverflow?

All the time.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#312

Post by ThereIsNoWorry »

teakettle42 wrote: post #287
ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/12/30/how-often-do-people-ac... I feel like you're arguing in bad faith. So, whatever.

Explaining a fundamental ethical concept you should have learned in primary school when writing your first book reports is not arguing in bad faith. SO’s license requires attribution. If you don’t want to be a plagiarist, you either need to include attribution, or you need to rewrite the solution in entirely your own words.

So, rearranging conditionals or loops or variables then, problem solved. You cannot 1:1 copy paste anyway. That never works. You always have to adapt it to your particularity. So it's "reworded" by default. And CoPilot is doing nothing else. It's not just 1:1 memorising code, it's a tiny bit smarter than that. I strongly believe you're not a developer. Point taken. I understand your considerations. You should write code sometimes to solve a complex problem that uses some libraries and see how far you get without consulting the internet or books.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#313

Post by moffkalast »

coldtea wrote: post #308
moffkalast wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything, use of Copilot would be an improvement What do you mean, Copilot regularly pastes stuff directly from SO. One of those automatic doc generators was able to point me to the exact answer where one of them was from.

That it doesn't just "copy and paste" but does more involved "AI" mixing

I don't think renaming variables and adjusting spaces holds up in court.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#315

Post by Xunjin »

teakettle42 wrote: post #166
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…

My code is shared under a license (MIT) that mandates attribution. That’s all I ask — if you use my code, give me credit. Stealing my code to train your bot — which will replicate portions verbatim! — is no different whatsoever than the casual plagiarist that copies and pastes a novel snippet manually. Its absolutely my legal and ethical prerogative to complain about people stealing my code by failing to respect the…

That would be great to Copilot show where it found this snippet and give the person credit about. Even if it's unlicensed.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#316

Post by coldtea »

Hamuko wrote: post #209
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.

Yes, but nobody that copies it cares...

(Where nobody is a stand-in term, to mean "less than 1% of those do")

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#317

Post by Xunjin »

rockbruno wrote: post #279
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…

My problem with this conversation is how we can have a 200 comment thread without anyone providing any kind of proof to these claims. Is there any instance of this bot printing an actual copyrighted algorithm instead of a mundane uncopyrighteable piece of logic?

The famous “burden of proof” fallacy. In the end, I'm eager to anyone who can prove it, sue them and see the results from it.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#318

Post by barthvr »

rambojazz wrote: post #231
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…

Sounds like they're not selling any of your code

Copilot access is $10/month.

Think about how Napster was treated back in the day, or torrent websites. You pay to access some copyrighted content. Is it legal ?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#319

Post by CrazyStat »

jrumbut wrote: post #275
zarzavat wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think releasing a commercial product that copies people's code without complying with the license is anywhere near fair use. Also, the open source community has far less leverage to apply pressure to Google than it does to GitHub. We may be able to do something about this.

> I don't think releasing a commercial product that copies people's code without complying with the license is anywhere near fair use.

The whole point of fair use is that the license doesn't matter. You can have a license that says I'm not allowed to use what you wrote for any purpose ever and I can still use it under fair use.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#320

Post by pwdisswordfish9 »

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…

‘Facebook just sells personal information of other people’ is such a ridiculous understatement of what Facebook does. Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating surveillance capitalism, they sneer at the audacity of Facebook to do something without first asking their permission.
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