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

331–340 of 838 posts

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#331

Post by tiborsaas »

moffkalast wrote: post #298
tiborsaas wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made use of a ton of open source tools and have not paid any attribution or compensation. By made use of, I mean I used them as their intended purposes and not their source code. I have a FOSS OS, server, CMD tools and libraries powering my ideas, it's part of the deal that I don't have to pay. If I modify them I know what I have to do, but Co-pilot is somewhere in-between the two, it's abstracting knowledge fro…

> it's not repeating non-trivial work 1:1 But that's basically all copilot does? It's just a fancy compression system with a search function.

No, it customizes the snippets to your context, the code is synthesized and not looked up in a db like a web search engine.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#333

Post by zitterbewegung »

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…

Why can’t startups understand what a open source license is ? Apache 2.0 could be ingested by this tool but it is a horrible license for your database as a service. AGPL would be a great license for a database as a service but should not be ingested by OpenAi / GitHub copilot.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#334

Post by hk1337 »

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…

Usually they want some recognition for their contribution and with GitHub copilot they get none of that.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#336

Post by gjadi »

samatman wrote: post #286
core-utility wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have any evidence that copilot doesn't check/filter by license?

This is in fact impossible . All they could do is filter by the LICENSE file in the repo. Unfortunately for them, by law copyright and license are determined by the authors and merely represented by a LICENSE file, which could be lying about both. The court isn't going to accept that excuse when this goes to trial.

And you can have multiple licenses in the same repository, folders with copyright exceptions, etc.

It's hard enough for us human to find our way in this mess, I've little hope for an AI.

But maybe it's just the first step. The final step being able to sell an AI that understands Copyright management. I'm sure there is a big market for that.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#337

Post by ParetoOptimal »

olalonde wrote: post #306
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…

Quoted post unavailable.

You can be both a professional software developer and a caring human that considers ethics and exercises empathy.

It's easy to convince oneself they can only be a professional developer to escape ethical responsibilities which require significant time and energy.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#338

Post by SahAssar »

causi wrote: post #291
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…

Unfortunately the way IP law works, at least in the US, is that you can use essentially whatever you want as training data and it's up to the user to make sure none of the generated code violates licensing agreements.

If that's the case then GH/MS should at least disclose that for the code generated to actually be legal you have to hunt down the actual source (will be hard in a lot of cases) and check the license against your own license.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#340

Post by Griffinsauce »

mihaic wrote: post #95
parhamn wrote: post #50

Pretty soon the world is going to come to realize art/creation is just blending, incrementing and repurposing prior art. No book, painting, codebase, sonnet, design is theft-less. The art is the space reduction, otherwise we’d just bruteforce away.

This type of argument always distracts from the fact that figuring out where we draw the line between theft and reimagining. The Magnificent Seven for instance was a reworking of Seven Samurai, but stands on its own as an original creation. Going into a cinema and filming a picture to later put on a torrent site is not artistic reworking. The hard discussion is about what is acceptable, we all know prior art exists.

> This type of argument always distracts from the fact that figuring out where we draw the line between theft and reimagining.

This seems to be missing a word, could you clarify?

Also: since you mentioned theft: this actually comes down to the discussion whether you can own thought and/or digital artifacts which can be replicated without taking anything away from the "owner".

Given the absolute choice I'd rather pick complete freedom than restriction. I suspect that anyone's opinion on this follows what they value higher: creation or exploitation.

Post reply on HN