371–380 of 838 posts
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…
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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.
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…
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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.
It's just automating the copying and pasting (and slight reworking) of boilerplate code that would normally take me much longer to do, especially when I am working with a language I'm less familiar with but is necessary for my stack. I've literally never seen it suggest code that is more or less almost exactly what I would have come up with given a lot more time. In essence, it eliminates tedium- exactly the point of all of programming: Work elimination.
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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…
I'm sure the MS lawyers thought long and hard about this and are patiently awaiting any actual lawsuits with confidence in their position. It would be very hard to prove ownership of any snippets. To the point where you can argue that it is just fair use and to the point where companies would think long and hard before committing any resources to fighting MS on this in court at great expense. I don't think that will…
This is the end of Microsoft's actual calculation.
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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.
Of course you can and you should. But going from the Twitter bio and personal website, it doesn't appear to be the case here. They're an activist who lives from soliciting donations and selling 30$ videos on how to be anti-racist (like, literally).
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If it's minus a license then it should be assumed that rights are retained (in the same way you can't just take ownership of an image you find on the internet) so if it were filtering it shouldn't take code from repo's without explicit and favorable licenses. If it is taking code only from repo's with permissive licenses (e.g. MIT) then why aren't they following the attribution requirements? I don't think you can hav…
If I steal some code and put it on Github under MIT that doesn't really make it MIT, I'm just lying that it is. If Copilot then uses that it's still in violation of the law I'd assume (ignorance doesn't exonerate you etc.). So they'd have to verify on a case by case basis, which they obviously haven't given the volume of data they had to feed the thing. It's kinda shocking that they think they can sell this, even pro…
Is every product user liable when a vendor ships some stolen code?
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I sometimes read people's open source code on github and use the ideas from that to develop my own ideas. In fact sometimes I copy and paste short passages and then rework them. I also employ a team of people who may do the same. Is that fair use, yes of course it is. Is co-pilot automating that fair use, I would say so.
Microsoft's internal policies don't allow their employees to do this without legal approval.
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> Well if it isn't a legal but an ethical concept, then that's just your opinion Plagiarism being unethical is just my opinion? > Are you going to attribute that every time you use Math.pow? Does a simple 2-ary function call of a well-defined API qualify as “taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.”? If not, then it’s not plagiarism.
> Plagiarism being unethical is just my opinion? What constitutes as plagiarism and what doesn't, outside of what the law says, yes. > Does a simple 2-ary function call of a well-defined API qualify as “taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.”? So you agree that taking some code verbatim from SO is not plagiarism then? What about this, would copy pasting this verbatim be plagiarism? htt…
It’s pretty clear what it is.
The definition of plagiarism hasn’t changed since you were in grade school and were taught not to copy sentences into your papers.
If you still don’t understand what plagiarism is now, yours is a willful ignorance that doesn’t excuse unethical behavior.
> What about this, would copy pasting this verbatim be plagiarism
> https://stackoverflow.com/a/959004
Yes, that’d be plagiarism. It’s also bad code.
You should use the example to understand the underlying problem, at which point you will be well-equipped to write your own one-liner.
If you can’t write it using your own understanding of the problem, you’re not an adequate programmer and need to improve your skill-set … which won’t happen if you just keep plagiarizing code you don’t understand.
It is now proven that copilot returns code from codebases with non-permissive licenses [1]. I'm curious - what are the legal implications of this going forward? I've so many questions. 1. Will Microsoft ever face lawsuits for these license violations? 2. If so, who/how? Class-action? 3. Will copilot be forced to open-source in the future? Under which license? Some open source licenses are incompatible with others, bu…