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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#391

Post by bayindirh »

drexlspivey wrote: post #382
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…

Owning code snippets sounds ridiculous to me, like can I own this snippet? def average(*numbers): return sum(numbers)/len(numbers) if not is it because it is too small? what’s the minimum line number that ownership kicks into? what if I change the function name and the variable names?

If that's under a copyleft license, I can't just copy & paste it under my non-copyleft licensed code and call it mine.

That's as simple as that.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#392

Post by izacus »

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.

Unless Copilot is "commenting" or "parodying" the code you've wrote, it's not fair use. Copying and using the code in another project sure as heck IS NOT fair use.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#393

Post by solar-ice »

paulcole wrote: post #283
Sakos wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

> 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 This is nuts. How can anbody be expected to both know that you’re German and German law when you post on an international website? Or is this a German law that exists to prevent other Germans from doing things but that the rest of the world scoffs at? https://choosealicense.com/

You're expected, wherever you are, to look into where any code you use comes from and what legal rights you have to use it. (The author not offering you a license means you can't use the code, nearly anywhere in the world - pretty basic Berne Convention stuff.)

This is the legal expectation in general, not just for software - you can't just come across a design for a neat widget somewhere and start using it in your product, there's probably both copyright and patent on it. Software isn't special. Not everything in Github can be copied into your code verbatim.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#394

Post by the_gipsy »

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…

> share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge

I put a fucking license on it so that it doesn't get abused by some fucking corporation. Jesus Christ, it's not hard to understand.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#395

Post by amelius »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #358
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…

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…

It will stop being fair use when someone makes an AI that creates cartoon characters based on the figures in Disney movies.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#396

Post by c01n »

MS and Github are thieves, all their code is closed source, yet they sell copyrighted code they don't own. If they told us years ago that our code will be automatically stolen by an "AI", most coders would not have created an account. The innovation here is that they have access to most of the worlds open source code and automated the stealing.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#397

Post by falcolas »

paulcole wrote: post #283
Sakos wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

> 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 This is nuts. How can anbody be expected to both know that you’re German and German law when you post on an international website? Or is this a German law that exists to prevent other Germans from doing things but that the rest of the world scoffs at? https://choosealicense.com/

That’s how us law works too. Works are automatically under copyright, even if you don’t say so. It needs a license to lessen the copyright restrictions.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#398

Post by bayindirh »

core-utility wrote: post #213
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…

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

There was a tweet by Nora Tindall (which is deleted) having a screenshot of a mail direct from GitHub stating that GPL code is included in the training of the Copilot and will indeed use it.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#399

Post by ilikehurdles »

mistercow wrote: post #273
mojuba wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can give you an example of an entire (well, I still consider it alpha) library I wrote several months ago, using Copilot: https://github.com/osuushi/triangulate This is an implementation of a 1991 paper on polygon triangulation into Go. So the deepest thinking about how to solve the problem was obviously already done for me, but there were a number of edge cases that I had to invent my own solutions to, and the tra…

When I find myself writing comments of this style I see, I usually ask myself if this thing would be better extracted into a function. These comments are primarily stating the obvious.

If I find myself writing a 200 line function with nested or repetitive loops I expect to hear from colleagues about how I should refactor it.

I feel that the solution to writing boring, repetitive boilerplate shouldn’t be to automate writing more of it, but to reduce or remove it entirely. Seeing things like this just reinforces my preconception that Copilot acts in low quality code environments to produce fittingly low quality code, or with languages like Java where the language is married to boilerplate.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#400

Post by olalonde »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #390
olalonde wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> They're an activist who lives from soliciting donations Assuming this is the case, are you concluding they don't have time to be a real software developer? Maybe they were a professional developer, but now are an activist 50% of the time. > selling 30$ videos on how to be anti-racist Is the indictment here that they are a capitalist? My basic point is you seem to really want to dismiss their views you don't like by…

> Is the indictment here that they are a capitalist?

No and they are actually anti-capitalist according to their Twitter bio.

> My basic point is you seem to really want to dismiss their views you don't like by arguing they aren't credible rather than attacking their ideas.

The comment I was replying to already did a good job at that, I was just adding some context.

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