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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#411

Post by giaour »

lupire wrote: post #384
gumby wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get paid to write code having learned from writing code for others and from reading code others wrote. In this regard I dont see why github copilot is any different.

People don't memorize chunks of code and copy it.

Sometimes people do, and in any case copyright isn't limited to just verbatim copies. You can't, for example, reuse characters or plots from other works of fiction in your own novel, even if you rewrite it in your own words: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fic...

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#412

Post by williamcotton »

bayindirh wrote: post #391
drexlspivey wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems rather silly to me that such small innovations would be worthy of legal protections under either a copyright or copyleft license.

Isn’t there already precedent in other forms of IP, such as chord progressions in music, sentence length in literature, etc?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#413

Post by monocasa »

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.

Can you point to case law backing that up?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#414

Post by ewalk153 »

If the portion of code that Copilot lifts is the "heart" of the original work, that would be much less likely to be considered fair use[1], regardless of the length.

> For example, it would probably not be a fair use to copy the opening guitar riff and the words “I can’t get no satisfaction” from the song “Satisfaction.”

I wonder how this could be integrated into the system?

[1] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/...

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#415

Post by ipaddr »

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?

Someone trademarked the word THE yesterday and a few common musical notes and your video gets banned

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#416

Post by RHSeeger »

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.

It seems fairly similar, at least to me, to a search engine copying snippets of other people's web sites and displaying them on a page. Admittedly, there's still some discussion as to whether or not _that_ is fair use, but I think enough of the population think it is (with many news organizations disagreeing).

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#417

Post by seba_dos1 »

Xunjin wrote: post #315
teakettle42 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's unlicensed, then you can't use it at all, so giving attribution wouldn't change much in that case.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#418

Post by olalonde »

falcolas wrote: post #403
olalonde wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of Github Copilot doing that? Like a snippet of code generated by Copilot and a link to the original source code.

An example posted here on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287

Thanks. Personally, I feel like such small and widely used mathematical algorithms should not be copyrightable (or using them should fall under fair use). It even has its own Wikipedia page[0], where the source code is also reproduced without copyright notice.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#420

Post by jrochkind1 »

meheleventyone wrote: post #182
ajuc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hard discussion is about what is acceptable What if we just say "both"? Libraries were a thing for millenia and writers still wrote books. There are costs to IP laws and the benefits aren't obvious.

Libraries pay fees to lend books, at least in our modern capitalist society.

Not in the USA, where the "first-sale doctrine" means once you buy a book, you can do whatever you want with that copy of the book (lend, rent, sell, destroy) without needing a license. Libraries in the USA definitely don't pay a fee beyond the purchase price of the book (or they can legally lend donated books etc). Copyright holders don't make any additional money from library lending.

I am not familiar with how it works in other countries, but I have heard something about there being such a fee.

(It's not quite true to say libraries have existed for "millenia" though, with regard to this issue. Mass produced printing hasn't in fact existed for millenia, libraries 1000 years ago had hand-copied manuscripts, probably mostly scrolls. The effect on "the market"? For whatever reason authors were writing then it was not to make money by selling reproductions of their writings, that wasn't a thing. Which means, yeah, btw, people still wrote things and made up stories even when they couldn't make money by charging people for copies to read...)

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