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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#441

Post by akagusu »

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.

When co-pilot reproduce substantial parts of someone else code without respecting the license terms, it is not fair use,it is just a disguised license abuse.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#442

Post by falcolas »

olalonde wrote: post #418
falcolas wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s the verbatim replication of the comments that makes this a damning piece of evidence against the “it’s not copying code, it’s an AI” argument.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#443

Post by wowokay »

meheleventyone wrote: post #158
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…

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 think you might be missing the point of their frustration.

Lots of companies do not put their code in public repositories, granted I understand the perspective of violating a license, but the point is if you don’t want your code used by someone else (even with the risk of not getting credit, don’t know why that matters) then don’t make your repo public period.

To that point, what’s to stop GitHub from making a policy that states: “All public repositories will be utilized in AI training”?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#444

Post by Hamuko »

rob74 wrote: post #58
antihero wrote: post #31

I mean, if it's autocompleting a fairly simple line, and can do that because it's analysed a lot of lines, I don't really see that as "stealing anything". If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying. But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. I think the first use case is far more…

> But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. If you do that on your own, it's your (legal) responsibility. If Copilot does it for you, it's GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility.

>If Copilot does it for you, it's GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility.

GitHub/Microsoft says that it's still your responsibility.

>You should take the same precautions as you would with any code you write that uses material you did not independently originate. These include rigorous testing, IP scanning, and checking for security vulnerabilities. You should make sure your IDE or editor does not automatically compile or run generated code before you review it.

I'm not really sure how am I supposed to go about validating that I can in fact use this code that the magical black box barfed into my IDE using a bunch of different weights.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#445

Post by kraftman »

bborud wrote: post #198

My personal reasons for not using copilot are a bit simpler. I believe the act of researching which solutions to use for a given problem is not so much about time, or the code you end up with, but about developing a better understanding of what you are doing. You may end up just cutting, pasting and modifying a piece of code you found, but hopefully, you were exposed to a few different ways to accomplish the same thi…

I would be interested to know how many people are actually using copilot to generate entire chunks of code that they don't understand. For me it's just autocomplete on steroids, its not answering any questions I don't know the answer to (other than syntax ive forgotten), it's just making the boilerplate faster to write so I can think about the actual problem I need to solve.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#446

Post by aposm »

542458 wrote: post #427
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #364

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…

IANAL. My understanding is that the general legal precedent in the US is that a) datamining text has no copyright implications (in the same way that reading a book has no copyright implications) and b) it is not a copyright violation to use a small amount of copyrighted material provided the context is sufficiently transformative. This might seem silly or unfair to you, but that is the current legal reality. But even…

I can't imagine a scenario in which any lawyer would consider granting Github the right to "analyze" code anywhere close to granting Github the right to spit out that same code verbatim without your copyright notice (even if laundered by AI).

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#447

Post by ryukafalz »

wowokay wrote: post #443
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 think you might be missing the point of their frustration. Lots of companies do not put their code in public repositories, granted I understand the perspective of violating a license, but the point is if you don’t want your code used by someone else (even with the risk of not getting credit, don’t know why that matters) then don’t make your repo public period. To that point, what’s to stop GitHub from making a poli…

> even with the risk of not getting credit, don’t know why that matters

The point is that it’s not respecting the license, not just that it’s not giving “credit”. If I release code under a GPL license, I damn well don’t want someone using that code under a license that’s not GPL-compatible, no matter how it got there.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#449

Post by olalonde »

falcolas wrote: post #442
olalonde wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s the verbatim replication of the comments that makes this a damning piece of evidence against the “it’s not copying code, it’s an AI” argument.

Yes, it is clearly copying code from Quake, I wasn't denying that.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#450

Post by GuB-42 »

> Copilot just sells code other people wrote

So what? Selling code other people wrote is the foundation of the free software movement. It is the entire business model of countless companies, and it is a good thing. Among them are most major linux distro vendors like Red Hat and Canonical.

The value added by Copilot is that they sell you the lines "code other people wrote" you want out of billions.

I still think it is derivative work, and that they should only process code under permissive licenses, or, if they want to include GPL code, make a GPL-only version, usable only for GPL projects. I thought it is what they did, there is so much code under permissive licenses that is should be enough to train their model, but apparently, they don't care, as long as it is public, it is included. For me, they are shooting themselves in the foot, several companies have already banned Copilot due to the potential issues with copyright.

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