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

461–470 of 838 posts

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#461

Post by spupe »

jhugo wrote: post #408
spupe wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, how does that differ from Stack Overflow? Do you go and check whether a given reply belongs to a licensed project? Also, please consider that there is a toggle that allows you to block Copilot from using public code.

> Do you go and check whether a given reply belongs to a licensed project? All SO questions, answers and comments are CC BY-SA. The terms of the site say that anyone submitting this content agrees that it's licensed that way, and when you visit the site you agree that you are provided with the content under that license. It's not necessary for you to check whether the submitter had the right to offer it under that li…

> All SO questions, answers and comments are CC BY-SA. The terms of the site say that anyone submitting this content agrees that it's licensed that way, and when you visit the site you agree that you are provided with the content under that license.

Have you ever read GitHub's conditions to know whether they also have the right to use your code that way, no matter how you decide to license it? I feel that you are overly focused on the legal part here, which I'm sure was handled by Microsoft's lawyers. I'm more interested in the question of principle.

No matter what the terms of use at SO say, anyone can give you an answer that is a copy of some code they don't own. You may consider that immoral, but I don't, not at the scope SO is used for. In addition, the vast majority of cases at SO and Copilot are not about complex functions being stolen, it's about some dumb code you would have found in 2 minutes of googling. What I'm trying to argue here is that if we are all cool with SO and think it's useful, there is no fundamental difference here. We never cared too much about licenses for boilerplate code, and I think we shouldn't start now.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#462

Post by pronik »

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.

You are responsible for your tool use. That's the same discussion as with whether uTorrent is responsible for your torrenting copyrighted stuff or with Tesla's auto-pilot. You buy the tool, you are responsible for what you create with the tool.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#463

Post by [deleted] »

gumby wrote: post #373
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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#464

Post by SahAssar »

ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #113

1. You most likely agreed to that by using GitHub. 2. Copy&Pasting Code by manual search exists. 3. This is just a smart tool so you don't have to figure out yourself what to copy&paste (in the best case) and save a lot of time. Sometimes I truly wonder how people can genuinely be upset about things like this. What is broken are copyright and patent laws in the 21st century.

> 1. You most likely agreed to that by using GitHub.

Are you saying that I would need all the original authors consent to upload a repo to github even if I include all the original attribution and licenses? Because what you are implying is that when uploading I'm granting github a license far outside the bounds of the license included, which only all the contributors can do. For example, would the linux project need to contact each and every contributor ever to upload a mirror to github, since their contributions were under GPL but you are implying that the license given to github is much, much broader?

This would make any project not originally started on github and with a few contributors basically impossible to host there.

> 2. Copy&Pasting Code by manual search exists.

The question is who is doing the infringement here. Github copilot is obfuscating the copying and telling it's users that the code is theirs to use, own, etc. as they please but is also taking large chunks of code it does not have the right to redistribute, even less grant licenses to.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#466

Post by dekhn »

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.

Copyleft isn't really a good example. Let's talk about copyright. That fragment of code is not copyrightable on its own. Too small, too trivial.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#467

Post by bayindirh »

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.

An automated system will devour all my code, which is under a case-tested copyleft license, and regenerate its parts in any place, without respecting the license terms, and call it "fair use".

I have two questions:

1. Why have licenses, then?

2. What if I just use leaked sources of closed source software and call it fair use?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#468

Post by ModernMech »

Yenrabbit wrote: post #310
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…

At least the way I use it, it's not taking much away from my problem solving. It's just that instead of having to type `particlesGeometry.setAttribute('position', new THREE.BufferAttribute(positions, 3))` I just write `//Add as an attribute` and then hit TAB, since Copilot is smart enough to see that I've just prepared some geometry and populated an array of positions (both operations also sped up by not having to ty…

That sounds like a problem that could be better solved through language and library design rather than an AI that sucks up all the code in the world.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#469

Post by bayindirh »

dekhn wrote: post #466
bayindirh wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Copyleft isn't really a good example. Let's talk about copyright. That fragment of code is not copyrightable on its own. Too small, too trivial.

Let's say I have 25 line function which does something novel and can be published as research (which I did, BTW, no joke), and I opened its reference implementation with AGPLv3+.

Is it again too trivial?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#470

Post by redox99 »

megous wrote: post #456
redox99 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really no different than somebody uploading proprietary code they don't own (stolen, leaked, whatever reason etc) on Github. Github has to assume that you are allowed to do so. What are they going to do otherwise, somehow manually verify that each repository is legit? Now you might say, what about GPL code you don't own. You are allowed to redistribute it (upload to github). But because you are not the owner y…

Ok, takedown requests exists. Say Qualcomm finally wises up and asks github to takedown a copy of the millions lines of their super proprietary 4G modem firmware implementation from github. Will github retrain the model after each such takedown? :D If not, then it's kinda stupid to argue the point about the lack of knowledge, since lack or not lack of knowledge clearly doesn't matter. Github will happily continue usi…

I guess they would add some kind of filter to copilot output that removes results that clearly come from code that was DMCAd.

It's kind of like some employee that worked at Qualcomm and has seen the code. Do you retrain him (aka hit his head until he forgets) after leaving the company?

The comparison might seem silly but as AI advances I expect more and more arguments (especially in court) to come from analogies of humans and AIs.

Post reply on HN