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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#471

Post by ryukafalz »

lupire wrote: post #377
moffkalast wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do you think that the recipient is responsible for verifying that no one else has copyright of code they recieved under license? Is every product user liable when a vendor ships some stolen code?

> Is every product user liable when a vendor ships some stolen code?

No, but the difference is the users of a product are typically not making and distributing copies. That’s not the case if you use someone else’s code in your project.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#473

Post by Longlius »

CrazyStat wrote: post #319
jrumbut wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don't think releasing a commercial product that copies people's code without complying with the license is anywhere near fair use. The whole point of fair use is that the license doesn't matter. You can have a license that says I'm not allowed to use what you wrote for any purpose ever and I can still use it under fair use.

IANAL but fair use is primarily about the public interest. What public interest is served by allowing proprietary software vendors to copy GPL code that's reserved for the commons?

I don't really think this argument passes muster.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#474

Post by 0x_rs »

I'm not a lawyer, nor very well versed in the vast world of licenses and their definitions in court contexts, but I've been wondering about something with the growing appeal ML-generated content has for the average person (and the "high" barrier for entry in the market) — are licenses in some form or another going to adapt to this phenomenon? From a brief search, I have not found any new license with a no-dataset-usage clause (assuming fair use does not apply, that's another big question). What are the chances anything of the sort will become an option for any "creative" work that's usually shared freely (such as artwork, code, et cetera) even despite copyright? What about the ownership of the dataset? It seemed to be questionable years ago already that possibly IP-protected content goes through the black box and resembling material gets on the other side, whose ownership is it really? I'm guessing some notable court cases in the future could define this in the following years if the popularity continues growing.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#476

Post by [deleted] »

pronik wrote: post #462
rob74 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#477

Post by ryukafalz »

moffkalast wrote: post #292
lin83 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating it, they sneer at the audacity of openAI to do something without first asking their permission. Something being cool doesn't exempt it from discussion of its ethics and certainly doesn't exempt it from legal consequences. Often what people call "disruption" is often just exploiting resources/people/their work in unsustainable ways until oversight…

Moreover it's a genuine danger for non-hobbyist developers since you could be including stolen code into a market product. Even including something banal like Linux is already problematic since it's GNU licensed, which by extension makes your entire project GNU licensed and you can't keep the exclusive rights to it.

Just to clear this up, since I’ve heard this a lot before:

> since it's GNU licensed, which by extension makes your entire project GNU licensed and you can't keep the exclusive rights to it

This is incorrect. Including GPL code in your product cannot automatically relicense your code. It’s just a copyright violation if your product’s license isn’t GPL-compatible and you don’t abide by the GPL.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#478

Post by causi »

monocasa wrote: post #413
causi wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure.

https://jtip.law.northwestern.edu/2021/05/28/copyright-issue...

However, even if infringement occurs during machine learning, training AI with copyrighted works would likely be excused by the ‘fair use’ doctrine.[ii] For example, in Authors Guild v. Google, Inc.[iii], Google had scanned digital copies of books and established a publicly available search function. The plaintiffs alleged that this constituted infringement of copyrights. The Second Circuit held that Google’s works were non-infringing fair uses because the purpose of the copying was highly transformative, the public display of text was limited, and the revelations did not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#479

Post by jhugo »

spupe wrote: post #461
jhugo wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ove…

> 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.

I have, and there is not. Neither could there be — in many cases the person uploading code to GitHub is not the copyright holder — they are just doing something permitted under the license — and for a large open source project there could be thousands of copyright holders. A random person mirroring some source code to GitHub is in no position to negotiate different license terms on behalf of the copyright holder(s).

> 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.

I don't understand why you think a person writing an answer on SO and a computer program outputting some permutation of its inputs into your editor are the same thing. The person writing an SO answer is intelligent and capable of conceptual understanding, the computer regurgitating code without regard to its license is not.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#480

Post by drexlspivey »

cupofpython wrote: post #440
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 you write it yourself, it's fine. if you directly copy it from somewhere you arent allowed to copy from, then it is wrong. There are no rules about the form of the code itself that governs whether or not someone owns it. Common sense applies. Sure you could "steal" very small, common, code snippets and get away with it; but that doesnt make it less wrong. When a commercial entity explicitly does it, however, some…

Point is that you can ask 100 programmers to write an average function and probably most of them will come up with this answer verbatim. How can copyright law handle this? There is also the opposite problem, I can copy a complicated snippet and change the variable names. Am I absolved from liabilities now?
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