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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#491

Post by Zambyte »

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…

> from a project that is public but with a non-permissive license

Permissive or not doesn't matter. Public Domain or not is what matters. Permissive licenses still require you to propagate the copyright notice, which Copilot strips.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#492

Post by CrazyStat »

jrumbut wrote: post #347
CrazyStat wrote: post #319

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. 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.

Yes but among the four factors that are used to evaluate fair use claims are whether it is being used commercially (it is) and how it affects the market for the thing that was copied (it clearly would since one way code is used is being imported by other code, if Copilot didn't insert my code into the new app, they might very well use my open source project that provides the same code).

I wasn't staking a position on whether Copilot is fair use, just pointing out that fair use doesn't care about license.

That said, copilot itself is not a replacement for your open source project that it was trained on. The code it generates may or may not be, but that's probably not Github's problem as far as copyright law is concerned.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#493

Post by spupe »

jhugo wrote: post #479
spupe wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>> 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 have, and there is not.

At least one IP lawyer strongly disagrees, suggesting anything you host on GitHub is fair game [1].

[1] https://fossa.com/blog/analyzing-legal-implications-github-c...

> The person writing an SO answer is intelligent and capable of conceptual understanding, the computer regurgitating code without regard to its license is not.

From a copyright perspective, that is irrelevant. In fact I would think Copilot has more incentives to not infringe than a random SO user, who is very unlikely to be sued. I already argued in another post that in my view, from any perspective, it is also irrelevant whether it's a person or AI doing the same work Copilot does.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#494

Post by cupofpython »

drexlspivey wrote: post #480
cupofpython wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If they come up with it on their own, it shouldnt be an issue. Likewise, swapping the variable names does not absolve you from liability.

Copyright really is not only concerned with what exactly is on the page, but also how you got there, and where the knowledge came from to get you there.

What if I read your codebase, and then years later while programming for myself I inadvertently use solutions you came up with while thinking I came up with it myself?

There really are no hard set rules, and this is something that is handled on a case-by-case basis based on whether or not a convincing argument can be made that you copied a novel idea from someone else and claimed it as your own.

We can argue the semantics of it all we want, but the subject area is an active battleground. Typically it only matters when money starts to get involved, since no one usually presses the issue or gets involved with random personal projects. So when an enterprise level company leverages that lack of caring into a proprietary pay-to-use project that operates by copying and pasting code from copyrighted material, then it seems like a case might be able to be made for it.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#495

Post by thih9 »

Is github copilot using private repositories for the learning process?

If yes, how do they mitigate the risk of exposing private data when something is quoted verbatim?

If not, then why are repos with non permissive licenses ok?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#496

Post by Engineering-MD »

542458 wrote: post #460
aposm wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Here's Kate Downing, an IP lawyer specializing in software license: > According to Downing, the answer depends to a certain extent on where that code is hosted. If it’s on GitHub, there very clearly would not be copyright infringement. > “If you look at the GitHub Terms of Service, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features,”…

To me regardless if it is technically legal, it certainly doesn’t feel right. Furthermore, contracts rely on people understanding what they are agreeing to, and I don’t think many developers would agree to letting the code be used outside the terms of the license they uploaded it under.

I am very surprised there hasn’t been a legal challenge to it.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#497

Post by williamcotton »

ModernMech wrote: post #468
Yenrabbit wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet after all of these decades, after countless advances in libraries and languages, I am still writing boilerplate in C, JS, Python, et al.

I’m not sure that a language or library can ever understand the context of code without following an ML approach.

Languages and libraries will always allow for more than the immediate task at hand. The innovation is that this tool understands which specific language or library features are probably going to be needed next!

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#498

Post by Tryk »

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…

This doesn't address the point of the Tweet, you are simply attacking the form of their argument.

Moreover it is possible to BOTH marvel at the human ingenuity that went into making copilot AND disagree with their methods. Some things can be marvelous and wrong at the same time.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#499

Post by monocasa »

causi wrote: post #478
monocasa wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inf…

That's training for search to lead to a full copy of the original work with citations, not training for regurgitating verbatim chunks of copywritten works to be incorporated at scale into other copyrighted works while obfuscating their original source.

The Second Circuit's tests listed in your citation specifically fail in this case. It's not highly transformative since it's just regurgitating snippets to be used in other competing works rather than applying the body of works to a different domain. And it's specifically to provide a market substitute for the protected aspects of the original works.

Additionally, none of this says 'its all great and it's on the user to figure it out'.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#500

Post by meheleventyone »

dekhn wrote: post #465
meheleventyone wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure: https://twitter.com/ChrisGr93091552/status/15397316329318031...

3 lines of fairly generic code? That's not what copyright is protecting.

Just for the record I was providing some evidence to support this question: "Do we have any evidence that copilot doesn't check/filter by license?"
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