Copilot sells code other people wrote • Hacker News Board

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#611

Post by jppope » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 6:24 PM UTC

sirsinsalot wrote: post #578

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #569

I find this whole topic very annoying, this is like the 3rd variation to reach the front page today. But it has made me realize why I instinctively dislike Free Software as a movement. Copyright and licensing are bad, actually. Stop getting worked up about the idea of using courts to punish theft. Stop getting into a frenzy of arousal about the police kicking down doors to drag Billy Gates to jail because 80 characte…

"A commons of knowledge is a public good." Yes but this copilot model takes that, adds value and doesn't itself join the public common good. Instead it takes it, and makes you pay to have it back in another form. If copilot were open source and the model released for the public good, being built of public data (in your scenario) we would have a very different conversation.

> "Yes but this copilot model takes that, adds value and doesn't itself join the public common good. Instead it takes it, and makes you pay to have it back in another form."

$10/ month ... how much to you think this thing cost to build, and to maintain?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#612

Post by borishn » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

Buttons840 wrote: post #605

borishn wrote: post #602

Copilot is fair use, get over it! Copilot is not writing your code any more that Google search is writing your code. You are writing your code, and Copilot is just making suggestions. US constitution secures limited copyright to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". Copilot is just that, get over it!

A good and well argued opinion made hostile by saying "get over it" twice! Saying "get over it" discourages further discussion. Your comment would be better without it.

You are right, but it is so frustrating how people whine about this.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#613

Post by visarga » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 6:29 PM UTC

sirsinsalot wrote: post #578

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #569

I find this whole topic very annoying, this is like the 3rd variation to reach the front page today. But it has made me realize why I instinctively dislike Free Software as a movement. Copyright and licensing are bad, actually. Stop getting worked up about the idea of using courts to punish theft. Stop getting into a frenzy of arousal about the police kicking down doors to drag Billy Gates to jail because 80 characte…

"A commons of knowledge is a public good." Yes but this copilot model takes that, adds value and doesn't itself join the public common good. Instead it takes it, and makes you pay to have it back in another form. If copilot were open source and the model released for the public good, being built of public data (in your scenario) we would have a very different conversation.

It costs money to run a huge language model with low latency, in the loop with you - charging 10$/month is reasonable. You need multiple GPUs to load even a single copy. Copilot is adding something extra to the original code - it selects the recommendation from the whole corpus, while keeping the surrounding context into consideration and adapting to your variable names.

And in reality 99.9% of the generated code has no long ngrams in common with the training set, it's already original. All they need to do is to enforce never to generate data identical to the training set, something that can be implemented with a bloom filter, then the generated code is impossible to attribute and should have no legal problems.

In the end what do models like Copilot do? They act like culture - absorbing and replicating memes. They free the knowledge and make it reusable. They can act like a general purpose NLP tool for information extraction, classification and text generation. You can implement your ideas faster with it, don't need to label much data.

It works even with just a prompt. Try OpenAi Codex to extract a receipt to see what I am talking about - it gives you the output in JSON. It's a new tool and a new interface to the computer. There are going to be plenty of open source implementations as well, some are already under training.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#614

Post by jazzyjackson » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 6:31 PM UTC

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #601

sammax wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t most licenses require at least attribution? I don’t believe GitHub is restricting themselves to only licenses that don’t. In fact the only software licenses I can think of that don’t require attribution are 0BSD, WTFPL, CC0, MIT-0 and Unlicense, and they all aren’t super popular. Also in some countries creators have inalienable moral rights which can be enforced regardless of the license. For example in Germany…

This is an important and overlooked point. Even common permissive licenses (ISC / MIT / Apache-2.0) require attribution

Just as a mind experiment: couldn't CoPilot just publish a list of every github user and attribute the work to all of them?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#615

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 6:31 PM UTC

PaulKeeble wrote: post #561

nickjj wrote: post #535

This might be overreacting but is there a way to opt-out of Copilot using your code in open source repos? It feels morally wrong to me that I can spend thousands of hours working on projects on my own free will but then a company can sell the code I wrote to others in the form of snippet completion as a service. In fact they end up selling your code back to yourself if you plan to use the service. If the answer is no…

It should be automatic based on license. GPL code definitely shouldn't be included but MIT could be. They already have this information in most repositories and if its missing they have no right to use it at all. We don't need extra options the licenses already restrict the use and derivative work.

[deleted]

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#616

Post by jazzyjackson » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 6:33 PM UTC

sirsinsalot wrote: post #578

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #569

I find this whole topic very annoying, this is like the 3rd variation to reach the front page today. But it has made me realize why I instinctively dislike Free Software as a movement. Copyright and licensing are bad, actually. Stop getting worked up about the idea of using courts to punish theft. Stop getting into a frenzy of arousal about the police kicking down doors to drag Billy Gates to jail because 80 characte…

"A commons of knowledge is a public good." Yes but this copilot model takes that, adds value and doesn't itself join the public common good. Instead it takes it, and makes you pay to have it back in another form. If copilot were open source and the model released for the public good, being built of public data (in your scenario) we would have a very different conversation.

If it was just published as a public good it would probably be as illegal as sci-hub

I consider the $10/m as a donation to the microsoft legal defense fund to allow free access to accumulated knowledge.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#617

Post by nightski » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

jppope wrote: post #611

sirsinsalot wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A commons of knowledge is a public good." Yes but this copilot model takes that, adds value and doesn't itself join the public common good. Instead it takes it, and makes you pay to have it back in another form. If copilot were open source and the model released for the public good, being built of public data (in your scenario) we would have a very different conversation.

> "Yes but this copilot model takes that, adds value and doesn't itself join the public common good. Instead it takes it, and makes you pay to have it back in another form." $10/ month ... how much to you think this thing cost to build, and to maintain?

That's the whole point. Without the data, it would be worthless. Microsoft is not paying the full cost because it is ripping the data without asking consent. I'm not saying what they are doing is illegal per se, but it's definitely immoral.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#618

Post by colejohnson66 » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

birdyrooster wrote: post #592

bastardoperator wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making stuff up. MSFT never bought SCO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Not sure where your confidence came from but a Google of “sco Microsoft” reveals: By the mid-1980s Microsoft had gotten out of the Unix business, except for its ownership stake in SCO.[20] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft

Owning stock, on its own, is not the same as buying a company

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#619

Post by nescioquid » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 6:37 PM UTC

borishn wrote: post #602

Copilot is fair use, get over it! Copilot is not writing your code any more that Google search is writing your code. You are writing your code, and Copilot is just making suggestions. US constitution secures limited copyright to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". Copilot is just that, get over it!

Not an expert, but fair use generally covers education, criticism, parody, and satire. There is a test for meeting fair use and it includes things like amount copied and commercial or non-profit interest.

The amount copied from any particular source might be small, but an aggregate strip-mining of many copyrighted sources is an interesting twist. Another might be, as you suggest, it might be a machine that itself does not violate copyright, but has the effect of causing users (who accept the suggestions) to violate copyright.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#620

Post by handoflixue » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #584

sirsinsalot wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A commons of knowledge is a public good." Yes but this copilot model takes that, adds value and doesn't itself join the public common good. Instead it takes it, and makes you pay to have it back in another form. If copilot were open source and the model released for the public good, being built of public data (in your scenario) we would have a very different conversation.

Yes they haven't paid it forward, or back, but why fight on the occupier's territory. By calling for legal frameworks to enforce this we accept the language and terms of the dominant party. By using courts and the law and creating new law for copyright we actually move further from the goal of abolishing copyright and IP entirely. Every time we use courts to enforce IP we're strengthening the Walt Disneys and Nintend…

> Every time we use courts to enforce IP we're strengthening the Walt Disneys and Nintendos of the world.

Can you actually point to substantial examples where Disney or Nintendo benefited significantly from a precedent set by an open source court case? Open source has been around for decades, so it should be trivial to find numerous clear-cut examples at this point... if your theory is actually correct.