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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#631

Post by Guid_NewGuid »

wcoenen wrote: post #624
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…

> I want a truly public domain license I think this sentence contradicts itself. A "license" implies that there is a copyright holder who allows usage of the work under the terms of said license. While "Public domain" implies that there is no copyright holder (e.g. because the copyright expired, was explicitly waived, or is for some other reason not applicable). If you want to put your work in the public domain, you…

You're right that it does contradict itself, but the unfortunate situation is that public domain declarations don't work and would make it harder for people to use your code safely in the current licensing model. The closest options are Unlicense and CC0 afaict and both don't work in many European jurisdictions.

I just want people to be able to take my code and do whatever the hell they want with it (including commercially) and optionally contribute to it. Having a license currently makes that easier but every time the Free Software lot going zooming off into the weeds of GPL v3 versus GPL v2 versus LGPL my eyes roll back into my head and I internally start screaming "get a life!".

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#632

Post by birdyrooster »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #618
birdyrooster wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

lmao

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#633

Post by iamevn »

tiborsaas wrote: post #481
teakettle42 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My code is shared under a license (MIT) that mandates attribution. That’s all I ask — if you use my code, give me credit. Stealing my code to train your bot — which will replicate portions verbatim! — is no different whatsoever than the casual plagiarist that copies and pastes a novel snippet manually. Its absolutely my legal and ethical prerogative to complain about people stealing my code by failing to respect the…

Is is really stealing when your code is used to change a parameter value from 0.3623727247 to 0.3623727321?

It does not matter what the internal representation is. What matters is that Microsoft is selling a tool which reproduces non-public domain works while claiming to grant the user ownership of the output.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#634

Post by TAForObvReasons »

Inityx wrote: post #591
quietbritishjim wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if Github did provide that setting, as a courtesy, someone could clone / fork the code to another repo (if you use any licence that allows it) and not enable that setting.

Sure that's possible, but there's a huuuge difference between Possible and Default Behavior.

In a case like this, GitHub itself could set up a bot account that forks all projects as soon as you make the switch. The company in fact would be incentivized to do so.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#635

Post by brianmcc »

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!

Wait till it suggests something Disney can argue they own rights to...

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#636

Post by humanwhosits »

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!

Citation needed for copilot being fair-use

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#637

Post by zerocrates »

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!

Yes, the copyright clause gives as its purpose "the progress of Science," but that doesn't mean that anything which claims to be "progress" gets a free pass.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#638

Post by f1refly »

dobin wrote: post #142
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…

I neither see it "stealing". The neuronal network was trained with code as input. It's creating code as output. The output has nothing to do with the input once it is trained. Do people dont know how neuronal network work? It's like saying GPT-3 created text is copyright infringement, because some author used the same sentence in a book before.

1. Create a neural network that produces an x264+dts stream of a movie 2. distribute it 3. checkmate copyright lawyers

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#639

Post by sirsinsalot »

spullara wrote: post #623
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.

It absolutely adds to the common good in the form of people using it to write more open source code.

Seeing as copilot is known to output code thats a straight copy from non-permissive code where the author's permission wasn't obtained ... I'd say it is helping you steal from code authors without giving back (as there is no obligation to open source your code).

Given Microsoft's record of persuing IP violations aggresively through the legal system, I'd say the whole thing is ironic.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#640

Post by icoder »

Flimm wrote: post #540
tagyro wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people really copy/paste from StackOverflow? I feel this is more a meme, rather than reality. I do check StackOverflow, but never have I took an answer verbatim. I try to see if it's the same problem and what was the approach in deconstructing it, which I find more useful in the long run.

According to Stack Overflow's blog: "One out of every four users who visits a Stack Overflow question copies something within five minutes of hitting the page." https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/12/30/how-often-do-people-ac...

Well, to be fair, most of that is probably just copying the a particular syntax or built-in function, which (I think?) has nothing to do with copyright.

At least for me, that's most of the copies I do, followed by the ones that basically are 'call these functions in order', then paste it as a comment and use it as cheat sheet, and only very rarely I copy a 'creative' snippet almost verbatim, like a regexp matching email addresses, a to-hex or a crc calculation. And perhaps that's actually tricky.

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