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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#641

Post by nirvdrum »

zarzavat wrote: post #594
nirvdrum wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people would claim what you're doing is a derivative work. I'm not sure the "of course it is" is very clear-cut (at least in the US). I've worked at big companies that have lawyers that care very much about this topic and what you're describing is prohibited. But, maybe it's different if you're not distributing your source.

> I've worked at big companies that have lawyers that care very much about this topic and what you're describing is prohibited. They are doing this to make sure that any lawsuit can be easily dismissed. It has nothing to do with the legality of the action (which sounds like fair use as the parent described it), and everything to do with the expense of a potential lawsuit compared to the cost effectiveness of simply t…

If the usage was very clearly fair use, there'd be no need to be defensive about it; the case could be dismissed trivially. In reality, the question would need to be sorted out in court.

Questions of derivative works and fair use come up fairly frequently even in the open source world. This isn't solely a question of corporate lawyer posturing. I don't know any copyleft authors that would be okay with someone copying & pasting their code, making trivial changes, and saying it isn't a derivative work. Of course, their understanding of the law may be flawed. You'll get to find out in court.

You're right. A lot of this boils down to how much you want to spend in court proving your usage is just under fair use. We've moved beyond the question of ethics if you're intentionally violating a project's source license and relying on fair use to do whatever you want with the code. If you want to poke someone with a stick, you can't be surprised when they hit back. I contend what the OP described isn't clearly fair use (note I'm not saying that it clearly isn't fair use either). It ultimately doesn't impact me because I'm just not going to copy & paste code from projects without attribution and following the license, but I'd be worried about anyone reading that comment as objectively true.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#642

Post by sirsinsalot »

tuckerman wrote: post #622
Varqu wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People (github in this case) do something to make your life easier so that you can save time for the price of 1 latte per month and you complain? Software Developers seem to be the most whining profession in the world and I despise this attitude (while being a developer myself)

People aren't whining because the price is too high, they are upset because some (myself included) believe Microsoft is exploiting developers by copying their work against their wishes and then turning around and selling other developers a product which may or may not be generating code which violates copyright/patent licenses. A developer who inadvertently uses a copilot suggestion which gets them into hot water is…

This. It is a matter of (a) consent and (b) compensating people that, without their data, the model would be useless.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#643

Post by sirsinsalot »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #616
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.

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.

To allow access to a service that grants you the accumulated knowledge's output in small bits.

I'm all for a world where these tools help developers, but i'm not here for a system that isn't open. I want to own my tools.

Copilot is a bit like musicians paying a monthly fee for access to a loop library. Except all the loops are rip-offs of other peoples hard work and there's no effort to compensate them.

If I made an AI that resampled music into derivative tracks ... you can be damn sure i'd be sued until my ears bled.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#644

Post by Guid_NewGuid »

tuckerman wrote: post #629
Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I can't really because the legal systems for it don't exist. I can't relinquish anything https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1471... (CC0 looks closer but still doesn't do what I'm after). And I can't because there are a bunch of, for want of a better word, dweebs who care about this stuff. I don't give a single solitary frick about the finer points of MIT vs GPL vs BSD 3 clause vs CC-BY-NC or…

I'm curious if this view is software specific or relates to any work released online? For example, do you feel similarly about a novelist or graphic artist? I reckon at least a few software engineers look at what they produce not entirely differently from how an artist or writer looks at theirs.

It's a good, and thought-provoking, question.

First to be flippant the idea of a software developer with that view sounds so unbearably insufferable and full of themselves I hope never to meet one. All code is terrible, be less attached.

Stream of consciousness: Should artists or writers be paid for what they produce? Yes. So why not software developers? I'm paid for what I produce. But then I don't release the stuff I'm paid for for free on the internet. But I'm against DRM, I also think Winnie the Pooh shouldn't have IP protection (now expired). What makes art or literature a different commons from software? I also think all scientific journals should be available for free. Do artists and writers have an alternative route to make money from what they publish, what is the artistic or writer equivalent of open source? I think this is the crux of it, if we're going to do open source let's actually do it and stop being precious about it but this only applies to freely-entered open source. So does that mean I support some form of copyright after all? Then again some old out-of-print books will sell for Amazon for like $4000 so we should be able to copy those for free.

Ultimately it's a question of what a vision for society without copyright would look like. I think software is uniquely placed to start exploring that idea. How would we make a living of software if anyone could reverse engineer (even our proprietary) code freely and safely?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#645

Post by JoshTriplett »

andybak wrote: post #582
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.

And I really don't mind. I want every line of code I've ever written to be used as much as possible. I find "intellectual property" to be dubious to the core. I'm not confident enough in my feelings to be a zealot, but if I had to pick sides then I know which side I would pick.

You're welcome to use a "do whatever you want" license on your code, and people should respect that. (Though even those licenses tend to require attribution, and copilot doesn't do even that.)

Other people use licenses that try to create a commons where if you want to use it you need to share your own code, as a counterpoint to the non-commons in which you can't use code at all. And if people use those licenses, they should be respected as well.

By all means, eliminate copyright, and let all code be copied freely. And until that happens, as long as proprietary code exists and doesn't let anyone copy it, respect copyleft licenses as well.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#646

Post by belter »

thamer wrote: post #583
jonny_eh wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you want a new license that just prohibits use by one company for one purpose.

There are other AI-based code completion systems than Copilot, at least Tabnine[1] and Kite[2] come to mind, I'm sure there are more. [1] https://www.tabnine.com/ [2] https://www.kite.com/

As of today there is a new one...

"Now in Preview – Amazon CodeWhisperer"

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-in-preview-amazon-codew...

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#647

Post by igneo676 »

jaywalk wrote: post #550
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…

If your code is using a license that allows it, how could you possibly opt-out aside from using a different license?

I'm not sure using a different license actually opts you out. By merely hosting your code on GitHub you grant them the right to analyze your code on their servers[1]

They may be morally in the wrong, but I'm unsure they are legally in the wrong here. To boot, denying them the right to create this tool in your license is technically a violation of OSS principles and problematic

[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#648

Post by JoshTriplett »

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…

Proprietary software is more than willing to use those legal frameworks. Unilaterally disarming while your opponent does not is a losing strategy.

As long as copyright exists, copyleft should be respected.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#649

Post by ajb »

zerocrates wrote: post #637
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.

Indeed, the US supreme court pointedly refused to accept that the purpose clause limits the power of copyright in "Eldred Vs Reno" (at least, that is my understanding as a non lawyer)

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#650

Post by worker_person »

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

If you own a controlling percentage. Then yes it is. That is how you buy/control a publicly traded company.

You can buy 100% of shares and take it private, but that's overkill for what Microsoft wanted.

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