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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#651

Post by andrelaszlo »

There are a few reasons why this could be considered ethical. First, open-source code is typically free to use, so the company would not be taking advantage of anyone by using it to train their AI. Second, the company would be providing a service that people are willing to pay for, so they would be generating value for society. Third, the company would be transparent about what they are doing and would not be hiding anything from the public.

...the above was generated by GPT-3 (text-davinci-002). Prompt: Write an argument for why using open-source code to train an AI and then sell the code generating service (without open-sourcing it) is ethical.

The main argument against this is that it takes away from the open-source community that contributed to the development of the code in the first place. By selling a code-generating service without open-sourcing it, the company is profiting from the work of others without contributing back. This is unfair and takes away from the overall open-source ecosystem.

Added two characters to the prompt :P

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#652

Post by vorpalhex »

concordDance wrote: post #522
vorpalhex wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it's hard for Github to determine that in general, so I doubt they would be liable for the error. Please insert that meme, "That's not how that works. That's not how any of this works!" The legal system is permission based, not forgiveness or "I didn't know" based.

If they had a reasonable basis for believing they had a license they're in the clear. "I didn't know" might not be enough but "I had good reasons to think otherwise" is.

> If they had a reasonable basis for believing they had a license they're in the clear.

False.

If they committed copyright infringement, even if they genuinely believed they weren't, they are not in the clear. They still owe damages.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#653

Post by vorpalhex »

Flimm wrote: post #528
vorpalhex wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it's hard for Github to determine that in general, so I doubt they would be liable for the error. Please insert that meme, "That's not how that works. That's not how any of this works!" The legal system is permission based, not forgiveness or "I didn't know" based.

I personally don't want to have to upload proof of identity to GitHub and a signed document swearing that I own the copyright to all the code I upload to GitHub, or proof that I coded it. We need to be careful what we wish for.

Excerpt from the MIT license:

> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#654

Post by bayindirh »

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #621
nightski wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But why is it immoral? All that code is still out there, if I had the time and the resources I could build a language model. Unlike commons in the real world (e.g. land, fresh water, etc) a code commons is purely additive. With the release of Copilot (which I don't intend to pay for or use) nothing has been destroyed, instead we'll get more code for less work where companies do pay for their developers to use it, som…

Because copilot is violating the terms I put for my code. My code is GPL. It cannot be put into projects with incompatible licenses. That’s my code, and I share it with strings attached. You can’t just copy my code and sell to other parties no strings attached.

If that’s fine and dandy, Microsoft should also train Copilot on their source code repositories, so we can use that knowledge, too.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#655

Post by strictnein »

stavros wrote: post #545
pronik wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Napster was liable for copyright infringement.

Napster's raison d'etre was copyright infringement.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#656

Post by jazzyjackson »

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!

Personally I think I'll just claim all the code I write with co-pilot is a parody.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#657

Post by whoisthemachine »

sammax wrote: post #596
jaywalk wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 feels like a tool that can easily be destroyed by a lawsuit, I can't imagine a TOS can force you to give away your copy rights (especially if they allow and encourage you to post your own copyright).

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#658

Post by sirsinsalot »

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.

If an AI "listened" to music and created new samples for musicians to use for a fee, do you not think the original musicians should be compensated?

The value transfer is basically theft.

It isn't about the usefulness of the service, or even that something similar is a good thing ... it is about the execution and what it says about fairness for those that worked to create the data it depends on to produce value.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#659

Post by madrox »

I don't think any professional community is aligned on how to think about ML-generated content yet. We don't know how to apportion rights between the data owner, the model owner, and the end user, and I don't think existing copyright law is ready for it. At least for software, I think the way forward is for the next generation of software licenses to explicitly state whether the code can be used to train ML models and what those models can be used for. Without explicit language, we'll be squabbling over interpretations of fair use.

There's going to be some big cases here. It's going to end up in the Supreme Court sooner or later, and if it were to go there today I think I know what they'd say.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#660

Post by bastardoperator »

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

Not sure where yours is coming from, if we look at [20] it makes no such claim.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061105100939/http://www.inform...

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