Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Copilot sells code other people wrote

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 838 posts

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#811

Post by notacoward »

futureshock wrote: post #674
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…

In this thread: many engineers nervously sweating. The moats are drying up and the wizards are about to be thrown out of the castle. This tech is the first product in a long line of products that will massively lower the barrier to entry. It has been a good run, but it was never going to last forever. We are not part of the capitalist class and were never going to be.

> the wizards are about to be thrown out of the castle

You have completely misunderstood who the moat-building wizards are. That's proprietary software. Heard of it? I ask because a lot of young people nowadays don't seem to understand how dominant it used to be and the threat that it represented. (Plus a few older folks who never knew, forgot, or deny reality for other reasons.) We've been trying to throw the wizards out for decades, by making code available to everyone and making sure it stays that way via licensing. Code without a license is subject to re-enclosure as important enhancements - even necessary ones, such as security - are made behind locked doors. The open version becomes out of date, the proprietary one wins, we're back to wizards and moats. What Microsoft is doing is the same thing for code that was supposed to have legal protection so it could remain open and avoid that fate. It's taking magic back from the people and making it exclusive to the "capitalist class" (eye roll) again.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#812

Post by invig »

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…

They’re not selling you code. They’re selling you an engine that helps you find the right free code at the right time.

If you read free code yourself it’s fine, but if a machine does it for you it’s not? We overvalue humans.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#813

Post by bayindirh »

invig wrote: post #812
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…

They’re not selling you code. They’re selling you an engine that helps you find the right free code at the right time. If you read free code yourself it’s fine, but if a machine does it for you it’s not? We overvalue humans.

> If you read free code yourself it’s fine, but if a machine does it for you it’s not? We overvalue humans.

No, it's not fine. Apparently, you missed SCO & Oracle vs. Google cases. Both of these cases argued that somebody looked to the code, and copied it. In SCO case it was not true, but the argument stretched the timeline rather successfully. In Oracle vs. Google, copying function signatures opened a big can of worms.

So, just by copying the function signature without filling it the very same code with the original, even for interoperability, you're getting into a huge gray area in a legal sense.

Similarly, no sane Wine developer will read leaked Microsoft source code, yet alone copy it. Again, no sane emulator developer will read leaked Nintendo code.

Reading the code "colors" your creativity, and if you're tried at court and enough similarity is found in your code with the leaked code, it's game over.

So, reading code and copying is not guaranteed to be legal, depending on its license. When this is done by a robot, it's still illegal (you're breaching licenses during the code generation process), and immoral and unethical on top of it.

So, we don't overvalue humans, but overvalue AI, which is just informed search, BTW.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#814

Post by bayindirh »

nmfisher wrote: post #759
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 totally agree, this reaction seems very hypocritical. If some rinky dink startup did exactly the same thing - as they are entitled to do under the licences of huge swathes of code on GitHub - hardly anyone would bat an eyelid. But just because it’s a Microsoft-owned company, it’s somehow verboten? That seems totally inconsistent with decades of people clamouring for more openness/liberty when it comes to IP rights.

Regardless of the size of the offender, if you're not respecting the terms of a license, you'll get pushback. It's natural.

If you're a company which executes Embrace Extend Extinguish on any technology you like yet don't own, you'll get quadruple amounts of pushback. That's normal too.

Microsoft isn't saint, and copilot is breaking a lot of legal, ethical and moral rules. It's doubly-natural to give reaction to this.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#815

Post by nemonemo »

radus wrote: post #749
leereeves wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that would be possible. One of the big limitations of neural networks is that they don't cite their sources.

Calculate a rough semantic similarity score across all your snippets, and pay out a fractional reward to all originating codebases. I think the bigger problem is that it will almost certainly lead to a proliferation of giant snippet spam repositories.

It is like the search engines vs. SEO arms race. The hope could be that such proliferation can be managed by disincentivizing such abuses. The reality might be vastly different with codes that have more regularity and better chance for AI's emulating humans than the natural language texts.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#816

Post by mplanchard »

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #603
mplanchard wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's what you want, you should license your code not under MIT, but under a license that allows replication/distribution without attribution. Meanwhile, others who do care about such things can license their code under licenses that require attribution/copyleft/etc.

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…

You don’t need an “official” license, although I agree creative commons is closer to what you want. I feel like you can pretty easily write a license file that explicitly waives all of your rights and responsibilities. Such simplicity is after all what made MIT such a popular license, even though it’s not substantially different from Apache.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#817

Post by regularfry »

Veen wrote: post #454
regularfry wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perfectly consistent to say both that there needs to be a system to ensure creators are compensated and that the current system for doing so is terrible.

It is consistent but useless if you have no suggestion as to what would replace the current system in a way that preserves the benefits to both parties. 1. Creators get a sustainable reward for their work. They wouldn't do it otherwise. I certainly don't do it for fun. 2. Consumers get to access that work as they wish. (Of course, this being HN, I'd expect any ideas to apply to developers as well as to writers and ar…

Keeping the benefits intact for both parties is a non-goal.

How about 14 year max copyright terms? Make copyright unsellable and uninheritable, so you don't get massive copyright hoarding entities that can distort legislation for their own benefit?

That's just two suggestions off the top of my head. I do get tired by false dichotomies.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#818

Post by Varqu »

tuckerman wrote: post #808
Varqu wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone contributes to open source, then they shouldn't be surprised that someone else uses this code. The licensing hell is something that shouldn't belong in IT.

When source code is made available under an open source license, there are strings attached; attaching those strings is the author’s right! Assuming you or any company has the right to do anything you want with that code without respecting the license is immoral. That “licensing hell” (i.e. strong copyleft protections) is the reason we enjoy such a vibrant and large open source community today. I don’t take it for gr…

The licensing hell is exactly the problem. If someone contributes to open source, which is a praiseworthy activity, then they do it with the intention that anyone can use this code but also re-adapt it, bundle in new products - it's all about bringing humanity forward.

And all those "you can do this, but you can't do that" licenses are things that only invite lawyers to the tech world. IMHO, licensing open source is a bullshit activity.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#819

Post by tagyro »

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...

1 out of 4 feels about right, thank you for the link!

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#820

Post by tremon »

throwaheyy wrote: post #783
DJHenk wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s nothing proprietary or original about eg. the syntax of a for-loop, or the boilerplate of setting up some JS framework MVC. Of course there is something proprietary or original about that. Why else would they need such an enormous AI to suggest it. Auto completing simple boilerplate was already solved in a much simpler way. > Copyright infringement hasn’t taken place until the user activated the autocomplet…

Applying your logic, is any search engine infringing on copyright because it contains a snippet of the source page? After all, if showing a search result in the IDE is “publishing” (let alone “selling” (?)) why hasn’t Google been sued out of existence for showing search results (oops, “publishing” copies of original work, billions of times over), as well as selling related advertising? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F…

is any search engine infringing on copyright because it contains a snippet of the source page?

In some jurisdictions, it is. And in other jurisdictions, it is only allowed as long as it shows a link to the source page, which Copilot also doesn't do.

Post reply on HN