Live data from Hacker News

Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

theregister.com

51–60 of 131 posts

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep getting this wrong. Your license is irrelevant. Copilot depends entirely on being exempt from copyright restrictions (under fair use doctrine), and you cannot restrict this with any license, because they're not using that license. The only way you can stop them using your code so is to not share it with anyone. If they find your code (even via a leak!), they can legally use it, if their fair use claim is…

Copilot being fair use is what Microsoft claims (obviously), not an established fact. There is no precedent for this claim. (Nitpick: Fair use isn't an exemption from copyright, it's a defense for violating copyright)

You shouldn’t be downvoted

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#52
post #9

Simply moving away from Github is not enough to protect your code if you see this as a problem. Moving your code away from Github to some open alternative doesn't stop Github consuming it to use in Copilot unless you specifically forbid that in your license. If you code is freely available to use for any purpose, as many open source licenses permit, then that includes using it as training data for a for-profit produc…

People keep getting this wrong. Your license is irrelevant. Copilot depends entirely on being exempt from copyright restrictions (under fair use doctrine), and you cannot restrict this with any license, because they're not using that license. The only way you can stop them using your code so is to not share it with anyone. If they find your code (even via a leak!), they can legally use it, if their fair use claim is…

Correct. Co-pilot is simply operating under the current interpretation of copyright law, which has provisions for fair use which is actually very important for how software development works. Fair use is crucial. Without that we can't implement proprietary APIs or allow ourselves to be inspired by other people's work. The samples of code you get from co-pilot aren't any different from those you find in a book (copyrighted and typically not OSS), on stackoverflow, or code you have seen somewhere else (for example on Github). And programmers use all of the above. If you don't like that, keep your code proprietary and refrain from publishing it.

In the same way, Google is making use of fair use by providing website titles, summaries, book samples, etc. There has been some controversy with news about them taking that too far. But by and large, they are still legal. And people of course have tried to challenge that in courts. It's just small samples being distributed, not a complete work. There are lots of examples of companies depending on fair use for all sorts of things. E.g. quoting an author or paraphrasing their work is fine. You don't need their permission for that.

Also another point here is that it isn't necessarily just MS that would be violating copyright (if the above somehow wasn't the case) but the receiver of the auto-completed code that ends up distributing that code. Because it is that code that ends up being distributed. All MS does is show you some code sample, it's the programmer that decides what to do with it. Whether you receive your sample from Stackoverflow, co-pilot, or a book is not relevant: you are responsible for the code you distribute.

Finally, the Github terms of use give Github some rights to doing things to your code if you choose to put it on Github. That probably also covers what they are doing with Github Co-pilot. That's a valid reason for removing your code from Github if you don't agree with that but of course no guarantee that Github Co-pilot would not crawl external public git repositories or that whomever you pick as an alternative wouldn't have some similar legalese in their terms of use. If these things matter to you, review it. Just because Gitlab hasn't launched a co-pilot competitor doesn't mean they couldn't.

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#53
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or don't license your code at all. Gives you great power with selective enforcement of IP rights.

In most jurisdictions, copyright is automatic. If you put no license on the code, the default is "all rights reserved"; that is, no one can do anything with it.

Yes, that's my intention, almost: no one can legally do anything with it. Private persons usually ignore these laws generally and get away with it.

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#54
> Why Copilot was trained on FOSS code but not copyrighted Windows code, and whether the company can specify all the software licenses and copyright holders attached to code used in the training data set.

Seems a case of "license respect for me but not for thee".

Microsoft are just a string of companies changing their original promises when taking over smaller companies with proper values.

See : Meta with Oculus not needing a FB account.

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#55
post #6
post #2

What's a good alternative? Preferably not in the US, preferably not biased towards (or against) any political agenda.

https://codeberg.org/

Hosting your code where all the nazi/racist/sexist assholes from imageboards are doesn't make your project shine.

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#56
post #54

> Why Copilot was trained on FOSS code but not copyrighted Windows code, and whether the company can specify all the software licenses and copyright holders attached to code used in the training data set. Seems a case of "license respect for me but not for thee". Microsoft are just a string of companies changing their original promises when taking over smaller companies with proper values. See : Meta with Oculus not…

I don’t know. It might be a good idea for all of us that they didn’t use Windows code for the modeling…

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#57
post #9

Simply moving away from Github is not enough to protect your code if you see this as a problem. Moving your code away from Github to some open alternative doesn't stop Github consuming it to use in Copilot unless you specifically forbid that in your license. If you code is freely available to use for any purpose, as many open source licenses permit, then that includes using it as training data for a for-profit produc…

People keep getting this wrong. Your license is irrelevant. Copilot depends entirely on being exempt from copyright restrictions (under fair use doctrine), and you cannot restrict this with any license, because they're not using that license. The only way you can stop them using your code so is to not share it with anyone. If they find your code (even via a leak!), they can legally use it, if their fair use claim is…

>Copilot depends entirely on being exempt from copyright restrictions (under fair use doctrine), and you cannot restrict this with any license, because they're not using that license.

I feel like this has not really been tested, especially in a court that resides outside the United States. Microsoft, as far as I know, probably has legal entities in other countries as well. A German developer residing in Germany could take Microsoft Deutschland GmbH to court in Germany.

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#58
post #9

Simply moving away from Github is not enough to protect your code if you see this as a problem. Moving your code away from Github to some open alternative doesn't stop Github consuming it to use in Copilot unless you specifically forbid that in your license. If you code is freely available to use for any purpose, as many open source licenses permit, then that includes using it as training data for a for-profit produc…

> Simply moving away from Github is not enough to protect your code if you see this as a problem. Moving your code away from Github to some open alternative doesn't stop Github consuming it to use in Copilot unless you specifically forbid that in your license.

I mean it does in the short term, because Microsoft trains it on public GitHub code.

Beyond that, as long as Microsoft is operating under their “fair use” theory, licensing is irrelevant: if they decide to expand their funnel to public code from outside of GitHub, yours will get sucked in if it is public, regardless of license, since their entire theory is they don't need a license.

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#59
post #48

Maybe its time to have versions of various open source licenses that expressly prohibit such use. GPLv4?

GitHub appears to be relying on a fair-use defense for Copilot. So it doesn't matter what license you slap on the code; if they're correct that their use constitutes fair use, as long as they can see your code, they can use it.

You could slap some kind of a clause in your license that forbids the use of your code in conjunction with an AI-powered code tool, and then try to sue people who use Copilot. Microsoft's claim is after all that training Copilot is fair use.

Although if you find your code in a project even without such a clause, you can probably still attempt to sue them for copyright violation, since most likely they are not abiding by your license anyways.

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep getting this wrong. Your license is irrelevant. Copilot depends entirely on being exempt from copyright restrictions (under fair use doctrine), and you cannot restrict this with any license, because they're not using that license. The only way you can stop them using your code so is to not share it with anyone. If they find your code (even via a leak!), they can legally use it, if their fair use claim is…

Copilot being fair use is what Microsoft claims (obviously), not an established fact. There is no precedent for this claim. (Nitpick: Fair use isn't an exemption from copyright, it's a defense for violating copyright)

> Fair use isn't an exemption from copyright, it's a defense for violating copyright

My uneducated brain cannot tell the practical difference between them, can you or anyone knowledgeable please explain like I'm 5?

Post reply on HN