I don't get what's wrong with Copilot being trained on GPL code. If I, a human, had learnt to code by reading GPL code, would that have rendered all the code I ever write GPL too? After all, all human-created content is transformative due to how our brains work. And AI isn't all that different from us in the way it learns.
Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same
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Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same
#82> 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…
Meta is said to change the policy requiring a Facebook account soon, by the way.
I would hope when they release the new VR headsets, this would come into effect.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/10/meta-removing-faceboo...
Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same
#83I don't get what's wrong with Copilot being trained on GPL code. If I, a human, had learnt to code by reading GPL code, would that have rendered all the code I ever write GPL too? After all, all human-created content is transformative due to how our brains work. And AI isn't all that different from us in the way it learns.
The issue is that if you, as a human, regurgitated swaths of GPL code verbatim, you would be in violation of copyright.
Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same
#84Simply 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” theo…
>Microsoft trains it on public GitHub code
They seem to say that's not the only source.
"What data has GitHub Copilot been trained on?
GitHub Copilot is powered by Codex, a generative pretrained AI model created by OpenAI. It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub"
Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same
#85Perhaps one should create an open-source alternative to GitHub copilot also trained on proprietary source code, such as some leaked Windows source-code, and everyone will be happy and appreciate that we can use fair-use to train such AIs.
The model may not be illegal, but anyone using this model to generate any large enough code which is verbatim copy of Windows code will be doing a copyright violation. So you'll waste CPU to create model and not use it.
Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
> Nitpick: Fair use isn't an exemption from copyright, it's a defense for violating copyright) Nitpick: Fair use is both a Constitutional and statutory (the latter codifying the former) limitation on the exclusive rights granted as part of copyright, so it's definitely an exception. Procedurally, it operates as a defense, but that's not inconsistent with it being an exception.
True, the contrast here would be e.g. copyright law as usually found in EU states, where the are actual, enumerated lists of exceptions to copyright. Fair dealing as used by some former UK colonies seems more similar to the EU approach than US fair use doctrine.
"Training of ML models with data not licensed to you and then selling the output of the model" isn't on those lists, and consequently is a flagrant copyright violation in - broadly - the entire EU.
If you are a developer in the EU using Copilot, it is really pretty obvious that using Copilot is a commercialized copyright violation, which is e.g. in Germany (but I'm guessing many other states) a criminal offense, not a civil offense. Now, people might say, they're paying Microsoft for this service, and that's not in the EU, so something something can't prosecute. Of course, that doesn't actually work in the real world, and this corner of prosecuting copyright violations has been extremely well explored during the many, many trials of people committing IP violations of music and films over the past few decades.
In addition to that, I'm pretty sure routine copyright violations by an employed developer would be one of the more clear-cut reasons for a termination without notice and compensation for having to replace the affected code.
Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same
#87I don't get what's wrong with Copilot being trained on GPL code. If I, a human, had learnt to code by reading GPL code, would that have rendered all the code I ever write GPL too? After all, all human-created content is transformative due to how our brains work. And AI isn't all that different from us in the way it learns.
The issue is that if you, as a human, regurgitated swaths of GPL code verbatim, you would be in violation of copyright.
If CodePilot is outputting unique enough GPL code verbatim, then a simple search can inform the user about it and he can make the decision to keep it or not. This could be a feature requirement.
Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same
#88I don't get what's wrong with Copilot being trained on GPL code. If I, a human, had learnt to code by reading GPL code, would that have rendered all the code I ever write GPL too? After all, all human-created content is transformative due to how our brains work. And AI isn't all that different from us in the way it learns.
The issue is that if you, as a human, regurgitated swaths of GPL code verbatim, you would be in violation of copyright.
There will still be a person committing the code that Copilot came up with in the end, wouldn't that person be in violation of copyright too then?
Just like if they would've copied it from some code base they found online under a non-permissive license.
Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same
#89The thing that worries me here is that supporters of free software wants to strengthen copyright. I would have thought that most were against IP in general or at least in favor of making it weaker. Is protecting your code against Copilot really worth giving this weapon to Disney?
> free software wants to strengthen copyright. I would have thought that most were against IP in general That's a misunderstanding. In a world without any concept of authorship and copyright, people would share, modify and redistribute books, drawing, musical scores... But most software can be compiled (and even obfuscated), making it unpractical to further modify and redistribute a copy. This means than in such word…
> But most software can be compiled (and even obfuscated), making it unpractical to further modify and redistribute a copy.
Tell that to people who remove DRM restrictions, fix bugs and then distribute the result. The only reason there aren't companies and university courses dedicated for such modifications is that it's illegal.
Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same
#90I don't get what's wrong with Copilot being trained on GPL code. If I, a human, had learnt to code by reading GPL code, would that have rendered all the code I ever write GPL too? After all, all human-created content is transformative due to how our brains work. And AI isn't all that different from us in the way it learns.
The issue is that if you, as a human, regurgitated swaths of GPL code verbatim, you would be in violation of copyright.
I can't fathom the amount of copyright infringement the Ctrl, C and V keys have caused.