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GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

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Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#151

Post by insanitybit »

lbotos wrote: post #74
insanitybit wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Joe Rando plays a song from 1640 on a violin he gets a copyright claim on Youtube That can't possibly be a valid claim, right? AFAIK copyright is "gone" after the original author dies + ~70 years. Before fairly recently it was even shorter. Something from 1640 surely can't be claimed under copyright protection. There are much more recent changes where that might not be the case, but 1640? > When Jane Rando uses dev…

> That can't possibly be a valid claim, right? I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that while the "1640's violin composition" itself may be out of copyright, if I record myself playing it, my recording of that piece is my copyright . So if you took my file (somehow) and used it without my permission, and I could prove it, I could claim copyright infringement. That's my understanding, and I've personally operate…

Yes, that sounds right to me. But that's not relevant to "Joe Whoever played it and got sued".

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#152

Post by XorNot »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #49
acoustics wrote: post #6

I’ve noticed that people tend to disapprove of AI trained on their profession’s data, but are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI. For example, I know artists who are vehemently against DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. and regard it as stealing, but they view Copilot and GPT-3 as merely useful tools. I also know software devs who are extremely excited about AI art and GPT-3 but are outraged b…

I think the distinction is that only one of those classes tends to produce exact copies of work. Programmers get very upset at DALL-E and Stable Diffusion producing exact (and near-exact) copies of artwork too. In contrast to exact copying, production of imitations (not exact copies, but "X in the style of Y") is something that artists have been doing for centuries, and is widely thought of as part of arts education.…

I'm mildly suspicious that this example is an implementation of a generic matrix functionality though: you couldn't patent this sort of work, because it's not patentable - it's a mathematics. It's fundamentally a basic operation, that would have to be implemented with a similar structure regardless of how you do it.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#153

Post by insanitybit »

pessimizer wrote: post #91
insanitybit wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Joe Rando plays a song from 1640 on a violin he gets a copyright claim on Youtube That can't possibly be a valid claim, right? AFAIK copyright is "gone" after the original author dies + ~70 years. Before fairly recently it was even shorter. Something from 1640 surely can't be claimed under copyright protection. There are much more recent changes where that might not be the case, but 1640? > When Jane Rando uses dev…

> Again, that doesn't sound like a valid suit. Surely she would win? In the few cases I've heard of where suits like this are brought against someone they've easily won them. That's freedom of speech for everyone who can afford a lawyer to bring suit against a music rights-management company.

Yes, this is a problem with the legal system in general.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#154

Post by enragedcacti »

shadowgovt wrote: post #111
ianbutler wrote: post #85

I just tested it myself on a random c file I created in the middle of a rust project I'm working on, it reproduced his full code verbatim from just the function header so clearly it does regurgitate proprietary code unlike some people have said, I do not have his source so co-pilot isn't just using existing context. I've been finding co-pilot really useful but I'll be pausing it for now, and I'm glad I have only been…

Searching for the function names in his libraries, I'm seeing some 32,000 hits. I suspect he has a different problem which (thanks to Microsoft) is now a problem he has to care about: his code probably shows up in one or more repos copy-pasted with improper LGPL attribution. There'd be no way for Copilot to know that had happened, and it would have mixed in the code. (As a side note: understanding why an ML engine ou…

Expanding on that, even if Microsoft sees the error of their ways and retrains copilot against permissively licensed source or with explicit opt-in, it may get trained on proprietary code the old version of copilot inserted into a permissively licensed project.

You would have to just hope that you can take down every instance of your code and keep it down, all while copilot keeps making more instances for the next version to train on and plagiarize.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#155

Post by XorNot »

dawnerd wrote: post #22
acoustics wrote: post #6

I’ve noticed that people tend to disapprove of AI trained on their profession’s data, but are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI. For example, I know artists who are vehemently against DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. and regard it as stealing, but they view Copilot and GPT-3 as merely useful tools. I also know software devs who are extremely excited about AI art and GPT-3 but are outraged b…

In theory AI should never return an exact copy of a copyrighted work or even anything close enough you could argue is the original “just changed”. If the styles are the same I think that’s fine, no different than someone else cloning it. But there’s definitely outputs from stable diffusion that looks like the original with some weird artifacts. We need regulation around it.

> there’s definitely outputs from stable diffusion that looks like the original with some weird artifacts.

Do you have examples? Because SD will generate photoreal outputs and then get subtle details (hands, faces) wrong, but unless you have the source image in hand then you've no way of knowing whether it's a "source image" or not.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#156

Post by CapsAdmin »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #134
CapsAdmin wrote: post #107

I would imagine the root problem here is people taking copyrighted code, pasting it in their project and disregarding the license. To me this seems common, especially when it comes to toy, test and hobby projects. I don't see how copilot or similar tools can solve this problem without vetting each project.

That's an entirely plausible explanation, but it doesn't mean that Microsoft has any less of a legal nightmare on their hands.

I'm not really sure what I think about this. How responsible should Microsoft be for someone's badly licensed code on their platform? If they somehow had the ability to ban projects using stolen snippets of code, I don't think I'd dare to host my hobby projects there.

If you can't trust that the code in a project is compatible with the license of the project then the only option I see is that copilot cannot exist.

I love free software and whatnot, but I have a feeling this situation would've been quite different if copilot was made by the free software community and accidentally trained on some non free code..

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#157

Post by [deleted] »

shadowgovt wrote: post #111
ianbutler wrote: post #85

I just tested it myself on a random c file I created in the middle of a rust project I'm working on, it reproduced his full code verbatim from just the function header so clearly it does regurgitate proprietary code unlike some people have said, I do not have his source so co-pilot isn't just using existing context. I've been finding co-pilot really useful but I'll be pausing it for now, and I'm glad I have only been…

Searching for the function names in his libraries, I'm seeing some 32,000 hits. I suspect he has a different problem which (thanks to Microsoft) is now a problem he has to care about: his code probably shows up in one or more repos copy-pasted with improper LGPL attribution. There'd be no way for Copilot to know that had happened, and it would have mixed in the code. (As a side note: understanding why an ML engine ou…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#159

Post by jeroenhd »

heavyset_go wrote: post #143
deepspace wrote: post #140

This shows how copyright is all screwed up. Let's say the code in question is based on a published algorithm, maybe Yuster and Zwick, (I did not check). What exactly gives Davis a better claim to the copyright than the inventors of the algorithm? Yes, I know software is copyrightable while algorithms are not, but it is not at all clear to my why that should be the case. The effort of translating an algorithm into cod…

You can patent an algorithm if you want to protect it.

(in some countries)

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#160

Post by kodah »

cyanydeez wrote: post #117
tpxl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Joe Rando plays a song from 1640 on a violin he gets a copyright claim on Youtube. When Jane Rando uses devtools to check a website source code she gets sued. When Microsoft steals all code on their platform and sells it, they get lauded. When "Open" AI steals thousands of copyrighted images and sells them, they get lauded. I am skeptical of imaginary property myself, but fuck this one set of rules for the poor,…

Basically, copyright is for people with copyright lawyers

That's not even a joke. One of the premises of a copyright is that you defend your intellectual property or lose it. If the system were more equitable then it would defend your copyright.
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