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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

#171

Post by pclmulqdq »

msbarnett wrote: post #101
pclmulqdq wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people ironically put the Getty watermark on pictures and memes that they make to satirically imply that they are pulling stock photos off the internet with the printscreen function instead of paying for them.

Memes generally would not fall under the category of non-copyrighted material; they’re most of the time extremely copyrighted material just being used without permission. And even a wholly original work an artist sarcastically puts a Getty watermark and then licensed under Creative Commons or something would fall into very murky territory – the Getty watermark itself is the intellectual property of Getty. The origina…

You could argue that mocking the Getty logo like that is some form of fair use, which would be a backdoor through which it can end up as a legitimate element of a public domain work, in which case it would be fair game.

I agree with you that it is also possible that people posted Getty thumbnails to some sites as though they are public domain, and that is how the AIs learned the watermark.

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

#172

Post by joecot »

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…

> For myself, I am skeptical of intellectual property in the first place. I say go for it.

If we didn't live in a Capitalist society, that would be fair. But we currently do. That Capitalist society cares little about the well being of artists unless it can find a way to make their art profitable. Projects like DALL-E and Midjourney pillage centuries of human art and sell it back to us for a profit, while taking away work from artists who struggle to make ends meet as it is. Software Developers are generally less concerned about Copilot because they're still making 6 figures a year, but they'll start to get concerned if the technology gets smart enough that society needs less Developers.

An automated future should be a good thing. It should mean that computers can take care of most tasks and humans can have more leisure time to relax and pursue their passions. The reason that artists and developers panic over things like this is that they are watching themselves be automated out of existence, and have seen how society treats people who aren't useful anymore.

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

#173

Post by CapsAdmin »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #162
CapsAdmin wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.. Precisely. Would it be okay for me to publish some code as GPL because my buddy gave it to me and promised that it was totally legit and I could use it and it definitely wasn't copy-pasted from one of the Windows sourc…

> Precisely. Would it be okay for me to publish some code as GPL because my buddy gave it to me and promised that it was totally legit and I could use it and it definitely wasn't copy-pasted from one of the Windows source leaks?

But where do you draw the line? What if you accidentally came up with the same or similar solution to something in windows? The code might not be from your friend either, it could be from N steps of copy paste, rework, reformating, refactoring, etc.

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

#174

Post by lucideer »

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 don't know specifically what DALL-E was trained on, but if it's art for which the artists' have not consented to it being used to train AI then that's problematic. I haven't seen any objections to DALL-E on that basis specifically though, whereas all the discussion of Copilot is around the fact that code authorship & Github accounts are not intrinsically tied together, making it impossible to have code authors consent to their code being used, regardless of what ToS someone's agreed to.

> For myself, I am skeptical of intellectual property in the first place. I say go for it.

I'm in a similar boat but this is precisely the reason I object so strongly to Copilot. IP has been invented & perpetuated/extended to protect large corporate interests, under the guise of protecting & sustaining innovators & creative individuals. Copilot is a perfect example of large corporate interest ignoring IP when it suits them to exploit individuals.

In other words: the reason I'm skeptical of IP is the same reason I'm skeptical of Copilot.

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

#175

Post by chiefalchemist »

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…

I thought the same thing. But then shouldn't CP look at things it's not supposed to use and see if that's happened? How is that any different than you committing your API to Platform X and shortly thereafter Platform X reaches out to you...because GH let them know?

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

#177

Post by jacooper »

Waterluvian wrote: post #167

I think people may be drastically over-valuing their code. If it was emitting an entire meaningful product, that would be something else. But it’s emitting nuts and bolts. If the issue is more specifically copyright infringement, then leverage the legal apparatus in place for that. Their lawyers might listen better. This is not a strongly held opinion and if you disagree I would love to hear your constructive thought…

I mean it starts like this, but if Copilot gets a pass, companies might just use AI as a way to launder code and avoid complying with Free licenses.

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

#178

Post by frob »

codefreakxff wrote: post #112
c7b wrote: post #99

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. Do you have any evidence for those claims, or anything resembling those examples? Music copyright has long expired for classical music, and big shots are definitely not exempt from where it applies. Just look at how much heat Ed Sheeran, one of the bigge…

There have been a number of stories about musicians being copyright claims. Here is the first result on Google https://www.radioclash.com/archives/2021/05/02/youtuber-gets... For being sued for looking at source here is the first result on Google https://www.wired.com/story/missouri-threatens-sue-reporter-...

Just to be clear, because it's in the title, the reporter was threatened with a lawsuit for looking at source code. I cannot find anyone acually sued for it. BTW, here's an article saying said reporter wasn't sued: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/02/15/missouri_html_hac...

Anyone with a mouth can run it and threaten a lawsuit. If fact, I threaten to sue you for misinformation right now unless you correct your post. Fat lot of good my threat will do because no judge in their right mind would entertain said lawsuit because it's baseless.

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

#179

Post by jacooper »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #5

Microsoft should just train it on all their proprietary code instead. See how sanguine they are about it then.

They avoided answering this question at all costs.

Because it exposes their direct hypocrisy in this, its fair use for OSS but not for us.

Questions here are very important, and its no surprise GitHub avoided answering anything about CoPilot's legality:

https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/

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

#180

Post by SrslyJosh »

mjr00 wrote: post #11

Same issue with Stable Diffusion/NovelAI and certain people's artwork (eg Greg Rutkowski) being obviously used as part of the training set. More noticeable in Copilot since the output needs to be a lot more precise. Lawmakers need to jump on this stuff ASAP. Some say that it's no different from a person looking at existing code or art and recreating it from memory or using it as inspiration. But the law changes when…

> Some say that it's no different from a person looking at existing code or art and recreating it from memory or using it as inspiration.

Hah, no, the model encodes the code that it was trained on. This is not "recreating from memory", this is "making a copy of the code in a different format." (Modulo some variable renaming, which it's probably programmed to do to in order to obscure the source of the code.)

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