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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

#261

Post by jimlongton »

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…

>If it was emitting an entire meaningful product, that would be something else. But it’s emitting nuts and bolts.

Take a single C file or even a long function from the leaked Windows NT codebase and include it in your code. See how happy Microsoft will be with it. They spent millions of dollars on their legal teams. Eroding copyright protections will harm the weakest most. How many open source contributors can afford copyright lawyers?

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

#262

Post by AmericanChopper »

dataflow wrote: post #258
AmericanChopper wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entire thread is about how copilot committed a copyright violation on a simple code block.

That code block is neither "simple like FizzBuzz" nor is it in a lawsuit. I feel like we're speaking past each other at this point.

What makes it not simple like FizzBuzz? You will not be able to come up with a reason why this one single function is copyrightable, but a FizzBuzz function isn’t. It’s one function in 15 lines of code. Get 1,000,000 developers to implement that function and you’re not going to have anywhere near 1,000,000 substantially different implementations.

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

#264

Post by londons_explore »

matkoniecz wrote: post #251
paulgb wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know of any examples of images being wholly recreated, but it’s certainly possible to use the name of some living artists to get work in their style. In those cases, it seems like not such a leap to say that the AI has obviously seen that artist’s work and that the output is a derivative work. (The obvious counterargument is that this is the same as a human looking at an artist’s work and aping the style.)

https://alexanderwales.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/image.... Left: “Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer” by Stable Diffusion Right: Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer This specific one is not copyright violation as it is old enough for copyright to expire. But the same may happen with other images. from https://alexanderwales.com/the-ai-art-apocalypse/ and https://alexanderwales.com/addendum-…

I think this happens a lot with famous images since that image will be in the training set hundreds of times.

Even if deduplication efforts are done, that painting will still be in the background of movie shots etc.

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

#265

Post by pclmulqdq »

heavyset_go wrote: post #195
XorNot wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mathematics is not patentable, but you can patent the steps a computer takes to compute the results of that particular algorithm.

Only if it has physical consequences. There was a case in 2014 that narrowed software patents significantly, called "Alice vs CLS Bank." No more patents on computerized shopping carts, but encryption or compression can still be patented.

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

#266

Post by ShamelessC »

jacooper wrote: post #177
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.

Having worked for a couple of big companies with IT, you should know they are effectively all breaking the law already in this regard (except for maybe hardware companies) because it’s basically impossible to enforce and no one cares.

The best way to make sure your code isn’t copied is not to publish it.

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

#267

Post by TillE »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #115
jonnycomputer wrote: post #5

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

As a thought experiment: what do we all suppose would be the impact to Microsoft if they deliberately made public the proprietary source code for all of their publicly available commercial products and efforts (including licensed software, services; excluding private contracts, research), but the rest of their intellectual property and trade secrets remained private? Since I’m posing the question, here’s my guess: -…

I think Microsoft, their ISVs, and everyone would benefit a lot if Windows were "open source" in the narrow sense - viewable source code, with a license to compile and use only to the extent that you already own the requisite Windows license(s).

Pirating Windows is already utterly trivial with KMS activation, so it's not like they'd lose anything there.

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

#268

Post by csallen »

ghoward wrote: post #27
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 am a programmer who has written extensively on my blog and HN against Copilot. I am also not a hypocrite; I do not like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion either. As a sibling comment implies, these AI tools give more power to people who control data, i.e., big companies or wealthy people, while at the same time, they take power away from individuals. Copilot is bad for society. DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are bad for soci…

> while at the same time, they take power away from individuals.

Stable Diffusion and DALL-E give a ton of power to individuals, hence why they are popular.

It feels like you're doing a cost analysis instead of a cost-benefit analysis, i.e. you're only looking at the negatives. It's a bit like saying cars are bad because they give more power to the big companies who sell them + put horse and buggy operators out of a job.

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

#269

Post by DannyBee »

rtkwe wrote: post #94
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,…

I think copilot is a clearer copyright violation than any of the stable diffusion projects though because code has a much narrower band of expression than images. It's really easy to look at the output of CoPilot and match it back to the original source and say these are the same. With stable diffusion it's much closer to someone remixing and aping the images than it is reproducing originals. I haven't been following…

Well no.

Code is only protected to the degree it is creative and not functionally driven anyway.

So the reduced band of possible expression often directly reduces the protectability-through-copyright.

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

#270

Post by [deleted] »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #180
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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