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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

#371

Post by hackerfromthefu »

CapsAdmin wrote: post #294
sidewndr46 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does dalle-2 verbatim reproduce artwork? I have never used it.

It's kind of like having millions of parameters you can tweak to get to an image. So an image does not really exist in the model. I can imagine Mona Lisa in my head, but it doesn't really "exist" verbatim in my head. It's only an approximation. I believe copilot works the same way (?)

This is just nonsense.

It's similar to saying that any digital representation of an image isn't an image just a dataset that represent it.

If what you said was any sort of defense every image copyright would never apply to any digital image, because the images can be saved in different resolutions, different file formats, or encoded down. e.g. if a jpeg 'image' was only an image at an exact set of digital bits i could save it again with a different quality setting and end up with a different set of digital bits.

But everyone still recognises when an image looks the same, and courts will uphold copyright claims regardless of the digital encoding of an image. So goodluck with that spurious argument that it's not copyright because 'its on the internet (oh its with AI etc).

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

#372

Post by robocat »

williamcotton wrote: post #317
ghoward wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure sure that originality is that different between a human and a neural network. That is to say that what a human artist is doing has always involved a lot of mixing of existing creations. I disagree, but this is a debate worth having. This is why I disagree: humans don't copy just copyrighted material. I am in the middle of developing and writing a romance short story. Why? Because my writing has a glari…

Asked to give practical advice to starting writers, he said, “Read.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/30/books/early-cormac-mccart...

Imagine telling someone who wanted to learn a sport to watch it. I define someone that writes as a writer. It is the act of writing that enables you to then read and learn from others.

An example: a dyslexic friend and a dyslexic family member: their writing communication skills of both is now fine in part because their jobs required it from them (and in part because technology helps). I also had one illiterate friend, who has taught himself to read and write as an adult (basic written communication), due to the needs of his job. Learn by doing, and add observation of others as an adjunct to help you. Even better if you can get good coaching (which requires effort at your craft or sport).

Disclaimer: never a writer. Projecting from my other crafts/sports. Terribly written comment!

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

#373

Post by dougabug »

Filligree wrote: post #324
bigiain wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely at the very least it'd be a TOS violation? I doubt any stock photo service grants you enough rights to redistribute their watermarked free image samples? Especially not in the context of a project like Stable Diffusion?

But it's not reproducing their samples. It's just adding their watermark to newly generated pictures you can't find in the training set.

If it faithfully memorized and reproduced a set of watermarks, it would be premature to conclude that it hadn’t memorized other (non-generic) graphical elements.

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

#374

Post by xani_ »

kmeisthax wrote: post #352
rtkwe wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The reason why it's easy to match Copilot results back to the original source is that the users are starting with prompts that match their public code, deliberately to cause prompt regurgitation. Stable Diffusion actually has a similar problem. Certain terms that directly call up a particular famous painting by name - say, the Mona Lisa[0] - will just produce that painting, possibly tiled on top of itself, and it won…

> The reason why it's easy to match Copilot results back to the original source is that the users are starting with prompts that match their public code, deliberately to cause prompt regurgitation.

The reason doesn't really matter...

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

#375

Post by didibus »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #222
rtkwe wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t think copilot is intrinsically a copyright violation, as you seem to be alluding to. Examples like this seem to be more controversial, but I’m not sure there’s a clear copyright violation there either. If you asked every developer on earth to implement FizzBuzz, how many actually different implementations would you get? Probably not very many. Who should own the copyright for each of them? Would the outcome b…

I think the issue people have is that every developer trying to implement FizzBuzz will not have studied all the existing public copyrighted implementations. They will likely be reinventing the solution with maybe never having seen an existing FizzBuzz implementation or having only seen one or two at most, and probably won't be re-implementing it verbatim.

But the machine learning model has studied every single one of them.

And maybe more preposterous, if its dataset had no FizzBuzz implementation would it even be able to re-invent it?

I feel this is the big distinction that probably annoys people.

That and the general fact that everyone is worried it'll devalue the worth of an experienced developer as AI will make hard thing easier, require less effort and talent to learn and thus making developers less high demand and probably lower paid.

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

#376

Post by crazygringo »

BeefWellington wrote: post #278
crazygringo wrote: post #223

As some other commenters have noted, it seems like the copyrighted code is being copied and pasted into many other codebases (shadowgovt says they found 32,000 hits), which are then (illegally) representing an incorrect license. So obviously the source of the error is one or more third parties, not Microsoft, and it's obviously impossible for Microsoft to be responsible in advance for what other people claim to licen…

Uhh, I'm gonna have to disagree hard on this take: > So obviously the source of the error is one or more third parties, not Microsoft, and it's obviously impossible for Microsoft to be responsible in advance for what other people claim to license. Copilot is Github's product, and Microsoft owns Github. They are responsible for how that product functions. In this case, they should be held responsible for the training…

> Giving them the benefit of the doubt here, at minimum they chose which random third parties to believe were honest and correct.

Well probably no, they didn't pick and choose at all, they just "chose" everyone who put code online with a license. Which is a legal statement of ownership by each of those people, and implies legal liability as well.

> is that the fault of Stephen King or the person selling the robot?

Well, there's certainly an argument to be made that it's neither -- it's the fault of the person who claimed Stephen King's work as their own with a legal notice that it was licensed freely to anyone. That person is the one committing theft/fraud.

The point is that with ML training data, such a vast quantity is required that it's unreasonable to expect humans to be able to research and guarantee the legal provenance of it all. A crawler simply believes that licenses, which are legally binding statements, are made by actual owners, rather than being fraud. It does seem reasonable to address the issue with takedowns, however.

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

#377

Post by pabs3 »

_ryanjsalva wrote: post #313

Howdy, folks. Ryan here from the GitHub Copilot product team. I don’t know how the original poster’s machine was set-up, but I’m gonna throw out a few theories about what could be happening. If similar code is open in your VS Code project, Copilot can draw context from those adjacent files. This can make it appear that the public model was trained on your private code, when in fact the context is drawn from local fil…

I read that the Amazon equivalent of GitHub Copilot does respect licensing properly, maybe you can talk to them about adopting their approach.

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

#378

Post by sanderjd »

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 what it's worth, I think it's all very impressive and amazing but also really sketchy. Or at least, I think the developers of these systems need to be very careful about what they are allowed to do with what content, and I don't trust that they are doing that, because of articles like this one and others.

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

#379

Post by bscphil »

kmeisthax wrote: post #355
bigiain wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With stable diffusion it's much closer to someone remixing and aping the images than it is reproducing originals. So very similar to how the music industry treats sampling then? Everybody using CoPilot needs to get "code sample clearance" from the original copyright holder before publishing their remix or new program that uses snippets of somebody else's code... Try explaining _that_ to your boss and legal departme…

This is already a problem with anyone who ever copypastes from Stack Overflow. You're all violating CC-BY-SA[0] and nobody really cares about this. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

If I ever take any code from SO, I include a comment with a link to it. Surely that's standard practice for anything longer than a line or two?

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

#380

Post by Thorrez »

mattkrause wrote: post #364
Filligree wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human drew that, it would not be copyright violation.

I’m not so sure about that. The scenes à faire doctrine would certainly let you paint your own picture of a pretty girl with a large earring, even a pearl one. That, however, is definitely the same person, in the same pose/composition, in the same outfit. The colors are slightly off, but the difference feels like a technical error rather than an expressive choice.

Even if it is an expressive choice of the new artist, if enough of the original artist's expressive choice remains, it could still be a copyright violation. Fair use can sometimes be a defense, but there are a lot of factors that go into determining whether something is fair use.
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