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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#141

Post by ketralnis »

rcoder wrote: post #122
keithnz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why use the API? why not just use git to get the code? All you need the API for is repository discovery

I'm gonna guess that Microsoft GitHub (tm) would shut you down pretty quickly if you tried to clone tens or hundreds of thousands of repos in a short window of time, b/c of course that's sketchy/abusive use of their infrastructure, right? But of course if the data is already sitting in object storage inside your cloud environment and all you have to do is run some MapReduce jobs to get at it... Hence: unfair, anticom…

I don't understand. Your favourite boba joint can email every one of their customers a coupon. That's "unfair" to the other boba joints without access to their mailing list too, right? You're just describing a regular old competitive advantage

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#142

Post by stevage »

ClassAndBurn wrote: post #84

My view is the copilot is not stealing open source code. It is learning from it just as a human reader would. People's disguste is based on the assimilation of what they thought was a human trait being machine derived from their work. The copilot service backed by an army of actual humans wouldn’t be a story at all. Nor would anyone be angry, if an individual offered coding skills as a service, and had gone through t…

It isn't really learning, if it's just regurgitating whole function bodies. I use Copilot a lot, and definitely see whole functions being spit out, that were presumably written by a person somewhere.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#143

Post by gfynt »

rockemsockem wrote: post #128

What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? Where you have to opt into models or can opt out (and many wind up doing so)? OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield w…

If they continue that path, the future will be that OpenAI, Microsoft, Google etc. will pay larger and larger fines at least in the EU, until they are blocked entirely.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#144

Post by deworms »

Sirened wrote: post #129
ClassAndBurn wrote: post #84

My view is the copilot is not stealing open source code. It is learning from it just as a human reader would. People's disguste is based on the assimilation of what they thought was a human trait being machine derived from their work. The copilot service backed by an army of actual humans wouldn’t be a story at all. Nor would anyone be angry, if an individual offered coding skills as a service, and had gone through t…

You aren't allowed to just read code and regurgitate it in order to claim it as your own. That is, just because you memorized this great new novel you read, it doesn't mean you can go and sit down and hammer it out and sell new copies. People go to great lengths to do this sort of things (see: clean room reverse engineering [1]) in order to try and wash themselves of liability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean…

If you think most people pay any attention to licenses or respect them you better think again. Snippets get copied verbatim with no regard to their source all the time. Licenses have no power and are routinely ignored.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#145

Post by ok123456 »

jashmatthews wrote: post #21
williamcotton wrote: post #10

Copyright only covers the expressive parts and not the utilitarian parts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea–expression_distinction https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/cases/5004 Most of your code is probably not subject to copyright in the first place, regardless of license.

Doesn't Copilot reproduce the exact expression given the right prompt, though?

So does a random number generator.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#146

Post by PythagoRascal »

ClassAndBurn wrote: post #84

My view is the copilot is not stealing open source code. It is learning from it just as a human reader would. People's disguste is based on the assimilation of what they thought was a human trait being machine derived from their work. The copilot service backed by an army of actual humans wouldn’t be a story at all. Nor would anyone be angry, if an individual offered coding skills as a service, and had gone through t…

> It is learning from it just as a human reader would

I don't see how that invalidates the copyright/license argument. So, instead of just a straight up license violation it's a license violation via plagiarism.

That argument wouldn't hold up even if it was a human that caused the violation. You can't just paraphrase someones licensed work and then lie about looking at and pretend you made it yourself, which is basically what seems to happen with co-pilot, as it doesn't also automatically reproduce the license of the code it reproduces.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#147

Post by DannyBee »

To set people's expectations, it is likely to take a bunch of lawsuits and a bunch of cases here to get to anywhere useful. The problem with lawsuits on copyright is that they are rarely precedential. I get that what people see is the large cases that try to tackle big topics. But for every single one of those, there are probably 10x or 100x equally large case that did precisely none of that.

This is particularly true of fair use, it is very fact specific. A court is much more likely to answer a very fact specific question about copilot, tied to the very specific facts of the case (IE how is this exact thing used/etc) than more broad, abstract questions.

In fact, standard Article III courts in the US are literally not allowed to issue advisory opinions.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#148

Post by giobox »

rockemsockem wrote: post #128

What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? Where you have to opt into models or can opt out (and many wind up doing so)? OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield w…

Its not popular to say it, but I agree to some extent here too. We may need a wholesale reimagining of copyright/patents in many places to accept the new reality of both of building the tools (data to train) and in accepting the occasional bad output (copyright/patented function appears in output). I think watching the law evolve with the tech is going to have a lot of ups and downs.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#149

Post by dwgebler »

slondr wrote: post #107
dwgebler wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to license it, you can just publish it with a declaration that as the author, you are releasing your work in to the public domain. However, in terms of licensing I believe MIT is the most permissive.

MIT still requires the license text to be included with the source. Copilot, if it is not fair use, violates the license of MIT code it re-emits.

Okay, so just take "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software" out of MIT and call it the Do Whatever You Want Licence. You're not obliged as an author / copyright holder to impose restrictions on people using your work if you don't want to.

Whether Copilot is breaching MIT depends on what constitutes a substantial portion, which I am not qualified to rule on.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#150

Post by invig »

What's with the default to "if it's not explicitly legal, it must be illegal"?

Imagine if every new piece of software your wrote had to be tested for legality because you don't know that it's explicitly legal. Oh there aren't laws for this new thing, so I guess you should challenge yourself all the way to the supreme court?

I get the author not liking Copilot, but I don't see that GitHub/Microsoft have any kind of obligation to figure this out just because they're GitHub/Microsoft.

If I as an individual had this obligation placed upon me I'd just never write any more code.

Ultimately I think, like open source, Copilot and the tools that will follow advance human progress in novel ways. Software getting easier to make is a good thing. If you don't like this particular implementation of something helpful, feel free to start an open source alternative without challenging yourself in the supreme court.

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