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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#171

Post by throwaway8820 »

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…

I personally expect the law to end up with a "safe harbor"-like situation. Consider YouTube. Occasional copyrighted content does not make YouTube illegal, or able to be held liable for slip-ups. See the DMCA as well, which requires takedowns upon notice, but otherwise provides near total indemnity for user-generated content.

Because of this, if the law looks at GitHub Copilot, I would expect that they would find Copilot to be A-OK despite the occasional regurgitation of copyrighted material that isn't fair-use, as long as it is removed upon request.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#172

Post by lucasyvas »

beebmam wrote: post #121
smt88 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot wouldn't be shut down or neutered because "a few vocal people" protested against it. It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. You act like Microsoft is trying to do a public service and people are angry about it. The reality is that they're taking billions of hours of work and using it to build a product t…

Why should Copilot engineers, and the company that invests in it, not be rewarded for their incredible product and SaaS offering they spend resources on providing?

No post body was provided.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#173

Post by Andys »

If you're against Copilot as developer, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

Locking up code under non-permissive licenses stymies the pace of code development and increases the costs of progress dramatically.

We all stand on the shoulders of others before us. Including the organisations that stand to benefit the most from aggressive licensing.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#174

Post by Tijdreiziger »

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…

Well, what does the future where those materials are free use look like?

You argue that desiring ownership of works that you created is “extremely emotional and cherry-picked”, but you do not provide a compelling argument why artists, photographers, and indeed programmers should be excluded from the conversation when it is their art, photography and code that is being appropriated in the first place.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#175

Post by noasaservice »

beebmam wrote: post #121
smt88 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot wouldn't be shut down or neutered because "a few vocal people" protested against it. It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. You act like Microsoft is trying to do a public service and people are angry about it. The reality is that they're taking billions of hours of work and using it to build a product t…

Why should Copilot engineers, and the company that invests in it, not be rewarded for their incredible product and SaaS offering they spend resources on providing?

Are they following All the licenses they are consuming?

Why haven't they uploaded Windows source to Copilot?

Just how much code reproduced violates copyright?

If, instead of Copilot, Bob was giving me code to copy, and it was a AGPL codebase, am I still subject to the AGPL?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#176

Post by swhalen »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #118
swhalen wrote: post #104

Why can't Tim Davis (or another software author whose code is emitted verbatim by Copilot) demand that Microsoft take down Copilot, or at least the part of Copilot that contains his code? Microsoft is distributing his software without a license, isn't it?

It could potentially under "fair use," which completely overrides any and all copyright claims if the conduct is found to be, indeed, "fair use." Fair use in code is broader than just copying. For example, in Google v Oracle, APIs were found to be not copyrightable. Even if you copied the names of, say, 86,000 different functions in a proprietary library, you did not violate copyright. Then comes the second problem.…

There must be a line past which copying is no longer "fair use", otherwise no copyrights in code would be enforceable at all. I suppose it is up to a court to decide, but in the Tim Davis thread from yesterday it looked to me like Copilot was emitting entire, nontrivial functions verbatim.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#177

Post by honkler »

jen20 wrote: post #18
echelon wrote: post #7

BSD 5-Clause 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software…

The issue with copilot is that it is not respecting clause 1.

so what? You can put on a cowboy hat and larp as one, but that does not mean everyone else around you have to take it seriously. Same way with these made up licenses. If it's on the internet, it belongs to all. Or else keep it with yourself.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#178

Post by mdswanson »

stevage wrote: post #142
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.

I also use Copilot a lot, and while it does suggest large function bodies, I'm not sure that it's "regurgitating" them (though it could be...I don't know). I suspect that it's seen so many function bodies that are similar that it generates another similar output. Like autocomplete in a word processor has seen so many similar chunks of text that it reproduces them based on past experience. I don't know this as a fact, of course. I'm just reacting to the word "regurgitating."

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#179

Post by visarga »

smt88 wrote: post #78
19h wrote: post #52

I'd be rather saddened if Copilot was shut down or neutered because of a few vocal few protesting against it. It's been a massive productivity improvement to our senior devs, and I got so used to it that it's an annoyance when Copilot doesn't respond.

Copilot wouldn't be shut down or neutered because "a few vocal people" protested against it. It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. You act like Microsoft is trying to do a public service and people are angry about it. The reality is that they're taking billions of hours of work and using it to build a product t…

> It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus.

Copilot makes source code much more open, if you think about it. It implements code reuse in a different way than classes and libraries. It offers its skills equally to everyone, skills learned from everyone.

As for the cost of the API - it's expensive to run large language models, I think the price is justified. But there are free models if you like to run your own.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#180

Post by wyaeld »

mtlynch wrote: post #161
armchairhacker wrote: post #37

One issue I see with Copilot is that they get free access to all open-source data on GitHub, but using GitHub APIs to download the data yourself isn't possible (rate limiting). This is an unfair advantage. Copilot is not only making money off of open-source, they are making money off of open-source in a way others can't. I would love to see a lawsuit which requires GitHub to provide their full Copilot dataset.

Not a supporter of Copilot, but I think it's pretty easy to access the same data through BigQuery: > The Google BigQuery Public Datasets program now offers a full snapshot of the content of more than 2.8 million open source GitHub repositories in BigQuery. Thanks to our new collaboration with GitHub, you'll have access to analyze the source code of almost 2 billion files with a simple (or complex) SQL query. https://…

There is a distinction between being able to access the source code, and a tool giving it to you without any context of the underlying license it is governed by.
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