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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#301

Post by nonasktell »

Why would anyone want to stop Copilot is beyond me.

Reinventing the wheel, millions of time a day, is an atrocity.

Millions of (wo)man hours, wasted, every single day, on writing solutions to problems that have already been solved. There is a partial solution to this, and it's making people angry, it's crazy.

If you put your code publicly on the internet, you should expect that people will reuse your code at some point, no one broke into your privates repositories.

Why would anyone waste their time to make other people waste more of their time is really beyond me.

Let go of your egos for once.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#302

Post by sushid »

treis wrote: post #190
beachy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github does plenty of stuff that you can't do. e.g. the contributions graph as just one example that comes to mind. That's not unfair, and not the basis for a lawsuit, it's just business. > Copilot is not only making money off of open-source, they are making money off of open-source in a way others can't. Of course! That's why MS paid squillions to buy Github.

You're not supposed to be able to use dominance in one market (git hosting) to gain dominance in another (AI powered code suggestions).

You might be confused but that's literally what you do as a business. You leverage your domain area expertise to expand into new areas of business.

For instance, Apple already knew about the portable hardware market and extended their reach into the portable music market via iPod. It used the iPod to reach the music marketplace via iTunes. Used its market dominance to create iPhone and the rest is history.

Maybe that's a personal maxim on your part but there's no law that says if you have dominance (what does that even mean?) in one market you cannot enter another. Think about what you're saying. We'd have no multi-product company if that were the case. What does "dominance" or "market" mean anyway?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#303

Post by gspencley »

anon2020dot00 wrote: post #249
gspencley wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's with the default to "if it's not explicitly legal, it must be illegal"? That's not how I interpret what's happening. People who produce things have rights over their products. Be it artists, craftsmen, inventors, entrepreneurs or coders. There is a legitimate question here as to whether CoPilot has infringed upon those rights. I don't see it being about "making something illegal." I see it about answering a…

A few snippets of code is not a product. If there was an open-source money-making product and someone builds a competing product using considerable help from CoPilot then that is a stronger case for damages then if someone just used some snippets of code in their own product. But at that point, it would be just like someone cloning the Github code without following the license and in that case, it should become obvio…

I'm using the word "product" to mean "something which was produced." I searched for a few definitions because I thought they might actually be different forms of the same word. Turns out I could be wrong about that, but that was my intent. Something that you produce is a "product" of your time, effort, labour etc. Doesn't matter if it's something that you are selling or not. Doesn't matter if it's a relatively small production. The point is you produced it. It is yours.

The question is whether the courts will find damages. Everything else has nothing to do with my comment. You might have your own ideas and opinions, which is fine. So do I. Both are irrelevant. The point is that there is a legal question here that the courts alone are equipped to answer.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#304

Post by jarsj »

bo1024 wrote: post #247

There are two issues -- (1) feeding copyrighted material in to an AI model, and (2) getting copyrighted material out . The latter is obviously a violation of copyright, full stop. The former, to me, is obviously not a violation. If it were, that would massively tilt the playing field in favor of large corporations. It would become very hard to independently train your own models. Philosophically, I go by the principl…

But is it illegal for AI to provide the said assistance ? That, I believe, is the bigger question.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#305

Post by ROTMetro »

627467 wrote: post #293

Hey, I despise bait and switch from large corps. But I also find it unsustainable this idea that societies and legal resources are wasted fighting for IPs. The code is out there. Millions of people are being trained and writing code based of the learnings of open data. Designers have "mood boards". Developers have open source. Right now I don't have sympathy for MS, but in a few years any you developer could just do…

This is copyright. I put it out there with a government guaranty that I get to retain ownership out of it. Society at large benefits because more people put their stuff out their. You want to break that deal and you will end up with less sharing. Why are you for information silos? I am for open ideas and sharing. You are for stealing and breaking the moral agreement because distributing my code in the form of an AI analysis doesn't groke with you as the same thing as distributing it in another manner.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#306

Post by Ecco »

nonasktell wrote: post #301

Why would anyone want to stop Copilot is beyond me. Reinventing the wheel, millions of time a day, is an atrocity. Millions of (wo)man hours, wasted, every single day, on writing solutions to problems that have already been solved. There is a partial solution to this, and it's making people angry, it's crazy. If you put your code publicly on the internet, you should expect that people will reuse your code at some poi…

You’re missing the point. It’s not an ego problem: if you put your code on the internet with a license you should expect people to respect the license’s rules…

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#307

Post by steve_taylor »

Open source has trained me and countless others. We have learned from it. Why shouldn’t machines learn from it too? Is co-pilot copy-pasting slabs of code verbatim?

I see Copilot as a net positive. Open source is for sharing and learning. Copilot is sharing and learning on steroids.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#308

Post by batmanturkey »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #137
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…

The Luddite reaction to copilot is very hilarious to me. It seem to be a great way to identify low-talent coders, because who else would possibly feel so threatened by an AI?… Watching HN commenters suddenly become ardent defenders of copyright is quite the sight.

I see your statement as an inversion of consensus reality. What actual coder would use copilot? A beginner or dabbler.

I predict your attempt at tactically “managing” this copilot scandal will not play well on HN to experienced coders, your Microsoft colleagues chiming in next claiming it boosts their productivity notwithstanding.

Yes, I do indeed suggest astroturfing afoot.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#309

Post by lucasyvas »

bugfix-66 wrote: post #220
rockemsockem wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, he clearly knew about that code in advance and used his prior knowledge to coax Copilot into spitting it out, yeah? Three characters can get you pretty far, that's 1 combination out of 125,580 (considering all english letters, upper and lower, along with most of the numbers and symbols on my keyboard), plus the description of a fairly complex algorithm. Also, this code is really just executing a mathematical…

Microsoft Copilot is easily the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of man. You want to use my code, without ever knowing I wrote it? You want to use my hard work, regurgitated anonymously, stripped of all credit, stripped of all attribution, stripped of all identity and ancestry and citation? FUCK YOU There's no need to defend something so obviously harmful, so why do you do it? The law should be…

It is a code laundering tool so corporations can steal open source code rights . It's the plainest thing I've ever seen. They charge for it on top of it. The deniers are out of their minds if they can't see what's coming.

This has the potential to severely damage open source - I would not host my open source project on GitHub, especially if it was copyleft. I'm sure many others wouldn't either. Some of these authors make amazing software that we might not see because of this.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#310

Post by mkr-hn »

nonasktell wrote: post #301

Why would anyone want to stop Copilot is beyond me. Reinventing the wheel, millions of time a day, is an atrocity. Millions of (wo)man hours, wasted, every single day, on writing solutions to problems that have already been solved. There is a partial solution to this, and it's making people angry, it's crazy. If you put your code publicly on the internet, you should expect that people will reuse your code at some poi…

No one wants to stop what Copilot is being sold as. They want to stop the company selling it from doing what it is famous for doing.
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