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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#491

Post by woah »

It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. The only way you can get it to do that is to bait it with the function names of functions that have already been copy and pasted thousands of times onto GitHub without proper licenses.

Luckily, someone will probably come out with a "renegade" version trained on whatever makes it a useful assistant to my coding. I won't be afraid of accidently violating copyright myself, because I won't be trying to bait it into reproducing heavily copy&pasted cherrypicked examples, and I won't use 20 lines of its output with zero modification.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#492

Post by naikrovek »

vineyardmike wrote: post #476
naikrovek wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when you put your code on GitHub.com, you grant GitHub the right to show that code to others. https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... this is separate from the license you specify in the repository and you can't revoke it without removing your code from github.com.

Does “I give you permission to show this code to others” include “I give you permission to offer this code to others for their use in their code”?

users of github.com are responsible for their own use of any code they find, however they find it.

GitHub shows code to those who wish to see it. it is up to the person using that code to use it according to the license. when I buy a car, it is up to me to use that car according to the law. when I buy a gun, it is up to me to use that gun according to the law. etc.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#493

Post by culi »

woah wrote: post #491

It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. The only way you can get it to do that is to bait it with the function names of functions that have already been copy and pasted thousands of times onto GitHub without proper licenses. Luckily, someone will probably come out with a "renegade" vers…

Yeah I think it just means a non-commercial alternative would be made to replace it

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#494

Post by culi »

mgraczyk wrote: post #477

All this discussion of legality is interesting to me, because I'm pretty sure that if Github ran a search in the background, found the corresponding license for the code snippet, then showed it to the user in some cookie-banner like annoyance, it would be completely legal. This is what Github already does on their website with a search bar. Yet somehow I think most people upset about Copilot would not like that outco…

How do you run a search on the product of a bunch of neural network weights? Do you just mean like double-checking that the code it produced isn't a direct copy of something copyrighted?

If so I think that introduces a lot of other issues. There's an interesting phenomenon of different independent comedians suing talk shows for stealing their jokes. It almost always turned out that those jokes weren't actually stolen. Instead, there's only so many jokes you can make about a given news story and there's bound to be overlap between a whole room of comedians trying to milk every event of any comedic value and random independent comedians doing the same

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#495

Post by stingraycharles »

mgraczyk wrote: post #477

All this discussion of legality is interesting to me, because I'm pretty sure that if Github ran a search in the background, found the corresponding license for the code snippet, then showed it to the user in some cookie-banner like annoyance, it would be completely legal. This is what Github already does on their website with a search bar. Yet somehow I think most people upset about Copilot would not like that outco…

It’s interesting and pretty much uncharted territory from a legal perspective, that’s for sure. It very much relates back to the discussion about accountability of machine learning models, in that it’s desirable to be able to explain how/why some output was generated.

I don’t think a banner would be sufficient here, though; perhaps some references to the inputs that were used to generate the output, but that’s often very difficult to pinpoint.

Whatever happens, if this ends up setting some sort of legal precedent it will have a big impact on the industry, and I personally hope it leads to more accountability and transparency of the models, rather than the black boxes they are now.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#496

Post by Brybry »

bugfix-66 wrote: post #426
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 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! Training must be opt in, not opt out. Every artist, every creative individual, must EXPLICITLY OPT IN to having their hard work regurgitated anonymously by Copilot or Dall-E or whatever. If y…

Every human is using the hard work of other humans down through the entirety of history and mostly without credit or attribution. None us exists in a vacuum and we are all copying each other constantly.

Should students need to attribute the copyrighted textbooks and lessons that they learned from for all their future work?

Should artists attribute every reference they've used? Even if they draw stick figures based on the reference? Even if they only use small parts from multiple references?

What's different from a machine learning something and a human learning it?

I think in terms of practical open source/permissive licenses it makes the most sense for new licenses to be made that include no-training clauses for the rights holders that dislike machine learning.

Dall-E's use of training on non-permissive copyrighted web-scraped data seems more complicated and I imagine there will eventually be lawsuits to figure that out.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#497

Post by bruhhh »

This does more harm than good. If you set a precedent, then things like stable diffusion will also be illegal since it's trained on public data. OP just wants to make money from microsoft using fearmongering and false sense of righteousness

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#498

Post by nightski »

woah wrote: post #491

It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. The only way you can get it to do that is to bait it with the function names of functions that have already been copy and pasted thousands of times onto GitHub without proper licenses. Luckily, someone will probably come out with a "renegade" vers…

Personally I'm not worried about the end user using copyrighted code. That is their responsibility. If you have verbatim GPL code in your commercial closed source code base that is a liability and it might be dangerous to use copilot.

What I have more of a problem with is Microsoft charging for copilot which was trained on copyrighted code without any permission whatsoever which they really have no right to utilize/charge for.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#500

Post by ptmcc »

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.

Caring about licenses, fair use, and copyright has been deeply ingrained in the open source and hacker community for literally decades.
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