521–530 of 1001 posts
Copilot is trained on and returns AGPL code verbatim. It’s game over. If these licenses are not enforced it defeats the entire purpose.
For Copilot to blow up, it'd need to be licensed code from a big company demonstrably turning up in a product of a competitor, or some similar event.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a human, if I learn how to program by studying copyrighted code, is it unethical for me to use that knowledge to make a living ?
The difference is this, you’re likely working for the company whose proprietary code you’re working on and using as a “training model” while contributing to the greater good of that codebase. You’ve been authorised to see this code.
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…
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…
> 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. It's not obvious to me that (2) is a violation of copyright. Unlike patents, copyright violation is not as simple to prove. My understanding is that, at least in the US, independent creation is a valid defense against copyright infringem…
This is the theoretical case but I don't think I've ever seen that actually happen in practice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a human, if I learn how to program by studying copyrighted code, is it unethical for me to use that knowledge to make a living ?
Unless Microsoft is secretly powering Copilot with Mechanical Turk, that isn't what's happening here.
What if instead of Copilot, it was a bunch of humans who were searching all the source code they could access and then copying/autocompleting that code, regardless of the license.
Is that still OK? If yes, why?
Just imagine how in a lawsuit like this, OpenAI can use GPT-3 to generate eloquent court speech with statistical confidence that it can defeat human lawyers? It just comes down to TPU power.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I wonder how many people on HN would be on the side of the creators if we were talking about content created by Walt Disney and whether pirating was ethical?
Equal protection under the law. I am 100% on the side of content creators. Regardless of who they are . The courts tend to take a dim view of theft. Which is what this is. The article clearly lays out that multiple requests for sound legal basis have gone unanswered . It simply doesn’t exist and Microsoft is operating on a forgiveness vs permission model. Licensing is 100% about permissions. Clear and explicit enumer…
Fair use is a major part of copyright law. I do not have to ask permission to use your work.
For you to win in court you have to overcome fair use, you have to overcome innocent infringer, you have to overcome no damages.
Anyone leaving comments saying that there's an obvious way a court would rule on a copyright case involving those 3 things is wrong.
If you don't know Microsoft's history, a lot of what more informed people are worried about seems overblown. Copilot was Microsoft's first test of people's trust after the GitHub acquisition. It's going very, very, very poorly. There were ways to do this with consent and collaboration with the people and projects it takes code from, but they're acting like classic Microsoft here.
Too many people are focused on what's legal. It's fine to think of, but law is the last stop before the breakdown of society. Microsoft skipped society and went straight to sparking an inevitable test of and possible reshaping of copyright law.
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…
> 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. Sure — in the same way that hacking into a competitor's GitHub account and copying their private source code is "genuinely useful" to you. As the person benefitting from unlawfully using their source code, of course you wouldn't care that it rep…