Uhm, strangely I get a Connection Reset error in the browser when I try to access the URL from the corporate network, but it works without problems from my phone
GitHub Copilot investigation
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#682It 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 enables the large scale theft of code. It completely ignores licenses. There are plenty of open source licenses that allow code use with proper attribution yet Copilot doesn't (and probably can't) figure a way to comply with all of them.
Copilot, as the article suggests, is a marketing stunt. To me it's more than that. It's Microsoft pushing the boundaries of law using it's money muscle again. I have been screaming from the rooftops that VSCode was just M$ spyware and I get legitimately made fun of for it. Now we have Copilot as well and they aren't even hiding it.
To address your point more directly if you do any work for monetary gain Copilot is a defacto liability. You can't just take 20 lines of completely stolen code, modify a few things, and call it your own. That's why legal reverse engineering has an entire black-box method of development. QA, researchers, and developers aren't even allowed to talk to each other directly.
I hope Copilot does get shutdown. Along with everything like it. It is one thing to have an AI trained on your workplace's code, or specific code following specific licenses, but the blatant theft of not only licensed open source code, but also private code, is a terrible precedent to have.
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#683An intrim update to Copilot could link to where the code as pulled from. Or maybe there's a way for open source devs to add a comment to the code that links to their community/repo. If it was standardised then any data gathering would need to follow the collection rule.
I agree with the article's long term outlook about community and code quality, it is a very long term outlook though. It makes me wonder if humans will actually be writing code.
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think most people are concerned that Copilot is going to be reproducing verbatim copyrighted code, it's more that it sucks that a giant corporation is going to make a billion dollars from a tool that is entirely built off of millions of peoples' work who were never asked permission and will never be compensated.
I don’t think anyone really cares about that kind of stuff, though. Like, there are loads of examples of similar things which no one (rightfully) bags an eye at. Like if I take a photograph of you out in the public and sell the photo for $1 million, would you expect compensation? Or if someone compiles a list of the best restaurants in the world and sells that list, do you think the restaurants should be compensated?…
Bad example. A better example is I am a vendor across the street giving away free books. However, to comply and get a free book I require you to keep the book's bibliography intact.
You don't do this. You get my books, cut out the bibliography, glue all the pages together, and then sell the book as your own.
It is my book and all you did is derive some work from it.
Curation companies have the same problem and there are plenty of high profile lawsuits about it.
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#685Don't confuse what you want with what the law says
"Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device" [https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html]
A copy is made whenever that text is displayed, e.g., in GitHub's UI. Even that copy is subject to copyright.
Is there an excuse/exception? In this case, there is no "fair use" exception, because exceptions have to be litigated case-by-case to be recognized, and there are no remotely similar situations. Don't forget: Lexis is a multi-billion-dollar business built on protecting the copyright to the page numbers in the otherwise public court opinions.
Does the law actually protect people if it's too costly to enforce? Not really; hence the blase attitude. Congress is considering a "small claims" system for copyright, to remedy the big-firm bias. [https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92appm.html]
In the ML era, data is the new gold. Many, many firms nowadays get a good chunk of their revenues from selling their private view of "public" data: Facebook, LinkedIn, credit reporting companies, ADP, etc. Microsoft has gone all-in on stealing that gold from open-source developers.
It's not just that the code replication reduces any need to get the code from the source. But removing any link to the source destroys the value most-commonly sought in open-source software: recognition.
Salaries are the biggest expense of tech companies. They do everything they can to increase labor competition and reduce reputational rents: outsource, cross-train, promote open-source (for competition) and destroy any reputation networks or systems that justify higher rates. And, of course, standardize on containerized copy-paste or AI-generated software if they can.
So, no: copilot is not legal, it's socially and economically destabilizing, and it presents structural challenges to developers.
It's not good, but most will keep using it because although the vast, vast majority of developers are wage laborers, they aspire to be founders. They see it can make code fast, and they'll think it make them better.
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really appreciated the argument in the book "The New Breed," which is that we should adapt ideas around the governance of animals to governance of ML: You can train your dog to attack random passersby, but if you do, you're a monster and ultimately responsible for the dog's actions. Likewise, you can tell Copilot to crank out code specific algorithms written by specific people, but if you do so, you're still creati…
This just sounds like blaming the researchers to me. How would i ever know if my "boring code completion" was actually copyright infringement? Your argument just disallows discussing the problem while doing absolutely nothing about it. If you train your dog to NOT attack random passersby and it still does, that dog is euthanized no matter your intentions.
Tim Davis doesn't actually have any instance of copyright infringement to complain about; he was able to induce Copilot to /mostly/ recreate his code through careful prompting, but no one has actually deployed the code. By the same token, we don't outlaw ctrl-c and ctrl-v buttons on computers.
There is plenty of space here to discuss developing tools to check for unintentional infringement. I would guess, though, that such tools would sweep up a whoooole lot of non-copilot human usage and make it much harder to deploy anything new.
So, maybe a better discussion to have here is how to make the animal safer, not the total outlawing of the animal. Single-line completions (the majority of co-pilot usage) aren't infringing. Probably true for almost-any few line completion. So, capping the amount of consecutive auto-completed code might be a reasonable 'muzzle' on the model to keep it reasonably safe.
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in the same way that hacking into a competitor's GitHub account That's like comparing grand-theft auto to someone stealing a pack of gum from a convenience store. It's not a useful analogy. The latter is still a problem, but we don't need to be FUDy about it. And OPs right, this will keep happening until we come up with better ways of solving this problem. Whether that's educating companies on the legal (and moral)…
OP can correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't seem particularly interested in solving anything. They literally said "I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content." So the problem, as I see it, is the people who see the laundering of open source and proprietary code as a draw , rather than a drawback .
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Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#688As a joke, I made a webpage where you can do attribution to ALL GitHub repositories:
It scrolls past all the repos movie-credits-style. Doing it that way takes several days! It shows how abstract and absurd giving contribution to such a large body of works is.
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans do violate copyright if they use copyrighted passages directly in their work and pass it off as their own without any attribution, which is what copilot has been show to sometimes do, though not always. Copilot will sometimes offer chunks of code that can be found verbatim in open source code bases and passes it off to users without attribution. I agree it is ok to learn from copyrighted work and reproduce new…
> Microsoft will likely need to add checks to prevent copilot from offering verbatim copies of code going forward to try to avoid copyright violations here. Or they could integrate a way to find the produced output back in the corpus if it's sufficiently close and provide a reference/attribution. Basically whatever tool a copyright lawyer would use to track down original work. And that's just the engineering solution…
A Twitter thread linked yesterday showed that a keyword and the name of the original code's author in the Copilot prompt produced an almost exact copy of that developer's code. Copilot already does know the origin sometimes.
Edit: here's the related tweet: https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581632706693079042
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems pretty clear to me, training an AI on copyrighted materials is not fair use. I'm not sure why you seem to think it is fair use
> I'm not sure why you seem to think it is fair use I think OP explains clearly, in many paragraphs, why it's fair use. That's literally what their whole post is about.
The comment is a quintessential HN comment: all tone, little substance. It just claims that it's fair use because the AI learns things, which is not a criterion for fair use at all. People here just throw around fair use as a catch-all term for everything that should be allowed based on their personal gut feeling.