Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#711

Post by SahAssar »

sooyoo wrote: post #666
iepathos wrote: post #554

Earlier 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…

> 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.

That assumes that the licenses of your code and the original code are compatible which often isn't the case.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#713

Post by abigail95 »

cowtools wrote: post #211
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…

Of course it is cherry picked. The idea is that it allows you to INTENTIONALLY void any copyright you want. So let's say I obtain an illegal copy of microsoft windows' source code. Under this precedent, what stops me from just (overfitting) training a neural network to produce the source code verbatim, sans any license notice? But it doesn't end there. What stops me from making a neural network that exactly reproduce…

This doesn't make sense, a byte identical copy of other work is obviously not transformed. So anyone claiming fair use relying heavily on transformation would fail.

But the only thing that does is make step 3 of fair use harder to clear. Not impossible.

There are fair uses of copyright that use the entire identical work as is.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#714

Post by commitpizza »

otterley wrote: post #35
commitpizza wrote: post #6

Great, I hope it is tried in court. It should be. But unfortunately I have not a big hope that the courts will come to understand the issue well enough.

Many courts, especially those in the Northern District of California (where a case would likely end up litigated), are very proficient and literate about software and copyright law. See Judge William Alsup’s cases if you want to see some examples that illustrate the court’s competence. And these judges frequently have technical consultants on staff to assist with technological issues.

Ok, well that sounds nice. I have little to no insight to how courts works in the states so I was talking about my experience of the court system at home :)

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#715

Post by terryf »

sdenton4 wrote: post #686
delusional wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, tha…

But in this case copilot is not equivalent to copy-paste. When doing copy-paste, you are acting with knowledge of the source of the copied code and with intent to copy code.

With copilot, you are not acting with knowledge of the source and not with intent to copy, in fact I'm sure the users would have a reasonable expectation of the tool not copy-pasting existing code verbatim.

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that intent matters a lot.

Popcorn time was also just a tool to allow you to stream data from torrents. That didn't seem to help them put up a legal defence (nor should it have, because the intent was pretty clear on that one).

And seriously, if cases exist, where the only thing a tool does (albeit via a VERY complex implementation path) is to strip a license from a piece of code and serve that code up via an API, then that really does sound like the creators of the tool are at fault.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#716

Post by cool-RR »

While the moral and legal discussions here are interesting and worth exploring, I find this text hyperbolic. Its premise is that the main way that people currently interact with open-source projects is by digging into their source code, copy-pasting away a snippet of code that solves a particular problem, and then of course giving the authors the required attribution.

This is far from the truth. The main usage of most open-source projects isn't as code, but as a product. The median user of an open-source project wants to think about the project as little as possible. They want to be as unaware as possible of the code that makes up the project. They're happy to add the project to their `requirements.txt`, add a few lines to import and use it and then never think about it again.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#717

Post by concordDance »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #609
brian_cloutier wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're saying any work created by a model trained on copyrighted data is a derivative work of that copyrighted data. But this can't be right, it is inconsistent with how copyright has worked so far. Artists and musicians and engineers all learn from each other and have seen and learned from, "trained on" many other examples of works from their field. Even when works are clearly inspired by other works we tend…

courts in the US have repeatedly ruled that humans and machines aren't the same in the eyes of copyright. for example under current case law, nothing created exclusively by a machine is copyrightable.

This is not sane, sustainable or justifiable. E.g. what about that future when we have actual AI people?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#719

Post by xxs »

andyp-kw wrote: post #504
nightski wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/c…

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 ?

If copolot has the ability to write a whole application instead of suggesting based on its lookup and context, you might have a point. Unless proven otherwise I'd consider it a giant lookup table with (self)adjusting weights.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#720

Post by abigail95 »

batmanturkey wrote: post #253
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…

You should read the article before commenting. The WAY it was done with copilot is the problem: no attribution, just shoving all legal liability off on the end “programmer” without providing the attribution required TO COMPLY WITH LICENSES as the diligent programmer tries to clear all the code copilot handed it without meta data. Go read the article before arguing further, please. Otherwise you are wasting all of our…

The only waste of time in this thread is people making allegations about copyright infringement without applying a fair use test.
Post reply on HN