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

921–930 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#921

Post by [deleted] »

judge2020 wrote: post #897
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #894

Unfortunately the tone I'm getting from many of these comments makes me feel that people see open source projects as a resource to be mined rather than as a product to be respected. A very entitled attitude ("I really don't want to lose my lovely tool") There seems to be -- on the whole -- little respect for the spirit of the GPL and LGPL and it really is quite a change from, say, 20 years ago, when the 'free softwar…

What do you expect when people grant GitHub an extra license to their repos[0]? 0: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#922

Post by MentallyRetired »

salford wrote: post #919

A good solution might be to add a new license clause stipulating whether the owner is okay with their code being used to train AI models. Part of the clause would explain that if you are okay with your code being trained on, then you're also accepting being okay with it being copied verbatim at some point down the line during code completion. You do get a bit of tragedy of the commons where everybody wants to use the…

It does actually ask if you want to use your code to help train it. The problem is that even when people have said no, they're still seeing their code pop up in copilot's auto-complete.

I don't mind it using my code because in my opinion, we as a software industry are way behind on where we should be and copilot is helping a lot of developers finish their projects quicker.

That said, software licenses should 100% be respected. I would hate for FOSS projects to start being sued over code. It's not in the spirit of FOSS, but neither is stealing code. Copilot should be doing a better job excluding code and none of this would be a problem.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#923

Post by mkr-hn »

salford wrote: post #919

A good solution might be to add a new license clause stipulating whether the owner is okay with their code being used to train AI models. Part of the clause would explain that if you are okay with your code being trained on, then you're also accepting being okay with it being copied verbatim at some point down the line during code completion. You do get a bit of tragedy of the commons where everybody wants to use the…

There's no need for the repo owner do anything: they already indicate the license. GitHub even shows a simple explanation of the license in the repo's main page. GitHub has all the data it needs to respect the license. If their trained model can't reproduce the license for the repo a fragment comes from, then they've failed in their social and legal responsibilities.

I do understand how ML works. I know it's probably not possible with how it's currently done. That doesn't make it legal or ethical.

It would actually be great for everyone if it showed both the license and repo. Imagine you pull up a great function with Copilot and want to explore the source for more insights. You can't with how they've done this.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#924

Post by youssefabdelm »

mahogany wrote: post #913
youssefabdelm wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more... It's very depressing that this post is popular, wouldn't want Copilot shut down over some drama queen lawyers that have no connection to the reality of software development and ALL creative fields. Creation requires influence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc&feature=emb_titl... The entire fucking concept of intellectual property and copyright is flawed from the get go. The issue peo…

> The entire fucking concept of intellectual property and copyright is flawed from the get go. Many people are upset because Microsoft is hiding behind copyright and lawyers to enforce it, while at the same time ignoring the concept of intellectual property when it comes to smaller players. I'd imagine that if Microsoft removed copyright on all their code and released it and Copilot as open source, there would be muc…

This I can very much understand. I agree that this would've been the way to at least partially settle this. But then people will say "What about all the hard work of the employees / teams at Microsoft/OpenAI? Should they not get a return on their investment of time & money?"

In that case, something like the capped profit model OpenAI has (but with less profits) could work. They decide "Okay after we've reached this amount of money for Copilot, we'll both profit and have enough money to sustain it as a service until the next technological breakthrough makes this obsolete"

Then just make it free for everyone forever.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#925

Post by kurtreed »

To me the whole point of open source is selfless giving and sharing. You build something and release the source code in case it's useful for whatever purpose people might have: learning, understanding, contributing, forking, copying, etc. And companies might build on it, train models from it, use it internally, who knows. Great. Other companies can do the same and compete. So can other open source projects.

For some reason when a company benefits from your work instead of some other entity that's bad? Please explain.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#926

Post by waihtis »

kurtreed wrote: post #925

To me the whole point of open source is selfless giving and sharing. You build something and release the source code in case it's useful for whatever purpose people might have: learning, understanding, contributing, forking, copying, etc. And companies might build on it, train models from it, use it internally, who knows. Great. Other companies can do the same and compete. So can other open source projects. For some…

Because a company of Microsoft's magnitude will build a walled garden around their ecosystem over time? Haven't we seen this effect in play like a million times?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#927

Post by magic_hamster »

johnfn wrote: post #535
burkaman wrote: post #515

Earlier 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.

That's hardly a new thing! For instance, Google search makes billions of dollars by indexing content that other people make.

Google makes money from ads. When you strip those away, purely indexing the web and offering a search engine is probably costing them money, not earning.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#928

Post by williamcotton »

paphillips wrote: post #899
williamcotton wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an AI is ingesting and perfectly reproducing someone else's copyrighted works, it is in violation of copyright law in the same way a human would be if they reproduce someone else's copyrighted works. "In computer programs, concerns for efficiency may limit the possible ways to achieve a particular function, making a particular expression necessary to achieving the idea. In this case, the expression is not protec…

In my opinion this is a key comment in this thread and everyone subject to United States law should read the Abstraction Filtration Comparison (AFC) legal test when refining their opinion. Also, I have no legal background, but as far as I know patent law != copyright law. Specifically within AFC, note the "idea/expression dichotomy" [1] which clearly states: "copyright law protects an author's expression, but not the…

> Thus, if this tools spits out someone else's code verbatim it is a definite copyright infringement.

That is not true. It can be verbatim and not a copyright violation if it can be shown that the expression in question is strictly utilitarian! I literally provided a quote from that AFC article that says this!

There's even precedent that prior art nullifies a copyright claim, as seen in Johannsongs-Publishing, Ltd. v. Rolf Lovland:

"Johannsongs failed to offer admissible evidence to rebut Ferrara’s analysis, so there is no genuine dispute of material fact as to his conclusions that Söknuður and You Raise Me Up are not substantially similar and most of their similarities are attributable to prior art."

And this was about music, not software, which has always sat uncomfortably between utility and expression, if only because it is some kind of writing. No one is claiming copyrights over Photoshop filter settings or other inputs manipulated by sliders or buttons!

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#929

Post by reitanqild »

i_like_apis wrote: post #821
BowBun wrote: post #794

I'm in favor of this. You can't ingest code that says "you cannot use this without attribution", put it through a bunch of if statements that strip the license, and then say it's "AI-generated". I don't care about most of our generic CRUD apps or the 15th rewrite of a sorting algorithm, but I do care about those smart enough to advance the field and come up with novel solutions. If we take away the incentive for attr…

Totally disagree. Training is fair use. It is akin to learning. Code licenses do not restrict you from reading or learning. ML training needs to be fair use of copyrighted works, or most machine learning and AI projects will be impossible.

Training by reading others works can be fair use.

But the moment you start reproducing more than a few lines of prose without attribution I guess you are in for a nasty letter.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#930

Post by ballenf »

an1sotropy wrote: post #910
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #894

Unfortunately the tone I'm getting from many of these comments makes me feel that people see open source projects as a resource to be mined rather than as a product to be respected. A very entitled attitude ("I really don't want to lose my lovely tool") There seems to be -- on the whole -- little respect for the spirit of the GPL and LGPL and it really is quite a change from, say, 20 years ago, when the 'free softwar…

Agreed. Something else apparent from the comments is that people seem to think that some things are copyrighted, and some aren't, and that copilot would be better if it could avoid copyrighted code. Actually, essentially ALL code is copyrighted, and was so the moment it was written, and someone owns that copyright [1]. People only start noticing copyright when the terms of how that copyrighted content is licensed aff…

Copyright is our current framework for rewarding creativity and encouraging innovation. It fundamentally depends on the assumption that protection of creative works is possible and feasible. That assumption is what's under assault by copilot and AI systems in general.

It's easy to forget that protection of creative works is only a means to end, not the goal or ideal state.

I believe AI systems will be able to help us build a new system that can track attribution of ideas and identify predecessor works from derivative products. This attribution could then form the foundation of a reward system. This is just one possible future.

Post reply on HN