I think MSFT will regret not using some kind of bloom filter to avoid producing existing code verbatim. If they could show that it will never reproduce a long sequence (unless that sequence appears in more than x independent repos) they would have a much stronger argument of being transformative.
GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
141–150 of 475 posts
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#142It will be a real shame if the fantastic achievement of OpenAI with copilot etc is smothered by ego. Innovation in code should be heralded but if in the majority of cases the coder using Copilot and similar tools is just saving time on bog standard functions they could write themselves, it's difficult to understand why that needs to be attributed.
You could make this kind of "just" and "bog standard" argument for anything. Just using an image for educational or illustrative purpose, just using a song for a political rally etc etc. The fact is as a society we have decided to reward creators with copyright as a means to commercialise their creation and get compensation. Who is to say programmers are not creators and the compensation they want for open source lic…
How are you a "creator" (in an attribution-worthy sense) if you are producing an unoriginal implementation of an old algorithm that thousands of coders have produced before you?
Most coding is not innovative, and that is the kind of code that these tools are producing and derived from in most cases.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other side, they could argue that it's like a human learning how to code over a decade of looking at the internet, and that human doesn't need to DM every code author to ask if they can learn from their content (and the risk for the author is similar given the human might one day recall some author's code verbatim and not give attribution).
But the thing is that we explicitly allow humans to learn and develop their own skills learning from other humans, but we have our own taboos around directly copying peoples work without permission and passing it off as your own. The debate is that copilot isn’t a human, it’s a machine that outputs copied work on a statistical basis. Humans are allowed to be unoriginal, uncreative, boring, mediocre, and all sorts of…
> But they’re not copying whole cloth the way copilot is.
Stack Overflow content is CC-BY-SA 4.0 yet I can bet most corporate codebases include tons of code snippets without a link or citation to the original answer
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#144> “Your honor, we needed so many works that it was simply not practical to ask permission of the creators.” I don’t find this argument convincing given the ability today to license many content types at scale for TDM, including images, music and yes, journal articles (See “Full disclosure” above), but it is an argument often offered by infringers. Why is this type of argument even valid? Isn't this fundamentally sayi…
On the other side, they could argue that it's like a human learning how to code over a decade of looking at the internet, and that human doesn't need to DM every code author to ask if they can learn from their content (and the risk for the author is similar given the human might one day recall some author's code verbatim and not give attribution).
We allow humans to do what copilot does because we take into account that the human brain is very limited in this regard. If we could scan all of GitHub in under a week and recall perfectly what we saw we would already have different laws. Now that machines are able to somewhat learn like humans but 1,000,000 faster we need new laws.
That's why I don't believe "but that's like humans doing X" is a strong argument.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#145FOSS licenses need to add provisions that only 100% open and free to download AI models can be trained on works licensed under them. They need to add this yesterday.
That's almost certainly not enforcable though. See any of the cases where people have succesfully defended webscraping while violating TOS.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Copyright is not something that can be signed over by a terms-of-use change of a hosting provider Agreeing to GitHub's terms doesn't try to assign copyright over your code, it grabs licence to use your code however they see fit which is¹ legally quite different. Of course the real fun comes if someone agrees to their terms then uploads some of my code which they have to right to assign the licence to GitHub for. Wh…
How did you type the superscript footnotes? Edit: Wow, this is game changing. Markdown parsers need to implement superscript ascii character support! Lowercase ⁽ᵃ⁾ Uppercase ⁽ᴬ⁾ Numbers ⁽⁹⁹⁾
They are available in most fonts with reasonable-or-better Unicode coverage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...). 1, 2 and 3 are available in ISO-8859-1 so can sometimes be used in 8-bit-only text, but I'd use them with care in that context.
To type them easily you'll usually need composition (sometimes called chording) support. Some Linux (and other Unix) distributions still have this built in by default, though last time I used Linux for much desktop use it seemed to be fading from common availability, otherwise you'll have to hunt for another method. On Windows I use http://wincompose.info/ (here [atlgr][^][1] produces “¹”, for instance, in the default settings) which is useful for a number of other things (I first started using it for accented characters like á on a UK keyboard). If you have a keyboard with programmable function keys then you could use its customisation tool to map some of them to produce the super-script (or sub-script, or other) characters you commonly want.
For less convenient typing, use your OS's Character Map or similar tool.
On Android, unless you have a different keyboard in use which doesn't support this of course, long press on the number on the touch keyboard gives superscripts as an option.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#147It will be a real shame if the fantastic achievement of OpenAI with copilot etc is smothered by ego. Innovation in code should be heralded but if in the majority of cases the coder using Copilot and similar tools is just saving time on bog standard functions they could write themselves, it's difficult to understand why that needs to be attributed.
In my mind I don't want MS to rehash my code and sell it using "OpenAI" as some laundry machine.
Given how insane copyright laws are I would be pleased if they for once worked in my favour.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#148The article is once again mixing up the production of copyrighted work, which is illegal and the training on copyrighted but publicly available work, which afaik isn't illegal. And I don't see how it could be illegal when the code is public (although I don't doubt that lawyers will find a way).
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#149It will be a real shame if the fantastic achievement of OpenAI with copilot etc is smothered by ego. Innovation in code should be heralded but if in the majority of cases the coder using Copilot and similar tools is just saving time on bog standard functions they could write themselves, it's difficult to understand why that needs to be attributed.
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Not that it matters but I contribute to open source myself.
Wrt "devious" and "asshole" I see you are a new poster, you may want to check the site guidelines linked at the bottom of this page.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#150I just skimmed through the case and liked how they defined Artificial intelligence
“Artificial Intelligence’ is referred to herein as ‘AI’. AI is defined for the purposes of this Complaint as a computer program that algorithmically simulates human reasoning or inference, often using statistical methods. Machine Learning (‘ML’) is a subset of AI in which the behavior of the program is derived from studying a corpus of material called training data.”