261–270 of 475 posts
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It's very easy to be generous with other people's property, intellectual or otherwise.
It's also pretty easy to be generous with your own when it comes to copilot. I have not been damaged in any way by copilot learning from my code, and no one else has either.
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> I still think "training is fair use" still has a leg to stand on, though If that's the case, we need to serious re-consider how we reward Open Source as a society (I think that would be fantastic anyway!) -- we have people producing knowledge and others profiting directly from this material, producing new content and new code that's incompatible with the original license. You make GPL code, a make an AI that learns…
If open source code authors (and other content creators) don't want their IP to be used in AI training data sets then they can simply change the license terms to prohibit that use. And if they really want to control how their IP is used then they shouldn't host it on GitHub in the first place. Of course Microsoft is going to look for ways to monetize that data.
GitHub's argument* is not that they're following the license but that the license does not apply to their use. So they would continue to ignore any provision that says they can't use the material for training.
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740001
Moving off GitHub is a better step at a practical level. But again they claim the license doesn't matter, so even if it's hosted publicly elsewhere they would (presumably) maintain that they can still scoop it up. It just becomes more work, for them, to do so.
*Which is completely wrong in my opinion, for the record
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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…
Whenever I've used Copilot it never seems to copy whole sections of code. Can you provide examples of this? From what I've seen it is producing fairly generic boilerplate that has been modified based on the rest of the code in my repo so that it works with the other functions and even incorporates other pieces of my code in the same style that I'm using. The boilerplate aspect makes sense because this would be the mo…
Probably helps that this is from a codebase that's been forked quite a bit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very easy to be generous with other people's property, intellectual or otherwise.
It's also very easy to invent supposed "intellectual property" rights out of thin air that conveniently last for a century or more (!) for your own work. But instead of either of these views that focus on selfishness, it's much more productive to instead think about what benefits society as a whole.
It's so bizarre to see these prima facie bad arguments being used by someone who isn't being paid by Microsoft to make them. If Microsoft puts all of their code in, requires anyone who uses copilot to share their code with the algorithm, and allows anyone to run the model on their own platform complete with updates, you'll see all of the FOSS objections dry up in an instant.
I'm still baffled as to why people treat Github like a public library despite being owned by what was at one time the greatest enemy of free and open source software in existence. Not saying they haven't changed their tune somewhat, but a library owned by Barnes and Noble is going to have very different incentives than an actual library. Made all the more silly by the fact that it's Git. You could just host it yourse…
>Made all the more silly by the fact that it's Git. You could just host it yourself for five bucks a month Ah, but GitHub isn't selling git hosting. It's a social network that also does git. That's the cake that Microsoft bought, not the UI and API frosting.
Excellent. GitHub is in my opinion crossing a whole pile of lines here that should not have been crossed without the authors explicit permission, regardless of the utility of the tool they built. Copyright is not something that can be signed over by a terms-of-use change of a hosting provider, the expectation is that your host does not automatically claim the rights to anything that you store there. Such projects sho…
If this lawsuit succeeds, I have a startup idea that I think would be effective. Create a for-profit copyright registry for code snippets that are long enough to qualify for copyright protection. You can be the canonical owner of the copyright for a given piece of code! For a premium fee, we can generate and submit a patent on your behalf as well. Once I have a large corpus (perhaps millions of entries of code, most…
I'm still baffled as to why people treat Github like a public library despite being owned by what was at one time the greatest enemy of free and open source software in existence. Not saying they haven't changed their tune somewhat, but a library owned by Barnes and Noble is going to have very different incentives than an actual library. Made all the more silly by the fact that it's Git. You could just host it yourse…
> “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…
> Isn't this fundamentally saying, "The cost of not infringing copyright is massive, so we will glibly infringe!" Copyright is not a natural human right; it's a construct invented and conferred by governments in order to achieve certain objectives. (It's more like a state license than a right, to be honest; using "right" was a historical masterstroke from the original inventors). As such, if those objectives can be p…
I don't know of a better definition for "natural human right" than "a right/privilege/protection given to everyone automatically, even if they don't know about it or claim it, unless they specifically opt out of it." We get to decide what our "natural human rights" are, and we've decided that you automatically get copyright on your creative works even if you don't know what copyright is. Seems like a good thing, and a natural human right.
It 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.
I agree with you. I love using copilot (and similar tools) and I’ve found it is exceedingly good at predicting patterns in my own coding. It has saved me a lot of time, and I would hate for it to go away or be crippled because of lawsuits like this. I could care less if my own code is used for training. My code isn’t precious, it’s what I do with it that is important.
Literally no one objects to people like you donating your code to Microsoft.