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GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

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Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#151

Post by insulanus »

neolog wrote: post #56
jwalton wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even with an MIT license it is a copyright violation to copy the code without attribution. That was my take originally, but apparently this is not as cut and dry as you may think: https://www.technollama.co.uk/is-githubs-copilot-potentially...

> People share code for the betterment of society, and while copyleft used to be popular early on, the software industry has been moving towards less problematic and more permissive licences. The spirit of open source is to share code, and make it possible to use it to train machine learning. It sounds like this writer doesn't understand the point of the GPL or the distinction between free software and open source. A…

> the software industry has been moving towards less problematic and more permissive licences [sic]

... less "problematic" for who, exactly?

That is conveniently left out.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#152

Post by rvz »

st_goliath wrote: post #33

> Hi. I know you’re excited about copilot. > ... > It’s truly disappointing to watch people cheer at having their work and time exploited by a company worth billions. Huh? Over the last few days that I've watched this "copilot" story unfold on various news aggregator sites, I've first seen people point out copyright and other issues with it, then the fast inverse square root tweet happened, and then more articles and…

> But I somehow don't really recall anyone besides the Microsoft marketing department being overly excited about it

What you just saw 3 days ago was a hype driven unveiling of a cherry picked contraption by GitHub, OpenAI and Microsoft. Open source became the loser once again and got taken advantage of this clever trick and will soon become a paid service. (With lots of code that is under copyright of various authors.)

Anyone who critiqued the announcement three days ago was drowned out, downvoted and stamped on by the fanatics.

I wanted to see those who had access to it (Not GitHub or Microsoft fans) to demystify and VERIFY the claims rather than blindly trust it. Those suspicions by the skeptics were right, and lots of questions still remain unanswered.

Well done for re-centralising everything to GitHub. Again.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#153

Post by yayr »

see some analysis of the scope of this issue here: https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio...

especially: Conclusion and Next Steps.

This investigation demonstrates that GitHub Copilot can quote a body of code verbatim, but that it rarely does so, and when it does, it mostly quotes code that everybody quotes, and mostly at the beginning of a file, as if to break the ice.

But there’s still one big difference between GitHub Copilot reciting code and me reciting a poem: I know when I’m quoting. I would also like to know when Copilot is echoing existing code rather than coming up with its own ideas. That way, I’m able to look up background information about that code, and to include credit where credit is due.

The answer is obvious: sharing the prefiltering solution we used in this analysis to detect overlap with the training set. When a suggestion contains snippets copied from the training set, the UI should simply tell you where it’s quoted from. You can then either include proper attribution or decide against using that code altogether.

This duplication search is not yet integrated into the technical preview, but we plan to do so. And we will both continue to work on decreasing rates of recitation, and on making its detection more precise.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#154

Post by rcxdude »

ineedasername wrote: post #38

Can't you host code on GitHub that is not "free" for commercial use? If GitHub scraped these projects then it's a problem. Otherwise, Into honestly trying to have a conversation on this to understand the objections because I haven't made up my mind but struggle to see the problem. So pease consider the following: if the code was not encumbered by restrictions I don't see an obvious problem with this. Using code or da…

OpenAI's argument is that this is fair use, in which case the license does not apply at all (though if the court's decision hangs on certain parts of the fair use tests, especially the fourth part, what was contained in the license may have some relevance).

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#155

Post by dylan604 »

chartreusek wrote: post #11
iliekcomputers wrote: post #3

If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes, I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someone who's written quite a lot of MIT code. (And charging for a product which adds value to your developer experience and needs money to be run is not a bad thing)

Sure, but there's still the license at play here. It's not like they trained it only on public domain/CC0 code. What happens when it verbatim outputs a significant amount of code that was originally MIT, or BSD, or GPL licensed without the appropriate attribution. It can create unintended copyright violations and potentially open people using it up to liability.

Maybe they should train the ML to read the license? If the ML can undertand the license, then we'll have to bow down to their superiority. However, if it did understand the license, then it would do the right thing.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#156

Post by dathinab »

yangff wrote: post #130

So.. I can see that this ML model is generating some code exactly same as the original dataset, which definiately a problem. A defect model, sure. Beside that, I cannot understand why the overall idea, using open-source project to train a ML model that generates code would ever be a problem. We human beings are learning as the model, we read others code, books, articles, design patterns... and it becomes part of us.…

> I cannot see why this would be a problem, or why an organic would become something superior that what they do is a creation and a ML mode is scraping your code. What is the difference here????

TL;DR: The AI doesn't know it can't just copy past (from perfect memory) and as such it learned to sometimes just copy past thinks.

The GPT model doesn't: "learn to understand the code and reproduce code based on that knowledge".

What it learns is a bit of understanding but more similar to recombining and tweaking verbatim text snipped it had seen before, without even understanding them or the concept of "not just copy/pasting code". (But while knowing which patterns "fit together").

This means that the model will "if it fits" potentially copy/past code "from memory" instead of writing new code which just happens to be the same/similar. It's like a person with perfect memory sometimes copy pasting code they had seen before pretending they wrote the code based on their "knowledge". Except worse, as it also will copy semantic irrelevant comments or sensitive information (if not pre filtered out before training).

I.e. there is a difference between "having a different kind of understanding" and "vastly missing understanding but compensating it by copying remembered code snippets from memory".

Theoretically it could be possible to create a GPT model which is forced to only understand programming (somewhat) but not memorize text snippets, but practically I think we are still far away from this, as it's really hard to say if a model did memorize copyright protected code.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#158

Post by hvis »

randallsquared wrote: post #137
kuschku wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to […] reproduce Your Content […] as permitted through GitHub' functionality If you upload code to GitHub, you grant them (and every GitHub user) a license to do exactly what Copilot does. This ToS change happened 2017, and I actually had to get approval from all contributors of my projects to accept to the changed ToS: https://github.com/justjanne/Qua…

Yeah, and https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o... has this language: This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video. This license does not grant GitHub t…

Reproducing copylefted code is neither indexing nor analysis.

To be clear, a piece of code that creates a copy of some GPL code is not a problem by itself. However, it's misrepresented as something the tool "generated" rather than code belonging to an existing human actor, without appropriate attribution and licensing info.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#159

Post by hvis »

ineedasername wrote: post #129
TeMPOraL wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It it's actually open source without commercial restrictions though, I don't see an ethical difference in using the code directly or for an meta analysis driving ML for enhanced code completion. Most Open Source code comes with a requirement to carry over license note, which Copilot does not do. Additionally, ethics dictate you attribute the source when copying directly, something the Copilot also doesn't do.

Are they actually using the source to make a derivative/fork though? If reusing the code in another codebase then definitely attribution would be required. But using it as a dataset seems a bit different-- a grey area. Though I would still agree that the right thing to do would be to have an attribution area, even if it was thousands of entries long. Whether technically required by the license or not, the spirit of t…

Don't forget the usage restrictions, as specified in each individual license.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#160

Post by TeMPOraL »

ineedasername wrote: post #129
TeMPOraL wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It it's actually open source without commercial restrictions though, I don't see an ethical difference in using the code directly or for an meta analysis driving ML for enhanced code completion. Most Open Source code comes with a requirement to carry over license note, which Copilot does not do. Additionally, ethics dictate you attribute the source when copying directly, something the Copilot also doesn't do.

Are they actually using the source to make a derivative/fork though? If reusing the code in another codebase then definitely attribution would be required. But using it as a dataset seems a bit different-- a grey area. Though I would still agree that the right thing to do would be to have an attribution area, even if it was thousands of entries long. Whether technically required by the license or not, the spirit of t…

> If reusing the code in another codebase then definitely attribution would be required. But using it as a dataset seems a bit different-- a grey area.

It's already been demonstrated that Copilot - like all tools in the GPT family - frequently output large chunks of their training dataset verbatim. It's not hard to trigger this behavior, even unintentionally. To me, this is much closer to "reusing". But I'm not a lawyer.

It's also worth remembering that there are two parties potentially open to liability here - GitHub, with the way the code was used with the Copilot, and the user, who may be unwittingly including licensed code in their codebase. Given the well-known behavior of the GPT family I mentioned above, it might be hard to argue that Copilot "just chanced" into generating code that's identical to existing, non-public-domain code.

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