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FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

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Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#161

Post by phire »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #149
zarzavat wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft (presumably) did train it on their open source repositories, since those repositories are public GitHub repos. They didn't train it on anybody's private repositories.

But publicly accessible doesn't mean public domain. Microsoft has shared even some of their private code with others like governments. No doubt with strict licenses which they expect to be honored. AGPL and other licenses on publicly accessible code still matter.

Microsoft's apparent legal opinion is that training an AI on the data is the same as reading it, and doesn't require a license.

That as long as they have the right to read the data, they have the right to train an AI on it. The fact that the code is available under an open source license is irreverent to them.

As for why they didn't use their own private code to train their AI, I suspect it was more of a non-malicious: "we don't need to, this public github repo dataset is big enough for now"

Personally, I think Microsoft should double down on this legal stance. Train the AI on all their internal code. And train it on any code they have licensed from other companies too.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#162

Post by thamer »

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #70
lamontcg wrote: post #65

Given how the racist twitterbot AI turned out, along with L4 autonomous driving by 2017, I suspect that Copilot is going to suffer most from an incredibly high velocity of churned out security bugs and bad code. SWEs are probably going to get fired for using it and companies will need to ban it, even if the legal problems don't take it down.

It's useless. It is a problem looking for a solution much like most "AI" tools these days. I am frankly frustrated at everyone buying into this stunt.

Have you tried it? I've been using it for weeks and I'm consistently impressed by its suggestions. It's definitely not a stunt.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#163

Post by judge2020 »

ghoward wrote: post #88
seoaeu wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My licenses say, basically, "Sure, training is fair use, but distributing the output is not." Licenses basically by definition cannot say what is and isn't fair use...

> Licenses basically by definition cannot say what is and isn't fair use... Yes. However, my licenses only say what people already say. Then the licenses go further and say, "But anything else is not allowed." Everyone else says training is fair use. My licenses agree. But they make it clear that I don't believe that anything else is fair use. Yes, these licenses must be tested in court. Except that they poison the w…

Licenses can't dictate what is not allowed unless the user wants to use it in a way compliant with the rest of the license. If you decide to not follow the license at all, then it's effectively like any other copyright where you can use it without the owner's permission under fair use.

That doesn't usually mean you can use code though, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27726343

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#164

Post by reedciccio »

syshum wrote: post #126
warkdarrior wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you abolish copyright, that will only make it easier for for-profit corporations to use FOSS. There will be nothing stopping them from using FOSS, unless people stop sharing their code altogether.

While True, if you abolish copyright then there is nothing preventing me from Installing Microsoft office on as many machines as I want never paying Microsoft a dime....

This is a common misconception: without copyright, Microsoft would still have many legal means to force you to pay for every copy of windows, from contract law to patent licenses. Without copyright there would not be free software and copyleft as we know it.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#165

Post by paulryanrogers »

phire wrote: post #161
paulryanrogers wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But publicly accessible doesn't mean public domain. Microsoft has shared even some of their private code with others like governments. No doubt with strict licenses which they expect to be honored. AGPL and other licenses on publicly accessible code still matter.

Microsoft's apparent legal opinion is that training an AI on the data is the same as reading it, and doesn't require a license. That as long as they have the right to read the data, they have the right to train an AI on it. The fact that the code is available under an open source license is irreverent to them. As for why they didn't use their own private code to train their AI, I suspect it was more of a non-maliciou…

Training is one thing. Regurgitating chunks verbatim without attribution is another.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#166

Post by blibble »

kmeisthax wrote: post #158

>Is Copilot's training on public repositories infringing copyright? Is it fair use? My money's on yes, but this isn't settled until SCOTUS says so. >How likely is the output of Copilot to generate actionable claims of violations on GPL-licensed works? This depends on how likely Copilot is to regurgitate it's training input instead of generate new code. If it only does so IF you specifically ask it to (e.g. by adding…

> My money's on yes, but this isn't settled until SCOTUS says so.

there are more countries in the world than the United States, and most of the world's developers live outside of the United States

copyright only works because the Berne Convention was more or less universally agreed between governments

most countries won't pay any attention to what the US Supreme Court decides

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#167

Post by GuB-42 »

lamontcg wrote: post #155
GuB-42 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think copilot is the wrong application of AI. It spits out what most coders would write for a specific problem. First, if many people have the same problem, than libraries are the solution, not copy-pasting. Also, just because many people do one thing doesn't mean it is the right thing to do, and you sometimes get code with security vulnerabilities. Instead, I would like a system telling me about obscure things, tr…

I'm sure there's an IDE out there which will do that already without any AI. Just need to lint your code, highlight the bad stuff it finds and suggest a refactoring.

Most of them already do, personally, I use SublimeLinter for SublimeText, and LSP support.

But linters work with hand crafted static rules, which is good and the idea is not to replace them. The idea is to used big data techniques to find unwritten rules based on commit histories, the idea being that we are more likely to remove bad code than good code. So if your code looks like code that is often removed, is is most likely bad, even if it doesn't match an explicitely written anti-pattern.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#168

Post by judge2020 »

fadjacent wrote: post #123
ralph84 wrote: post #76

Their link to why you shouldn't use GitHub[0] takes you to a page where they criticize GitHub for complying with US export controls. The FSF is a US corporation, why do they think that US export controls don't equally apply to savannah.gnu.org? And unlike FSF, GitHub has actually done the work of applying for export licenses so that developers in US-sanctioned countries can access GitHub[1]. [0] https://www.gnu.org/s…

there is a different and more important criticism listed too, githus is nonfree. But, github could easily establish a non-us entity to host export restricted code. And for savannah, if anyone had any code they were worried about export control for their code, savannah would quickly and easily have an independent person host that repo outside the US.

To be more specific:

https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#:~:t...

> You agree that any and all content.. that you provide to the public Network... is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Overflow on a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive basis pursuant to Creative Commons licensing terms (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Technically a lot of people who copy from Stack Overflow are breaking CC BY-SA 4.0 since it requires attribution AND requires distributing code that uses it under the same license ( I think - I am not your lawyer) :

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#169

Post by judge2020 »

remram wrote: post #81
grepfru_it wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like this? [GitHub Copilot License Config Menu] Show suggestions with the following tags: - [ ] GPLv3 - [x] GPLv2 - [ ] AGPL - [x] CC-BY-SA - [x] Apache License - [x] MIT License - [ ] No License Attribution

Those licenses require attributions. You can't just say "Copyright (c) all the projects indexed in Copilot".

I would imagine saying "Copyright (c) appropriate rights holders on planet Earth" wouldn't satisfy most license attribution claims if they were ever tested in court.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#170

Post by judge2020 »

blibble wrote: post #166
kmeisthax wrote: post #158

>Is Copilot's training on public repositories infringing copyright? Is it fair use? My money's on yes, but this isn't settled until SCOTUS says so. >How likely is the output of Copilot to generate actionable claims of violations on GPL-licensed works? This depends on how likely Copilot is to regurgitate it's training input instead of generate new code. If it only does so IF you specifically ask it to (e.g. by adding…

> My money's on yes, but this isn't settled until SCOTUS says so. there are more countries in the world than the United States, and most of the world's developers live outside of the United States copyright only works because the Berne Convention was more or less universally agreed between governments most countries won't pay any attention to what the US Supreme Court decides

> most countries won't pay any attention to what the US Supreme Court decides

Copyright lawsuits across nation state lines are pretty much non-existent and not worth it. What matters in the U.S. is pretty much as far as anyone who cares about copyright is going to care about.

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