161–170 of 806 posts
if you're posting your code publicly on the web, its hard to get upset that people are seeing/using it
It's under the very specific license though. With your logic it's OK to train AI on a leaked Windows code then. It is/was publicly on the web.
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That's an entirely plausible explanation, but it doesn't mean that Microsoft has any less of a legal nightmare on their hands.
I'm not really sure what I think about this. How responsible should Microsoft be for someone's badly licensed code on their platform? If they somehow had the ability to ban projects using stolen snippets of code, I don't think I'd dare to host my hobby projects there. If you can't trust that the code in a project is compatible with the license of the project then the only option I see is that copilot cannot exist. I…
Precisely. Would it be okay for me to publish some code as GPL because my buddy gave it to me and promised that it was totally legit and I could use it and it definitely wasn't copy-pasted from one of the Windows source leaks?
> If you can't trust that the code in a project is compatible with the license of the project then the only option I see is that copilot cannot exist.
It might be possible to feed it only manually-vetted inputs, but yes; as it currently is, Copilot appears to be little but a massive copyright-infringement engine.
Microsoft should just train it on all their proprietary code instead. See how sanguine they are about it then.
As a thought experiment: what do we all suppose would be the impact to Microsoft if they deliberately made public the proprietary source code for all of their publicly available commercial products and efforts (including licensed software, services; excluding private contracts, research), but the rest of their intellectual property and trade secrets remained private? Since I’m posing the question, here’s my guess: -…
It’s so annoying that they are sooooo slow at this and we have to keep our users from upgrading after every release.
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Basically, copyright is for people with copyright lawyers
That's not even a joke. One of the premises of a copyright is that you defend your intellectual property or lose it. If the system were more equitable then it would defend your copyright.
Trademarks require active defense to avoid genericization. Copyright may be asserted at the holder's discretion.
This is a huge and looming legal problem. I wonder if what should be a big uproar about it is muted by the widespread acceptance/approval of github and related products, in which case its a nice example of how monopolies damage communities.
Only then will we see an answer to the question "is making an AI write your stolen code a viable excuse".
I very much approve of the idea of Copilot as long as the copied code is annotated with the right license. I understand this is a difficult challenge but just because this is difficult doesn't mean such a requirement should become optional; rather, it should encourage companies to fix their questionable IP problems before releasing these products into the wild, especially if they do so in exchange for payment.
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When Joe Rando plays a song from 1640 on a violin he gets a copyright claim on Youtube. When Jane Rando uses devtools to check a website source code she gets sued. When Microsoft steals all code on their platform and sells it, they get lauded. When "Open" AI steals thousands of copyrighted images and sells them, they get lauded. I am skeptical of imaginary property myself, but fuck this one set of rules for the poor,…
> Joe Rando plays a song from 1640 on a violin he gets a copyright claim on Youtube That can't possibly be a valid claim, right? AFAIK copyright is "gone" after the original author dies + ~70 years. Before fairly recently it was even shorter. Something from 1640 surely can't be claimed under copyright protection. There are much more recent changes where that might not be the case, but 1640? > When Jane Rando uses dev…
This becomes particularly onerous when trolls claim copyright on published recordings of environmental sounds that happen to be similar but not identical to someone else's but they do have a legitimate claim on the original recording.
If the issue is more specifically copyright infringement, then leverage the legal apparatus in place for that. Their lawyers might listen better.
This is not a strongly held opinion and if you disagree I would love to hear your constructive thoughts!
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You can slow this, you can't stop it whatsoever. It's about as ultimately futile as an effort as trying to stop piracy. People are ALREADY running salesforce codegen and stable diffusion at home, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, what we'll have 20 years from now is going to make critics of these tools have nightmares. If you try to outlaw it, the day before the laws come into effect, I'm going to download…
> You can slow this, you can't stop it whatsoever. It's about as ultimately futile as an effort as trying to stop piracy. ... But STOPPING the use of these tools? Go ahead and try, won't happen. So? No one needs to stop it totally . The world isn't black and white, pushing it to the fringes is almost certainly a sufficient success. Outlawing murder hasn't stopped murder, but no one's given up on enforcing those laws…
And as computers get more powerful and the models get more efficient it'll become easier and easier to self host and run them on your own dime. There are already one click installers for generative models such as stable diffusion that run on modest hardware from a few years back.
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I think the distinction is that only one of those classes tends to produce exact copies of work. Programmers get very upset at DALL-E and Stable Diffusion producing exact (and near-exact) copies of artwork too. In contrast to exact copying, production of imitations (not exact copies, but "X in the style of Y") is something that artists have been doing for centuries, and is widely thought of as part of arts education.…
I'm mildly suspicious that this example is an implementation of a generic matrix functionality though: you couldn't patent this sort of work, because it's not patentable - it's a mathematics. It's fundamentally a basic operation, that would have to be implemented with a similar structure regardless of how you do it.
This shows how copyright is all screwed up. Let's say the code in question is based on a published algorithm, maybe Yuster and Zwick, (I did not check). What exactly gives Davis a better claim to the copyright than the inventors of the algorithm? Yes, I know software is copyrightable while algorithms are not, but it is not at all clear to my why that should be the case. The effort of translating an algorithm into cod…
I work for a large tech company whose lawyers definitely care that my code doesn't train an AI model somewhere much more than I do. On the contrary, I would really like to open source all of my work - it would make it more impactful and would demonstrate my skills. It makes me a bit sad that my life's work is going to be behind lock and key, visible to relatively few people. Not to mention that the hundreds of thousands of work hours, energy and effort that will be spent to replicate it all over my industry in all other lock-and-key companies makes the industry as a whole tremendously inefficient.
I hope that AI models like Copilot will finally show to the very litigious tech companies that their intellectual property has been all over the public domain from the start. And we can get over a lot of the petty algorithm IP suits that probably hold back all tech in aggregate. We should all be working together, not racing against each other in the pursuit of shareholder value.
Historically, mathematicians used to keep their solutions secret in the interest of employment in the middle ages. So there used to be mathematicians that could, for example, solve certain quadratic equations but it took centuries before all humanity could not benefit from this knowledge. I believe this is what is happening with algorithms now. And it is very counter-progress in my opinion.