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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

#171

Post by TeMPOraL »

tasubotadas wrote: post #76

God forbit somebody profits from the code that you've posted publicly. It's a NET POSITIVE FOR EVERYBODY.

To the extent Copilot is doing something illegal, or making its users inadvertently engage in illegal behavior, it is copyright infringement, as (most) license violations are copyright violations.

Copyright cuts both ways. Free Software and Open Software exist in context, and because of, copyright laws. This means that a person or a company using output from Copilot may be engaging in copyright infringement. In other words, Copilot is enabling software piracy.

I might be sympathetic to it, and even consider it mostly positive, but then if companies can use my code ignoring the license, I want to be able to Torrent their products in peace too.

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

#172

Post by temac »

yayr wrote: post #153

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…

The way "AI" works for now, Copilot never comes with its own ideas, as it is incapable of deductive reasoning. It basically just detects from the context then mixes variations of things it learned. If there is nothing to mix (that is if there is a single source), the risk of spitting verbatim is high. But if there are multiple sources and some mixing and some amount of tiny differences, said differences better not be not too trivial because I don't see why we would suddenly drop Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison approaches...

So their defense of the like "oh it's fine it very rarely emits verbatim things" is bullshit anyway. That's an answer to a wrong question, at least given the answer is in this direction (would there be ton of verbatim recitation, they obviously would not try to wave away the problem like that -- however we can not conclude anything from verbatim output being rare, despite them stating that as if it a quite central and strong argument)

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

#173

Post by blibble »

dogma1138 wrote: post #51
hmfrh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes Uploading it to Github does not transfer ownership or imply allowances for any use. If you upload it without a license it is a copyright violation to copy the code. Even with an MIT license it is a copyright violation to copy the code without attribution. > I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someon…

Snyk did the same with Snyk code to build their “ML driven SAST” offering. Pretty much anyone can scrape GitHub and train their model. What exactly is the legal implications of this has yet to be tested. Pretty much every model is susceptible to some sort of model inversion or set inclusion attack. By their own admissions Co-Pilot sometimes outputs PII that part of the code and code snippets verbatim, even if it’s ra…

if I feed the entirety of github (sans licenses) into a java HashMap and provided an interface to query that I very much doubt that its output would qualify as "fair use"

why is it different if a slightly more complicated data structure is used?

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

#174

Post by thinkingemote »

Engineering-MD wrote: post #112
blibble wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are probably angry because this is yet another case of a big multinational corporation abusing unclear or difficult to enforce legislation for profit. it's worse than that: it's Microsoft trying to completely undermine the concept of open source meanwhile: they're unaffected as their high-value proprietary code remains private and doesn't train the model

Finally the angle for Microsoft buying GitHub becomes clear.

And once again RMS was proven right.

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

#175

Post by jeroenhd »

jefftk wrote: post #136
jeroenhd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source code still has a license. That license may or may not require distributing the license along with the code. MIT may allow distribution without a license unless the code share is significant, but reusing GPL3 is a no-go for commercial companies. The Apache 2 license allows for commercial use, but has implications for the way you can enforce your software patents. It also requires distributing the license f…

> reusing GPL3 is a no-go for commercial companies The GPL is completely compatible with commercial use. You just need to share modifications to the source with anyone you share the binary with. Many tech companies make extensive use of GPL software, and since they are not providing binaries to their end users they don't even have to share their changes to the source. Even the AGPL, which does require you to share th…

If you include GPL3 code, your code also effectively also becomes GPL3 licensed. This isn't a problem for companies producing GPL3 software, of course, but most companies keep their source code to themselves.

True, the web loophole is a way around this, assuming the GPL'd code isn't part of the compiled/minified/integrated frontend Javascript libraries that gets sent to the client (because then you have the exact same problem).

It's not that commercial use is prohibited by GPL3, it's more that most businesses do not want to risk accidentally releasing a version of their software that requires them to share all source code to that version. And even if you're producing open source software, GPL3 might still be a problem because of incompatible licenses (see ZFS for an example) if you don't own _all_ the copyright so you can dual-license your software.

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

#176

Post by fsckboy »

insulanus wrote: post #151
neolog wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

not only is "problematic" problematic, so is "permissive".

more permissive for whom? because the GPL is the most permissive license for users of the code: GPL guarantees, they're permitted to see the source.

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

#177

Post by randallsquared »

hvis wrote: post #158
randallsquared wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think we're assuming that they used GPT3 (or whatever) on code that was stored on github.com in accordance with their TOS, which means (if I understand correctly as a non-lawyer) that they didn't share it under the terms of the GPL, since they can't, but if whatever licenses the code already had attached were not sufficient, that code was also licensed to github for the purposes of indexing, analysis, and sharing with other github service users.

Does this mean that if you picked up GPL code from gnu.org and put it in your public repo, you're in violation of the GPL for illegitimately licensing that code to gihub under a non-GPL-compatible license? Maybe!

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

#178

Post by jeroenhd »

ineedasername wrote: post #145
jeroenhd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If large company violated my open source license, I'd certainly have a problem with it. Use my code all you want, but follow the basic rules. There's entire websites dedicated to GPL violations; people do care.

If the license allows commercial use, what would the GPL violation be in this case?

The GPL allows commercial use, provided that you ship the source code to the software bundled with the GPL3 source code you use to your customers. Publish a mobile app on any app store with a GPL3 snippet and suddenly you must provide the source code to your entire app under GPL3 terms. That in turn might violate the licenses for the other libraries you use, so mixing libraries might permanently leave you open to lawsuits from either copyright owner.

The GPL also inherently violates the Apple App store guidelines, so you cannot use any GPL snippets for iOS applications you plan to publish there.

There's workarounds for GPL requirements (notable the web loophole, writing applications that don't distribute binaries but generate web content instead, thereby not violating the GPL by not providing the backend source code) but even that has dangers (for example, when you include a snippet of GPL3 code in your (compiled) Javascript code).

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

#179

Post by krapp »

thinkingemote wrote: post #174
Engineering-MD wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally the angle for Microsoft buying GitHub becomes clear.

And once again RMS was proven right.

How would the GPL have prevented this, exactly?

More explicitly, how would a license that gives everyone the right to copy, modify and redistribute source code for any purpose without compensation or attribution have prevented Github from building a tool that copies, modifies and redistributes source code without compensation or attribution?

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

#180

Post by anothernewdude »

kuschku wrote: post #114
hmfrh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes Uploading it to Github does not transfer ownership or imply allowances for any use. If you upload it without a license it is a copyright violation to copy the code. Even with an MIT license it is a copyright violation to copy the code without attribution. > I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someon…

> 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…

> If you upload code to GitHub, you grant them (and every GitHub user) a license to do exactly what Copilot does.

You can upload code to GitHub without the ability to grant such a license, or is github now only for primary copyright holders?

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