181–190 of 201 posts
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Regardless of the nuances of that point, GitHub copilot violates copyright because the content it was trained on still lives in it, and you can get it to spit it out verbatim. If I were a master artist, my existence wouldn’t violate copyright, but I would certainly be violating it every time I chose to reproduce a copyrighted work for a client.
Okay but do any lawyers agree with you?
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The following is just my opinion, and I'm not that hard-set in case anyone has any nice arguments. Generally, when you (for example) use GANs to learn from (copyrighted) images and generate new images, I see no reason why those new images should inherit any copyrights from the original image if the resulting images look sufficiently different. (Obviously, if you just train on 1000 images of Mickey Mouse, you'll get m…
What about I train millions of tagged images, then when I write ‘mickey mouse’ it spits something very similar to ‘mickey mouse’? This is the what copilot does as far as I understand
In my view, artists work the same way. If you ask them to draw Mickey Mouse, they (maybe) will. It wouldn't be fair to say that they are infringing on Disney's copyright by storing images of Mickey Mouse in their brain. But their version of Mickey Mouse won't be copyrightable (unless they add parody/significant creativity etc.).
If we perform an _exact_ simulation of a human brain such that it believes it is a human, how will copyright law work? (Maybe it will own the copyright and turning the simulation off would be robocide. Okay, enough sci-fi.) If we remove consciousness and all that from the simulation, will the copyright go to its creator?
I saw in a couple other comments saying that machine learning is "just an algorithm"... But is machine learning sufficiently different from the way some parts of the human brain work to warrant being held to different standards?
My opinion is that it's reasonably similar and should have the same privileges that humans enjoy -- learning from whatever's in sight that is not explicitly marked as "for authorized personnel only".
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I as an open source author absolutely do not want Microsoft to get richer from using my code, code that I contributed or published for the benefits of other developers. They took my work, removed my name and trained an advanced pattern matching technique to try to make code like mine and then sell it. It’s so obviously ethically questionable it’s insane. Developers are absolutely pissed about this, and rightfully so.
Did you license your code under terms that allowed them to do so?
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I as an open source author absolutely do not want Microsoft to get richer from using my code, code that I contributed or published for the benefits of other developers. They took my work, removed my name and trained an advanced pattern matching technique to try to make code like mine and then sell it. It’s so obviously ethically questionable it’s insane. Developers are absolutely pissed about this, and rightfully so.
Then you should have never released it. Fairly straight forward solution to your very unique problem.
It’s such a BS argument to say “your license didn’t anticipate the future, it’s your fault.” No, that’s not how law works.
Furthermore, law is not ethics. I said it’s ethically questionable because that’s what matters. Not if a court will find Microsoft guilty of some kind of overreach.
Anybody with even passing knowledge of law knows this, so please, stuff it somewhere.
Given it's far from getting syntax and semantics right, it should probably be best to position this product as a tool that promotes creativity not productivity.
Copilot was made from stealing code on Github, ignoring the licenses set on repos such as e.g GPLv2, using AI as a trick to license-launder code. Copilot has announced their plans to become a paid service. So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company.
The following is just my opinion, and I'm not that hard-set in case anyone has any nice arguments. Generally, when you (for example) use GANs to learn from (copyrighted) images and generate new images, I see no reason why those new images should inherit any copyrights from the original image if the resulting images look sufficiently different. (Obviously, if you just train on 1000 images of Mickey Mouse, you'll get m…
This was discussed on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740001
A new license saying "this license does not permit use in training an AI" won't have any effect, because the claim by the trainers is that they don't need to license the work in the first place. Unfortunately this is likely to be something that's only settled ad hoc in court.
There's an interesting section that talks about what you want from a pair programmer - questioning your assumptions, spotting errors, debating design with you, etc, and how Copilot doesn't do this, but instead just spits out the code it thinks you want. That made me think that, when using Copilot, the human is actually the copilot. You're the one spotting bugs, picking different designs, and so on. I also think the d…
Right but realize how much of a marginal gain we're fighting for here. You can already do this with a separate window and some extra clicking and typing. Saving a little clicking and typing isn't a huge win, unless you're also willing to argue the most valuable work a SWE does is the clicking and typing.
This whole thing feels ultimately like a PR spot that we're all tripping over ourselves to participate with. Its the SWE equivalent of getting all excited about how self-driving is just around the corner TM. It's a premature waste of energy until real advancements are made.
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Not even copyleft licenses prohibit somebody from earning money from what you released, and that includes Microsoft. The idea behind free software is that it benefits all users equally, even if other developers get the biggest direct benefit. The best question to ask yourself is if you would be annoyed as much if a company like Black Duck did a similar training or analysis with their OpenHub (openhub.net)? I think on…
CC-BY-NC explicitly prohibits commercial usage. It’s also common to see GPL license for non-commercial usage and paid licenses for commercial usage.
If CC-BY-NC prohibits commercial use, it is not an open source or free software license (which have compatible definitions, but differ in motivations).
AFAIK, Creative Commons was set to create a set of licenses in the spirit of open source for creative works, and I wouldn't expect them to be open source at all.
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I as an open source author absolutely do not want Microsoft to get richer from using my code, code that I contributed or published for the benefits of other developers. They took my work, removed my name and trained an advanced pattern matching technique to try to make code like mine and then sell it. It’s so obviously ethically questionable it’s insane. Developers are absolutely pissed about this, and rightfully so.
It doesn't matter what you want . You released your code under an open source license. What matters now is what the license says.
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Basically you are saying any product thats free should be able to break the law arbitrarily? Google can decide to post your all email online, your location history for all time, your photos and you would be ok with that because its free? The undoubtedly free DNS server you use can leak all your requests too? You're ok with that? Yes its free, no they did not tell me or ask for my permission before using the code in t…
However you did give them permission to use your code by the fact that you acceded to their terms and conditions[1] when you created an account. IANAL, I don't know if this section would hold to scrutiny in a court of law, but I'm pretty sure this is what their legal team considers to cover them when it comes to training Copilot on code hosted with them. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-…
> Certainly the GitHub TOS grants them some common-sense ability to copy the code you upload so that they can usefully host it. Can you point to the portion that allows them to use it for Copilot?
> Because I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Section D4:
> > This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service...