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I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

thelig.ht

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Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#191
post #34

I thought this was a pretty good thread (by an ex-Wikipedia lawyer) on Twitter about the IP meaning of Copilot. https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410242882523459585... And this is a longer article about how IP and AI interact: https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright... I am not a lawyer, but I am capable of summarizing the thoughts of lawyers, so my take is that in general, fair use allow…

Wouldn’t this make for a simple license laundering system?

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#192

Semi-related question, The MIT license template has "Copyright © 2021 ", but don't I have to register copyrights somewhere? I've always been confused by this. Do I just stick "Copyright MyName" in my GitHub repos? It seems like this is what most people do..

Copyright does not require registration, although there may be advantages to doing so.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#193
It’s time to abolish copyright (http://www.breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendmen...). It absolutely makes no sense—unless your rich and don’t care about the progress of the arts and sciences.

You can spin your wheels all you want but going from simple first principles it is fundamentally flawed. If you believe ideas can be property, then you believe people can be property.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#194
This is hyperbole / pretend outrage. No sane person claims to be outraged at a company because they made a silly oversight in their experimental product. Obviously Github can just create one instance of Copilot trained with each incompatible license. Even if it used heuristics to find out the license, a tiny subset of code that is accidentally admitted into the training would be negligable, and copyright concerns in software have always been already overblown to begin with.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your example is the very specific scenario where you're attempting to replicate an entire program, API, etc., to identical specifications. That's obviously not fair use. You're not dealing with little bits and pieces, you're dealing with an entire finished product. No - google's 9 lines of sorting algorithm (iirc) copied from Oracle's implementation were not considered fair use in the Google / Oracle debacle. Likew…

Sorry, but you're not recalling correctly. :) The Supreme Court decided Google v. Oracle was fair use. It was 3 months ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_... That's the highest form of precedent, the question has now been effectively settled (unless Congress ever changes the law). Edit: added a dummy hash to end of URL so HN parses it correctly (thanks @thewakalix below)

The fair use was about Googled API reimplementation. It becomes a whole different case with a 1:1 copy of code. And don't forget fair use works in the US, not necessarily in the rest of the world.

But I'm happy about all the new GPL programs created by Copilot

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course not. Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied. Those projects could hire people familiar with competitor code and assign them to competing projects if they wanted. The contributors could, in theory, write new code with…

In this case though we have machine learning model that is trained with some code and is not merely learning abstract concepts to be applied generally in different domains, but instead can use that knowledge to produce code that looks pretty much the same as the learning material, given the context that fits the learning material. If humans did that, it would be hard to argue they didn't outright copy the source. Whe…

>When a machine does it, does it matter if the machine literally copied it from sources, or first transformed it into an isomorphic model in its "head" before regurgitating it back?

You've hit the nail on the head here. If this is okay, then neural nets are simply machines for laundering IP. We don't worry about people memorizing proprietary source code and "accidentally" using it because it's virtually impossible for a human to do that without realizing it. But it's trivial for a neural net to do it, so comparisons to humans applying their knowledge are flawed.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#197

This is exactly why people have issue with Github's Copilot. It's not the technology, but the fact that any code you pushed to GitHub in the past 13 years is now 'accessible' to anyone. Private repo? Paid account? Deleted repo five years ago? Deleted repo today? Proprietary code? Embarassing commits? Accidental API keys or passwords in commits? All 'available'. It feels like the entirety of GitHub was just 'leaked',…

I know that some people have uploaded the Microsoft research kernel or even the leaked Windows source code to github at some point. I wonder what Microsoft will do when snippets from that code start appearing in your code because of copilot. I'm guessing their lawyers wouldn't accept "the robot did it" as an excuse in that case. I'm tempted to just throwing stuff like "AWS_KEY=" at the algorithm and see how many work…

> I'm tempted to just throwing stuff like "AWS_KEY=" at the algorithm and see

Anybody tried? What does actually happen if you do this kind of thing? I can think of a few more obvious "script kiddie" ideas, but I won't post them here lest a copilot developer sees it and closes all the elementary stuff.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#198
I have some of my code BSD0 licensed (in practice public domain). One thing that I'm vary of regarding Copilot is: what would happen if my code would become a part of some proprietary code by a big multinational corporation and then they would DMCA me out? I'm a bit in the middle of a digital housekeeping and I think I will move my code somewhere else, because of it.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#199
post #34

I thought this was a pretty good thread (by an ex-Wikipedia lawyer) on Twitter about the IP meaning of Copilot. https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410242882523459585... And this is a longer article about how IP and AI interact: https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright... I am not a lawyer, but I am capable of summarizing the thoughts of lawyers, so my take is that in general, fair use allow…

> Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. This would be interesting to test with AI and pop music.

Perhaps the final judgment would say "AI cannot infringe on copyright provided that only other AIs consume the result of the first AIs work".

And suddenly there is a world of robots composing, writing and painting for other robots. With us humans left out.

There should be a /s at the end, but legal world sometimes produces such convolutions. See, for example, the interpretation of the Commerce Clause in Gonzales v. Reich.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#200

Anyone know how they're hosting their repositories? https://thelig.ht/code/ is actually kind of nice and minimalist; I was hoping to set up the same thing, mostly just for kicks.

it’s built with stagit: https://codemadness.org/stagit.html

Love the minimal style and monospace font!

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