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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

#201

Post by bblough »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #199
bblough wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your link: > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Not including the copyright information for the MIT-licensed code is a violation of the license.

depends on what is a 'substantial portion' of the software. i think that definition is not very clear.

No, it's not clear, and I guess that's up to the courts to decide.

But in my (non-lawyer) opinion - if the reproduced code is substantial/unique enough to be deemed to be covered by the license, then it's also substantial/unique enough to be subject to that license requirement.

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

#202

Post by oehtXRwMkIs »

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.

Do you mean solution looking for a problem?

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

#203

Post by runnerup »

dcow wrote: post #141
Y_Y wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? Copyright certainly matters. It's a big deal legally and economicically all over the world. Suppose that it's just a bad idea and shouldn't exist. Does that mean that I should release my code into the public domain? I think you could make a good case that even being totally opposed to copyright morally or pragmatically or otherwise, given that it currently is enforced in many places it's worthwhile to p…

Exactly. The copyleft side of me says you can't copyright instructions on how to bake a cake, or a fast route across a city, or a beautiful way to display colored pixels in a grid, or an efficient compression scheme for video data... because it's all intellectual, and not physical, "property". But society disagrees so a nice hack on copyright that perpetually keeps any of the above from being stolen and locked down b…

I really appreciate yours and parents line of reasoning.

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

#204

Post by ghoward »

nybble41 wrote: post #200
ghoward wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, it seems you have not read the licenses because only what can affect the license is in the license. The relevant part of the license is the definition of the covered work, which basically says that the output of any algorithm that uses copyrighted code as input is under the same license. It's wonderfully broad and general IMO. As for my intent, that is published as FAQ's alongside the licenses, but not as part of…

> The relevant part of the license is the definition of the covered work, which basically says that the output of any algorithm that uses copyrighted code as input is under the same license. In other words, you are granting unnecessary additional permission to use the output of an ML algorithm trained on the copyrighted code under the terms of the same license, when your permission was not required if the use of that…

The real question I have is how you think an algorithm doing synthesis is creative.

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

#205

Post by nybble41 »

ghoward wrote: post #204
nybble41 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The relevant part of the license is the definition of the covered work, which basically says that the output of any algorithm that uses copyrighted code as input is under the same license. In other words, you are granting unnecessary additional permission to use the output of an ML algorithm trained on the copyrighted code under the terms of the same license, when your permission was not required if the use of that…

The real question I have is how you think an algorithm doing synthesis is creative.

I never said that the synthesis process was creative; rather the opposite. The point of a tool like Copilot is not to come up with new, creative solutions, but rather to distill many different inputs down to their common elements ("boilerplate") to assist with the boring, repetitive, non-creative aspects of programming. When the tool is working as intended the output will bear a resemblance to many different inputs within the same problem domain and will not be identifiable as a copy of any particular source. Of course there have been certain notable exceptions where the training was over-fitted and a particularly unique prompt resulted in the ML system regurgitating an identifiable input text mostly unchanged, which is why I think it would be a good idea to add an anti-plagiarism filter on the results to prevent such accidental copying, particularly in cases where it might be less obvious to the user.

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

#206

Post by zarzavat »

heavyset_go wrote: post #189
zarzavat wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general taking short excerpts of a copyrighted work is legal and is not infringement.

Try lifting a riff from a Metallica song and see how far you can get selling it commerically. Also, Copilot is copying much more than short excerpts, going as far as to reproduce large amounts of copyrighted code verbatim[1]. [1] https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

If the sample of the Metallica song is insubstantial enough then you may well prevail in court.

It's unsurprising that copilot can reproduce the most famous subroutine of all time precisely, given that it occurs in hundreds or thousands of repos.

Also that code is not copyrightable. Pure algorithms are not copyrightable, copyright of code arises from its literary qualities.

E.g. I can copy an algorithm out of an ISO spec and that doesn't make my code a derivative work of the spec requiring me to pay royalties to ISO.

When you strip out the algorithmic elements out of fast inverse sqrt, you are left with what? Single letter variable names. That is certainly far below the threshold for copyright.

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

#207

Post by snarky_birdie »

davisr wrote: post #7

The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If megacorps like Microsoft can sue people into oblivion for violating their copyright terms, people can sue Microsoft into oblivion for violating theirs. I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game, but I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation be…

>I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game

You don't have to use Github to have a skin in the game. As long as someone has access to your open source code, no matter where it's hosted, anyone is free to upload it to Github. The open source license of your code allows that.

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

#209

Post by ghoward »

nybble41 wrote: post #205
ghoward wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question I have is how you think an algorithm doing synthesis is creative.

I never said that the synthesis process was creative; rather the opposite. The point of a tool like Copilot is not to come up with new, creative solutions, but rather to distill many different inputs down to their common elements ("boilerplate") to assist with the boring, repetitive, non-creative aspects of programming. When the tool is working as intended the output will bear a resemblance to many different inputs w…

> When the tool is working as intended the output will bear a resemblance to many different inputs within the same problem domain and will not be identifiable as a copy of any particular source.

You would have a great argument, and I would actually not be so mad at GitHub, if they had only trained Copilot on such boilerplate/non-copyrightable code. However, they trained it on all of the code in all of the public repositories. That's why we see:

> ...there have been certain notable exceptions where the training was over-fitted and a particularly unique prompt resulted in the ML system regurgitating an identifiable input text mostly unchanged...

The fact that this happens is a sign that GitHub did not train it only on boilerplate; they trained it on truly creative stuff. And they expect people to believe that the output is not under copyright. The gall blows my mind.

But even if it were to take the most repeated pieces of code and only synthesize stuff from that. Would that solve the problem?

Not really because some of the best (i.e., most creative) code is forked the most, meaning that Copilot saw some of the best code over and over.

Here's an experiment you can do (if you have access to Copilot): Start a new C source file, and in a comment at the top, say something like:

    // A Robin Hood open addressed map.
    map_item(
And see what it gives you. I would bet that it will suggest something close to [1], which is my code. (Ignore the license header; the code is actually under the Yzena Network License [2].) Notice that there is no "ymap_item()" function in my code, so this would not be triggering Copilot's overfitting.

The reason I think so is that Copilot doesn't just suggest one line at a time, which if it did, an argument could be made for boilerplate. Instead, it suggests whole sections of code. A good percentage of the time, even maybe a majority of the time, that is not boilerplate.

[1]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/src/map/map...

[2]: https://yzena.com/yzena-network-license/

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