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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#221

Post by ThereIsNoWorry »

teakettle42 wrote: post #216
ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code plagiarization is not a thing by all practical purposes (it's even almost impossible to go to court with that for very obvious reasons). And that's good. Because with that insane lockdown of "Intellectual Property" nothing would ever get done. So, think what you want.

> Code plagiarization is not a thing by all practical purposes Of course it is. Plagiarism is “the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.” It’s unethical and it will get you fired at any reputable company.

Ok, then there doesn't exist a single reputable company with a tech division and we're all unethical. Have a nice unethical day.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#222

Post by ajuc »

meheleventyone wrote: post #182
ajuc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hard discussion is about what is acceptable What if we just say "both"? Libraries were a thing for millenia and writers still wrote books. There are costs to IP laws and the benefits aren't obvious.

Libraries pay fees to lend books, at least in our modern capitalist society.

It was a news to me so I checked and it's true. Since 2016 in my country ;)

And it's a symbolic amount for vast majority of authors (country-wide it's around 5-5000 USD per year per author and the distribution is heavily skewed towards 5 USD).

So yeah :) I think authors were fine without these 5 bucks a year.

EDIT cause it might not be obvious. It's not per library. It's per country.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#223

Post by meheleventyone »

zarzavat wrote: post #218
meheleventyone wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They own their code and it either has a license for use or is implicitly rights retained if not. If Copilot regurgitates their code, from a project that is public but with a non-permissive license they are having their IP rights violated so are totally correct in being unhappy about that. Just because you’ve made something cool doesn’t give you the right to harm others in the process. If MS or OpenAI don’t think this…

The entire point of a fair use right is that you don’t need the copyright owner’s permission to be able to exercise it. Fair use allows you to do things that the copyright owner doesn’t like. Is fair use on a massive scale still fair use? Courts generally think so, otherwise Google would have been out of business a long time ago.

Is this fair use? I don't think that's been established yet. And if it is why didn't MS and OpenAI train it on their private code repositories? Fair use for thee not for me isn't very in keeping with the spirit of that claim.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#224

Post by eline43 »

There needs to be an update to either licenses or GitHub (and other) software directly, or even software terms of services, that gives the user an opportunity to opt-out of their data being used to train proprietary AI models.

'I don't agree with having an AI trained on/with my data.'

IMHO, all other problems with copilot stem from this.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#225

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

HumanReadable wrote: post #151

Sorry for the unproductive tone of this comment, but there's something about the attitude of this tweet that really grinds my gears. Any time someone invents something new and incredible, there's always a crowd of negative nancies eager to discredit and explain why the invention is nothing new and a detrement to society. I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly av…

> negative nancies

Not bad for everyday use - I like "nattering nabobs of negativism" (as scripted by William Safire), but it is really a bit over the top.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#226

Post by shireboy »

I do feel these arguments are valid if a little overstated. Most devs have googled, found some code, and pasted it in without thinking about attribution. Doesn’t make it right, but it is a question of how much code is being copied and how specific. For example, I peruse open repos to learn - I learned about the spread operator in JavaScript that way- doesn’t mean every time I use it I need to attribute whatever repo I saw it in. But, yeah, if I copied a larger chunk and the owner wants attribution, probably wrong.

I like the idea of having the bot automatically update a attribution file if it detects it’s used licensed code. Seems like it would be fairly trivial. Also a robots.txt for repo owners to control automated use.

Also, they should totally pay back a portion of revenue to the community and support the repos used to train. That seems like it would be a good PR move if nothing else.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#227

Post by eloisius »

jalfresi wrote: post #65
Separo wrote: post #18

GitHub provides the repo hosting and tools for free on public projects. I'm happy with this deal.

This does raise a point - do we now have to assume that all those services that provide free hosting/access/service to open source projects will be strip-mining the work of the open source community to sell them back to us all? I almost feel stupid believing it was an altruistic move to contribute back to the shoulders of giants they were already standing on...

I feel scammed too. At this point it should be obvious, but I’m finally savvy to the fact that every tech company that offers anything free, and you use it to create “your” content, is not your friend and you don’t even own the works you host with them. I feel scammed that GitHub was cool about 10 years ago. It was like the professional/cultural center of gravity in my career. GitHubbers we’re cool people. Everyone cool hosted their site on GitHub Pages. I didn’t want to see a resume; what’s your GitHub? Now I feel stupid for having contributed whatever tiny bit of brains I did to this AI by thinking that I was using the cool, developer-first code website.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#228

Post by triknomeister »

nl wrote: post #141
galoisgirl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an example: https://twitter.com/ChrisGr93091552/status/15397316329318031... > I checked if it had code I had written at my previous employer that has a license allowing its use only for free games and requiring attaching the license. yeah it does

That's a pretty bad example. He prompted it using the exact function header taken from the code he is complaining about. It'd be much more interesting if he setup a function that was doing a similar thing but with different parameter types and names, and a different order of parameters (ie, like a real problem).

Does that matter? A code provided should be provided with the license needed to use the code, otherwise the user is opening themselves up to litigation.

Hence why I agree with another comment somewhere that Microsoft is banking on software developers not litigating about use of their open source code in closed source projects.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#229

Post by csee »

cycomanic wrote: post #210
csee wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how it always works, though. Moderna is standing on the shoulders of centuries of cumulative human knowledge without compensating all the sources of that knowledge. Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers. This is where some modest taxation c…

> Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers. You clearly don't know how copyright around sampling works. Yes rappers are paying shitloads to previous generation musicians for samples they use.

Sure, if we're talking about sampling, which is analogous to co-pilot copy and pasting chunks of code verbatim (which we've seen happen). But the complaints about co-pilot go far deeper than that. Quoting from the tweet: "it just sells code other people wrote". Do musicians "just" copy from all the people they've been inspired by and learned from?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#230

Post by leakbang »

meheleventyone wrote: post #219
core-utility wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have any evidence that copilot doesn't check/filter by license?

One of the (ex?) programmers from Valve managed to get it to spit out parts of the Source engine verbatim. He posted a Twitter thread yesterday I believe.

Can you post the link to that?
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