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All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

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Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#271

Post by ralph84 »

rambambram wrote: post #188

I'm a programmer and also studied law for some time. These stories make me - once more - realize the old adage: "Possession is nine tenths of the law." Don't host that code in the cloud (or a better term, someone else's dirty bucket). What happened to developers hosting stuff on their own website!?

GitHub's argument isn't that you hosted your code on GitHub and therefore gave them a license to use it to train their model. GitHub's argument is they don't need a license to train their model because it's fair use. Hosting your code somewhere else doesn't prevent fair use. If you don't want your code used to train ML models, don't host it anywhere.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#272

Post by _Understated_ »

unanswered wrote: post #248
_Understated_ wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the concept of fair use (I think) but I can't see how it applies to Copilot. Google didn't create new books from the contents of existing ones (whether you agree that they should have been allowed to store the books or not) but Copilot is creating new code/apps from existing ones. Edit: I guess my understanding of fair use was wrong. I stand corrected.

That you apparently think fair use is something you just think about real hard in order to see how you feel about it in a given situation demonstrates that you do not understand the concept of fair use. There are rules.

Yeah, I realise that now.

However, where does one draw the line between fair use and derivative works?

Creating something based on other stuff (Google creating AI books from the existing ones for example) would possibly be fair use I think but would it not also be derivative works?

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#273

Post by diffeomorphism »

criddell wrote: post #139
diffeomorphism wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There obviously is no sharp line (e.g. it is 37. Immediate question: why not 36?), but that does not matter at all. We already have the same fuzzy line for writing. Am I forbidden from ever reading other author's books because I might accidentally "generate exact copies" of some of the sentences? Clearly not, that is how people learn a language. Does that mean I am allowed to copy the whole book? Also clearly not. Wh…

And somewhere is determined for your particular case in court. And tomorrow, a similar case may be determined differently.

Not really, no.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#274

Post by [deleted] »

ghoward wrote: post #164
Diggsey wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also NAL, but I think there's far more of a case that users of Copilot might violate copyright rather than Copilot itself: - Only a very small proportion of Copilot generated code is reproduced verbatim, so if you specifically built a product just from copied-verbatim code, your act of selecting and combining those pieces of copyrighted code would be creating a derivative work. - GitHub is not selling the copyrighted…

I think there is an argument to be made that Copilot is producing derivative code, though. It may produce copies verbatim, and that's a violation, but far more often, it produces a mixture of things it was trained on, most of which probably have some sort of license requiring attribution at the very least.

[deleted]

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#275

Post by jefftk »

rambambram wrote: post #188

I'm a programmer and also studied law for some time. These stories make me - once more - realize the old adage: "Possession is nine tenths of the law." Don't host that code in the cloud (or a better term, someone else's dirty bucket). What happened to developers hosting stuff on their own website!?

It doesn't matter where the code is hosted, just that it is publicly accessible. If developers hosted code on their own sites, someone could still scrape them and use that to train models.

(The question of whether this is sufficiently transformative to count as fair use is still wide open)

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#276

Post by b3morales »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #169
tsimionescu wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I, as a human being, have trained by reading code, much of which is covered by licenses that are somehow not compatible with code I'm writing. Am I violating licenses? There are many good answers from the legal side. I would also attack this side: the way human beings learn is entirely different from the way ML models are trained. We don't do gradient descent to find the slope of data points and find the most likel…

I'm not sure this is actually true. We can explain code, but the fact that we can explain code is not necessarily related to the way we actually end up writing it. Have you ever written a function "on autopilot"? Your brain has selected what you wanted it to do, and now you're just typing without thought? I don't think we're as dissimilar to this model as we'd like.

The feeling of being "on autopilot" when doing a task has to do with your, let's call it, supervisory process being otherwise occupied. It doesn't suggest that that the other mental processes which are responsible for figuring out the actions have changed their character or mode of operation.

"You" are just not paying attention to it in that moment.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#277

Post by formerly_proven »

glogla wrote: post #249
blibble wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it would be a win for Microsoft that don't distribute their source code whereas for open source it's a disaster

Which seems very much align with what has Microsoft been trying to do for decades now.

Interesting idea considering Microsofts copyright-dependence has reached an all-time low point since they move as much as they can into their SaaS and PaaS offerings. Nothing left to copy, except for employees, but you don't need copyright to bash their heads in, legally speaking.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#278

Post by syshum »

AaronFriel wrote: post #193
keonix wrote: post #185

If the training set contains verbatim (A)GPL code does this mean that Copilot also should be distributed by Microsoft under GPL? Because without it Copilot (as it is distributed by Microsoft) couldn't be built, wouldn't it make it a derivative work of GPL'd code (and obviously every other license)? I see a lot of people comparing human learning to machine learning in the comments, but there is a huge difference - we…

No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies befo…

While I agree you are correct about (in the US anyway) fair use being an exemption from copyright, thus superceeds licensing

I disagree that Copilot is "more obviously fair use.", some parts might be, but we have seen clear examples (i.e verbatim code reproduction) that would not be.

I dont believe the question of "is this fair use" is as clear as you believe it to be

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#280

Post by [deleted] »

jrm4 wrote: post #261
AaronFriel wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies befo…

You're strongly and incorrectly implying that "Fair Use" is a clear (and relatively immutable) concept within copyright law, which couldn't be further from the truth. Even if this or that particular case sets out what appears to be solid grounds, one shouldn't take that as gospel by any means. This mostly has to do with the nature of the wishy-washy nature of the 4 part Fair Use test, which, unlike decent legal tests…

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