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GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

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Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#381

Post by boulos »

mattkrause wrote: post #364
Filligree wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human drew that, it would not be copyright violation.

I’m not so sure about that. The scenes à faire doctrine would certainly let you paint your own picture of a pretty girl with a large earring, even a pearl one. That, however, is definitely the same person, in the same pose/composition, in the same outfit. The colors are slightly off, but the difference feels like a technical error rather than an expressive choice.

Really? It looks like some bad Warhol take on the Vermeer original.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#382

Post by pabs3 »

belorn wrote: post #54
naikrovek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who said they haven't. for something to show up verbatim in the output of a textual AI model it needs to be an input many times. I wonder if the problem is not copilot, but many people using this person's code without license or credit, and copilot being trained on those pieces of code as well. copilot may just be exposing a problem rather than creating one. I don't know much about AI, and I don't use copilot.

Microsoft have a public statement that they don't use proprietary code, only public code with public licenses. They have a lot of companies as customers who uses github, and they also use a lot third-party code in their own products.

I thought they said all public repos without regard to the license they are under, which could be a proprietary EULA.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#383

Post by Thorrez »

Filligree wrote: post #329
matkoniecz wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://alexanderwales.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/image.... Left: “Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer” by Stable Diffusion Right: Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer This specific one is not copyright violation as it is old enough for copyright to expire. But the same may happen with other images. from https://alexanderwales.com/the-ai-art-apocalypse/ and https://alexanderwales.com/addendum-…

If a human drew that, it would not be copyright violation.

Why? Obviously it wouldn't be a copyright violation because the original one is old enough to no longer by copyrighted. But other than age?

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#384

Post by mike_d »

_ryanjsalva wrote: post #313

Howdy, folks. Ryan here from the GitHub Copilot product team. I don’t know how the original poster’s machine was set-up, but I’m gonna throw out a few theories about what could be happening. If similar code is open in your VS Code project, Copilot can draw context from those adjacent files. This can make it appear that the public model was trained on your private code, when in fact the context is drawn from local fil…

> When you use Google to translate from English to Spanish, it’s not like the service has ever seen that particular sentence before.

But that is exactly how it works. Translation companies license (or produce) huge corpuses of common sentences across multiple languages that are either used directly or fed into a model.

Third party human translators are asked to assign rights to the translation company. https://support.google.com/translate/answer/2534530

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#385

Post by behringer »

nl wrote: post #362
rovr138 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the watermark is their logo or name, it could copyrighted or trademarked.

And it's the responsibility of the person using the tool to generate that image not to violate copyright by redistributing it.

The tool is already redistributing it.

A broadcaster of copyrighted works is not protected against infringement just because they expect viewers to only watch programming they own.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#386

Post by sinenomine »

acoustics wrote: post #6

I’ve noticed that people tend to disapprove of AI trained on their profession’s data, but are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI. For example, I know artists who are vehemently against DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. and regard it as stealing, but they view Copilot and GPT-3 as merely useful tools. I also know software devs who are extremely excited about AI art and GPT-3 but are outraged b…

I know much less programmers offended by copilot than artists offended by StableDiffusion.

This is a mostly irrelevant red herring setting up professions against each other. Instead we should cooperate on a costly yet necessary decision of instituting a basic income, especially prioritizing professions about to be superseded by modern ML.

Obviously, our decision-making class views the topic of instituting a realistic basic income right now as something extremely unpleasant, and so it goes.

People who helped to bootstrap the AI should be compensated, at the very least by being able to live a modest lifestyle without having to work. Simple as.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#387

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

insanitybit wrote: post #61
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this isn’t like photography and portrait artistry. This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. Stable Diffusion has literally been used to create new art by screenshotting someone’s live-streamed art creation process as the seed. While creating derivative work has always been considered art(such as deletion…

> This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid. If I parody your work, that's my work. If you paint a picture of a building and I go to that spot and take a photograph of that building it is my work. I can derive all sorts of things, things that I…

If you sing over a song you’re adding your own voice. If you photograph a building that’s your own photograph, where decisions like lighting and framing are creative choices. If you paint a picture of a building that’s your own picture.

An artist should credit when they are directly taking from another artist. Erasure poems don’t quite work if the poet runs around claiming they created the poem that was being erased.

But more importantly SD allows you to take and use existing copyright works and funny-launder them and pass them off as your own, even though you don’t own the rights to that work. This would be more akin to I take a photograph you made and sell it on a t shirt on red bubble. I don’t actually own the IP to do that with.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#388

Post by resonious »

ironmagma wrote: post #338
resonious wrote: post #304

Well, here's a question. Is GitHub violating the LGPL by including the code in their copilot data? Or is it Copilot users who end up using the regurgitated code? I guess GitHub is violating it the instant their servers send verbatim snippets like this to developers without the copyright notice. And then the Copilot users are also violating it when (if) they release their code that contains verbatim snippets and no no…

If the license requires attribution and Github is not providing it (which it isn’t), then yes, Github is violating the license.

Right, so who's going to do something about it? People seem to be complaining about it on Twitter but I'm not sure what the expected result is.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#389

Post by Thorrez »

_ryanjsalva wrote: post #353
binarymax wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO someone should be responding to the Twitter thread itself. I’m not sure why the official response is here when the copyright owner raised the complaint on Twitter.

Good call. Done. https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554?s=4...

It looks like you linked to the original, not the reply. There are so many replies to the original tweet that it's hard to find any specific reply.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#390

Post by MereInterest »

nl wrote: post #362
rovr138 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the watermark is their logo or name, it could copyrighted or trademarked.

And it's the responsibility of the person using the tool to generate that image not to violate copyright by redistributing it.

Just like it's the person's responsibility to only recombine jpeg basis states when they don't correspond to a copyrighted image? It seems more and more to be the case that the trained model is, in large part, a very compact representation of the training data. I'm not seeing a difference between distributing a model that can be used to reconstruct the input images, as opposed to distributing jpeg basis states that can be used to reconstruct the original image.
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