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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

#411

Post by ghoward »

rgbrenner wrote: post #398
ghoward wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter that it's a technical preview; people are using it now, GitHub has already used it internally. So if it infringes now, there is already code out there being used that does infringe.

GitHub appears to be tracking every snippet that they're generating during their trials: https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio... Are you doing that? If not, then I wouldn't use GitHub's use as justification to engage in copyright infringement.

Oh, I am not using Copilot. But other people not part of GitHub are. And those are still violations.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#412

Post by vharuck »

prepend wrote: post #351
vharuck wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s not copyright violation to train ML on content. I agree. It'd be a nice gesture to reach out to the creators of the training data, like is usual with web scrapers. But collecting and analyzing data publicly available on the web is ok. >So the license doesn’t matter unless there’s some “can’t use this for ML training” license that I don’t know about (and doesn’t seem to be legal). I disagree. While Copilot is, a…

> It'd be a nice gesture to reach out to the creators of the training data, like is usual with web scrapers. I don’t think this is practical. And who notifies people of scraping content? I would’ve annoyed if I got spam from sites that scraped my content.

I've contacted websites about scraping when it'd be a repeat thing and they didn't have a robots.txt file available. Also if their stance on enforcing copyright was hazy (e.g. medical coding created by a non-profit). Sometimes, they pointed me toward an API I didn't know about.

>I don’t think this is practical.

I don't like people ignoring things just because they're impractical for ML. That leads to crap like automated account banning without possiblity of talking to a living customer service representative.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#413

Post by indigochill »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #405
indigochill wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next up, Copilot for college papers! Who needs to pay a professional paper-writer (ahem, I mean write the paper) when you can have an AI write your paper for you! It's fair use, so you're entitled to claim ownership to it, right?

I think you are confusing legal protections for intellectual property with plagiarism. (At least that's what I think you're doing if I read your comment as sarcasm and guess what you're trying to say non-sarcastically?) But they are entirely different things. You can be violating copyright without plagiarizing, so long as you cite your source, but if you copy a copyright-protected work in an illegal way when doing so…

Yeah, I was being sarcastic. But you make a good point about the legality of plagiarism.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#414

Post by indymike »

jefftk wrote: post #266
indymike wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books (mostly) are not distributed under the GPL.

The GPL only gives you additional permissions relative to what you would have by default. The books included in that suit were more strongly restricted, since there was no license at all.

There are certainly some interesting additional conditions the GPL creates by taking the license away if you violate certain clauses. Regardless, the interesting part of this is that this looks different from the user's point of view and Microsoft's. Sure, 5 lines out of 10,000 is probably fair use. For Microsoft, their system is using the whole code base and copying it a few lines at a time to different people, eventually adding up to potentially lots more than fair use.

The question on this one will be about the difference between Microsoft/Github's product and a programmer using copilot's code:

"If I feed the entire code base to a machine, and it copies small snippets to different people, do we add the copies up, or just look at the final product?"

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#415

Post by [deleted] »

mysterydip wrote: post #187
schneidmaster wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a decent bit of caselaw indicating that computers reading and using a copyrighted work simply "don't count" in terms of copyright infringement -- only humans can infringe copyright. This article[0] does a pretty good job of summarizing the rationale that the courts have provided. My (non-lawyer) take is that GitHub is pushing this just half a step farther -- if computers can consume copyrighted material, and…

Makes me wonder what would happen if a similar thing was done with books. If I train an AI on all the texts of Tom Clancy, or Stephen King, or every Star Wars novel, and the books it generates every so often produce paragraphs verbatim from one of those sources, would copyright owners be up in arms? What would the distinction be between the code case and the text case?

[deleted]

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#416

Post by nerdponx »

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…

Unanswered question, as far as I know: is a trained model a derivative work? If the model accidentally retains a copy of the work, is that an unauthorized copy?

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#418

Post by dlisboa »

nonameiguess wrote: post #362
Luker88 wrote: post #335

Like it or not, it seems like: * most people here are unhappy * most laywers will say it's fine (it very probably passed MS ones) I can understand that. Copyright was not created with AI/ML in mind, even as a random stray thought. Those were not even words at the time. So the question is: If we change the law and require trained algorithms to only work on licenses that permit this, and to output the "minimum common l…

Standard caveat that I'm not a lawyer by any stretch, but this seems settled by the existence of text-generation assistants trained on the full corpus of human writing ever digitized, much of which is also copyrighted or licensed in some way. That is clearly fine, as training text generation programs on existing text has been standard for decades. Selling a product based on GPT-3 is fine and the law has not come afte…

I don't know if even copying small pieces of code verbatim should mean anything.

Another example is the photo generation ML algorithms that exist. They generate photos of random "people" (imaginary AI-generated people) by using actual photos of real people. If one eye or nose is verbatim copied from the actual photo to the generated photo, is the entire output now illegal or plagiarism? One might argue it's just an eye, the rest of the picture is completely different, the original photographer doesn't need to grant permission for that use.

Any analogies we make with this, be it text generation, image generation, even video generation, seems like it falls under the same conclusion: so far we've thought all of this was perfectly fine. I don't see why code-generation is any different. A function is just a tiny part of a project. It's not necessarily more important than the composition of a photograph, or a phrase in a book. We as programmers assign meaning to it, we know it takes time to craft it and it might be unique, but likewise a novelist may have spent weeks on a specific 10 word phrase that was reproduced verbatim, in a text of 500 pages.

The more I look at this the more it seems copyright, and IP law in general, is the main problem. Copyleft and OS licenses wouldn't be needed if it wasn't for the aggressive nature of IP law. I don't see the need to defend far more strict interpretations of it because it has now touched our field.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#420

Post by andy_ppp »

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…

Probably they get away with it, but it definitely seems against the spirit of the GPL just as closed source GitHub existing because of open source software seems quite hypocritical.
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