I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot • Hacker News Board

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#431

Post by saladuh » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #229

_ofdw wrote: post #155

Feels like everyone is missing the point: Copilot will ultimately serve to weaken the arguments in support of software patents and copyright. That can only be a good thing for society (though perhaps not for rent seekers).

It is certainly fascinating to see people start running away from " information wants to be free " and other Free Software principles full tilt when, all of a sudden, it's their livelihoods that are on the line. Unless my recollection is off, the GPL was never the goal of the original Free Software movement; it was merely a tool to get to the end state where all code becomes available for use by anyone for any reason…

I think what is upsetting to those who create free[0] software, particularly GPLed works, is that their code has been used to create something that is non-free, which they have no control over (and thus takes away all the 4 freedoms).

As such I really don't understand why so many people are saying things like you have said here. These people believing in free software, including the original intent of the GPL to be a tool against copyright, does not mean they should, or would, be all for co-pilot, a non-free product by a company that once spat in the face of free software (and likely still does behind closed doors), who is using their free software, including the GPLed works, to create a non-free software.

As such, even if it ends up being legal from a license standpoint, it really feels like copyleft is being taken advantage of and exploited because nothing is given back in return (even if copilot remained free of charge, that's hardly giving back in foss lingo). So I suppose it's more a moral and intent thing rather than a legal thing at this point, unless copyright law decides copilot is a derivative work (doubtful, personally).

> Unless my recollection is off, the GPL was never the goal of the original Free Software movement; it was merely a tool to get to the end state where all code becomes available for use by anyone for any reason without cost or restriction.

Yes, but the GPL was created for a world with copyright to step towards a world without it. However we are extremely far away from such a world, and I don't see how copilot helps step towards it at all. I just don't see the argument. It just results in code that will be used potentially wrongly in copyrighted works, proprietary or not. And all of this is enabled by, as I mentioned, a non-free software created by Microsoft, who have used their huge capital to gain access to a proprietary AI by throwing money at it. Nothing about it seems fair even if it ends up all being legal in copyright terms.

[0] I'm seeing a lot of people in these threads who don't know the definition of free software or open source. Free software referes to free as in freedom, not free as in 'free beer' (gratis). Of course, free software is still often gratis, but you can still monetize it in various ways.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#432

Post by daenz » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #430

daenz wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you have it all figured out, so I just have one question: if it's not innovative (it's "no different than stackoverflow with X"), then what is your explanation for why the Copilot announcement here received over 2.8k votes? It's so obviously just stackoverflow with a better selection mechanism, so why aren't people treating it as such?

as far as I have seen it that is exactly how people are using it, which is why the last thread about it was (rightfully) full of people pointing out what a bad idea it is of copying half-cooked code snippets into your own codebase. Why does it get a lot of upvotes? Because it's an AI product that makes things appear on your screen and that's the threshold for hype in our current age. Of course the number of upvotes o…

It sounds like you think most people upvoted it because it is a shiny toy and the bar is very low when it comes to impressing tech industry workers. And also you don't believe upvotes have a positive correlation with innovation on HN, because the mRNA vaccine posts don't have as many upvotes as you think they should. Does that about sum it up?

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#433

Post by bootlooped » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

talkingtab wrote: post #307

The essential isue is simple: taking someone's work product and financially profiting from that work without paying for it. No matter what, that is just wrong.

I have read a lot of open source code, somebody's work product, never paid to read it, and with that knowledge gotten a job which pays me. Is that wrong?

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#434

Post by bootlooped » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 1:44 AM UTC

cjohansson wrote: post #190

It's strange how this thing was not an opt-in feature at GitHub. I also feel like this thing is a violation of my integrity and I will consider stop using GitHub as well

Why would they need to ask for opt-in if they believe what they're doing is within the license terms?

I don't ask for opt-in when I copy a snippet from Stack Overflow or use some code from an MIT licensed repo.

The only question, I think, is if what Copilot does is actually in compliance with the licenses.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#435

Post by daenz » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

iafisher wrote: post #429

Barrin92 wrote: post #405

For anyone who thinks this is even remotely okay, answer me this. Imagine that Copilot is actually just a gigantic PR campaign, and when you send a completion request, they do this: They send the request off to a sweatshop in Bangladesh where a bunch of mechanical turk workers scroll through licensed codebases, find an appropriate snippet of code, agree on the best one, strip all of the licenses and attributions out,…

In your hypothetical 100% of completions are copied verbatim from existing code. But if GitHub is to believed, only 0.1% are.

It doesn't sound like the person you're replying to understands that the code returned is largely synthesized with OpenAI's Codex. It is not simply a "snippet selection" mechanism, it has "learned" (to a limited degree) patterns in code, and can generate those patterns even if they don't exist verbatim from the training set.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#436

Post by rizky05 » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 1:58 AM UTC

Why is this a problem when github does it, when tabnine has been doing this for a long time ?

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#437

Post by jefftk » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 2:00 AM UTC

krono wrote: post #415

jefftk wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's no license, then it's not open source. This is a term with a standard meaning, and it doesn't just mean that the source is available for reading

Ah right, I honestly did not know! Still, if you come across some published source code that does not appear to be licensed and does not specifically define itself as being "Open Source" as defined by the "Open Source Initiative", copyright law applies and you're not allowed to just take it and use it. GitHub specifically uses the words "source code from publicly available sources" when talking about what they used t…

Sorry, I was specifically responding to how my parent views open source.

I agree that Copilot was probably trained in part on public code that isn't open source -- GitHub's claim (not saying I agree) is that they don't need a license to train on code.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#438

Post by jefftk » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

krono wrote: post #397

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conventional definition of "open source" is software licensed under a OSI-approved license.

Does that mean general copyright does not apply to unlicensed open source software? Do any legal precedents exist related to this? I'm honestly curious now.

"unlicensed open source software" isn't really a thing. If you push something to GitHub with no license it's source-available, not open source.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#439

Post by jefftk » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 2:03 AM UTC

bogwog wrote: post #407

jefftk wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have a lot of open source code that I love to share for things like education or private stuff, but if you want to use it for something real, you need to hire me. If you can suck all the code without even I noticing it, that's not fair Co-pilot aside, that's already how it works today. If you make something open source, I can use your code to power my business, and I'm under no obligation to hire you. It's great wh…

> I can use your code to power my business, and I'm under no obligation to hire you. Make sure you read those licenses. Just because something is open source doesn't mean that you're free to use it for whatever you want. There are some projects that are open source and free for non-commercial use only.

> open source and free for non-commercial use only

That's not open source: https://opensource.org/osd

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#440

Post by saurik » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 2:09 AM UTC

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #246

saurik wrote: post #40

I never hosted--with quite some prejudice, even--any of my projects on GitHub (for a number of reasons that are off topic right now)... it didn't matter, though: people take your code and upload it to GitHub themselves (which is their right); so you can't avoid Copilot by simply self-hosting your repositories.

Github is just the begining, they will crawl any open source code, crawling npm, pypi, cpan, public gitlab... If your code is open source, they will get it. That's kinda the point of open source.

Well... "the point of" open source for some of us is to participate in a collaborative commune where we are willing to contribute code to the collective specifically because other people are required to also contribute their code to said collective as part of a shared battle against opaque proprietary systems; so the concept that someone is going to then find it, scrape it, and "launder" what was supposed to be our competitive advantage into their closed source projects by training it into a glorified pattern recognizer and then regurgitating it into their text editor without even as much as attribution without realization that the work we did and contributed to the world was part of a tit-for-tat pact as they want to have their cake and eat it too kind of ruins it for me... like it is bad enough that I have to constantly guilt trip people into not violating my license already: systematizing it via Copilot is making me think that we might need even stricter mechanisms for distribution of code within the commune so as to build a kind of "decentralized trade secret". (That said, other than your wording about "the point of open source", I agree with your doom-y sentiment 100%.)