Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 806 posts

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

#431

Post by [deleted] »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #315
matheusmoreira wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For myself, I am skeptical of intellectual property in the first place. I say go for it. Me too. I think copyright and these silly restrictions should be abolished. At the same time, I can't get over the fact these self-serving corporations are all about "all rights reserved" when it benefits them while at the same time undermining other people's rights. Microsoft absolutely knows that what they're doing is wrong.…

> Then it won't be a crime for any of us to copy Windows and Office either. You bet we're gonna go for it too. Don't worry. At that time all of the available hardware will refuse to run any software unless it comes with a signed license from one of the big three.

[deleted]

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

#432

Post by rfrec0n »

CapsAdmin wrote: post #399
hackerfromthefu wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just nonsense. It's similar to saying that any digital representation of an image isn't an image just a dataset that represent it. If what you said was any sort of defense every image copyright would never apply to any digital image, because the images can be saved in different resolutions, different file formats, or encoded down. e.g. if a jpeg 'image' was only an image at an exact set of digital bits i coul…

I don't understand what is nonsense, how it works? Your response seems to be for something entirely different. But anyway, how I see stable diffusion being different is that it's a tool to generate all sorts of images, including copyrighted images. It's more like a database of *how to* generate images rather than a database *of* images. Maybe there isn't that much of a difference when it comes to copyright law. If yo…

A tool can't be held accountable and can't infringe on copyright or any other law for that matter. It's more of a product. It seems to me like it's a gray area that's just going to have to be decided in court. Like did the company that sells the tool that can very easily be used to do illegal things take enough reasonable measures to prevent it from being accidently used in such a way? In the case of Copilot, I don't believe so, because there aren't really even any adequate warnings to the end user that say it can produce code which can only legally be used in software that meets the criteria of the original license.

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

#433

Post by pclmulqdq »

tremon wrote: post #235
pclmulqdq wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue that mocking the Getty logo like that is some form of fair use, which would be a backdoor through which it can end up as a legitimate element of a public domain work, in which case it would be fair game. I agree with you that it is also possible that people posted Getty thumbnails to some sites as though they are public domain, and that is how the AIs learned the watermark.

Fair use does not make a work public domain; it merely helps the creator of the derivative work defend their case in court. But neither the original nor the derivative becomes public domain after a successful fair use defense. Not a lawyer, of course, but I think slapping the Getty logo on a work claiming "fair use" and then releasing the work under public domain would be a case of misrepresentation, because Getty st…

You can produce a public domain work using content that you have fair use rights to. The original owner of the content you are using fairly has no claim of ownership. You would have to assert that right in court if the owner of the copyright came after you, but that does not preclude the possibility of making a public-domain work with other copyrights used in fair use.

Obviously, that would not entitle anyone to rip those elements from your work and use them in a way that was not fair use. The Getty watermark could fall into this category: public domain pictures using the watermark fairly (for transformative commentary/satire purposes) could go into the network, which uses that information to produce infringing images.

Trademarks are a different story, but trademark protections are a lot narrower than you might think.

The point is that it's very conceivable that the neural network is being trained to infringe copyrights by training entirely with public-domain images.

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

#434

Post by kube-system »

insanitybit wrote: post #50
tpxl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Joe Rando plays a song from 1640 on a violin he gets a copyright claim on Youtube. When Jane Rando uses devtools to check a website source code she gets sued. When Microsoft steals all code on their platform and sells it, they get lauded. When "Open" AI steals thousands of copyrighted images and sells them, they get lauded. I am skeptical of imaginary property myself, but fuck this one set of rules for the poor,…

> Joe Rando plays a song from 1640 on a violin he gets a copyright claim on Youtube That can't possibly be a valid claim, right? AFAIK copyright is "gone" after the original author dies + ~70 years. Before fairly recently it was even shorter. Something from 1640 surely can't be claimed under copyright protection. There are much more recent changes where that might not be the case, but 1640? > When Jane Rando uses dev…

The copyright on the original composition may be expired, but there are many people who make new recordings of that piece and those recordings are copyrighted. While it is entirely legal to record your own rendition, YouTube’s automated Content ID is dumb and often can’t tell the difference between your recording and some other contemporary recording.

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

#435

Post by orbital-decay »

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…

There's a substantial difference between being trained and being overfit to repeat training data 1:1. Overtraining is a bug of a model, not a feature. For example, Stable Diffusion 1.4 is overtrained on one specific Aivazovsky painting (among some others by other authors, like Mona Lisa, or Sunflowers - Van Gogh painted several of those). Copilot was famously overtrained on Carmack's fast square root code, so they had to block it programmatically after receiving bad publicity. Both are not intended by model authors, this is a flaw.

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

#436

Post by fweimer »

lofatdairy wrote: post #394
xani_ wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason why it's easy to match Copilot results back to the original source is that the users are starting with prompts that match their public code, deliberately to cause prompt regurgitation. The reason doesn't really matter...

GP is just highlighting why this is so common and often a challenging edge case. If you ask it for something that's exactly in its dataset, the "best" solution that minimizes loss will be that existing code. Thus, it's somewhat intrinsic to applying statistical learning to text completion. This means MS really shouldn't have used copyleft code at all, and really shouldn't be selling copilot in this state, but "luckil…

Pretty much all code they have requires attribution, and based on reports, Copilot does not generate that along with the code. So excluding copyleft code (how would you even do that?) does not address the issue (assuming that the source code produced is actually a derivative work).

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

#437

Post by spookyuser »

_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…

The way that copilot seems to understand not just variables from the file you’re working with but functions classes and variables from all the files in your folder is incredible!

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

#438

Post by mattkrause »

boulos wrote: post #381
mattkrause wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s a really apt comparison, since the Supreme Court just heard Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith, which hinges on whether Warhol’s use of a copyrighted photo of Prince as the basis for “Orange Prince” was Fair Use.

Warhol’s estate seems likely to lose and their strongest argument is that Warhol took a documentary photo and transformed it into a commentary on celebrity culture. Here, I don’t even see that applying: it just looks like a bad copy.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/10/justices-debate-whether-w...

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

#439

Post by [deleted] »

williamcotton wrote: post #296
SrslyJosh wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems utilitarian in nature That has no bearing on copyright.

It absolutely does. Here’s like the first link after a DuckDuckGo search for “copyright utilitarian”: However, copyright law does not extend to useful items. Therefore, complications may arise when sculptural works are also “useful” items. In these instances, copyright law will protect purely artistic elements of a useful article as long as the useful item can be identified and exists independently of the utilitarian…

[deleted]

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

#440

Post by fourthark »

bscphil wrote: post #379
kmeisthax wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already a problem with anyone who ever copypastes from Stack Overflow. You're all violating CC-BY-SA[0] and nobody really cares about this. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

If I ever take any code from SO, I include a comment with a link to it. Surely that's standard practice for anything longer than a line or two?

I do the same. I think it satisfies BY (attribution) but not SA (Share Alike).

As GP says, no one really cares, but it seems hard to satisfy SA... even if you are pasting into open source, is your license compatible with CC?

Perhaps I'm over-thinking this.

Post reply on HN