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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

#441

Post by sbelskie »

0-_-0 wrote: post #350
feanaro wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the recent Github v. youtube-dl fiasco happened, I remember reading similarly strongly-worded but dismissive comments regarding fair use, stating how it is quite obvious that youtube-dl's test code could never be fair use and how fair use itself is a vague, shaky, underspecified provision of the copyright law which cannot ever be relied on. To me, seeing youtube-dl's case as fair use is so much easier than using…

How would you feel about a paid-for search engine using hundreds of millios of web pages without permission in order to build a proprietary product ?

You mean like a search engine?

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#442

Post by fny »

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…

I think the bigger issue is that use of Copilot puts the end user at risk of using copyrighted code without knowing it.

Sure one could argue that Copilot learned in the way a human does. There is nothing that prevents one from learning from copyrighted work, but snippets delivered verbatim from such works are surely a copyright violation.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#443

Post by radiator »

elliekelly wrote: post #337
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!?

Anecdata: I’m a lawyer and programmer and my clients (large financial institutions) are increasingly insisting on hosting as much on-site as possible. It costs more, it can make it difficult to select vendors/service providers, and it’s not without business continuity risks which they take steps to mitigate. But I think more and more companies, particularly those in highly regulated industries, are deciding that the…

So some professionals will have the chance to migrate systems back to on-premises, after having migrated them from on-premises to the cloud? Interesting.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#444

Post by luffapi »

habitue wrote: post #353

I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. It seems like before the twitter thread on it went viral, the only people who cared about programmers copying (verbatim!) short snippets of code like this would be lawyers and executives. Suddenly everyone is coming out of the woodworks as copyright maximalists? I know HN loves a good "well actually" and Microsoft is always suspect, but let's leave the idea of code la…

> Copilot should be inspiring people to figure out how to do better than it, not making hackers get up in arms trying to slap it down.

One of the (many) problems is that GitHub/Microsoft already benefit from runaway network effects so it’s difficult to “do better”. Where will you get all of that training code if not off GitHub?

The real answer to this is to yank your projects from GitHub now while you search for alternatives.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#445

Post by adamdusty »

habitue wrote: post #353

I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. It seems like before the twitter thread on it went viral, the only people who cared about programmers copying (verbatim!) short snippets of code like this would be lawyers and executives. Suddenly everyone is coming out of the woodworks as copyright maximalists? I know HN loves a good "well actually" and Microsoft is always suspect, but let's leave the idea of code la…

I'm more surprised that people don't care about the telemetry aspect. It's an extension that sends your code to an MS service, and MS promises access is on a need-to-know basis.

I don't care if MS copies my hobby projects exactly, but I'm not sure my employer(defense contractor) would even be allowed to use a tool like this.

I think it looks cool though. I will probably try it out if it is ever available for free and works for the languages I use.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#446

Post by unanswered »

elliekelly wrote: post #331
unanswered wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t disagree with your point but was it necessary to make it in such a snarky way?

[flagged]

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#447

Post by atq2119 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #210
_Understated_ wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By comparison, Copilot is even more obviously fair use. Not sure I see it that way. If I take your hard work that you clearly marked with a GPL license and then make money from it, not quite directly, but very closely, how is that fair use? Or legal? Copying and storing a book isn't recreating another book from it. Copilot is creating new stuff from the contents of the "books" in this case. Edit: I misunderstood fa…

If you view GPL code with your browser would that mean that your browser now has to be GPL as well? In the sense that copilot is not much different than a browser for Stack Overflow with some automation, why would it need to be GPLed? Your own code on the other hand…

> If you view GPL code with your browser would that mean that your browser now has to be GPL as well?

Some good responses in sibling comments already, but I don't see the narrow answer here, which is: No, because no distribution of the browser took place.

If you created a weird version of the browser in which a specific URL is hardcoded to show the GPL'd code instead of the result of an HTTP request, and you then distributed that browser to others, then I believe that yes, you'd have to do so under the GPL. (You might get away with it under fair use if the amount of GPL'd code is small, etc.)

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#448

Post by mhh__ »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #399
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…

If Github hosts AGPL code, does that mean that github's own code must be AGPL? Obviously not. What's the difference? There's no point to copilot without training data, some but not all of the training data was (A)GPL. There's no point to github without hosting code, some but not all of the code it hosts is A(GPL). The code in either cases is data or content, it has not actually been incorporated into the copilot or g…

Code isn't to GitHub what training data is to this model, or at least even if you could argue that it is within a current framework it shouldn't be.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#449

Post by geoffhill »

russdpale wrote: post #436

Who cares? Seriously? Copilot has ripped off the absurd charade around licensing and code. It isn't any kind of copyright infringement. The AI is not copying and pasting code that is has found, it is rewriting the code from scratch on its own. We keep trying to take old ways and meld them to the internet, and its just not appropriate and it doesn't work.

> not copying and pasting code

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#450

Post by jcelerier »

wvenable wrote: post #423
jcelerier wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about lines such as Idxs[i] += (Imm >> ((i * HalfLaneElts) % 8)) & ((1 > 2); qint32 val = d + (((fromX > 8); even if it's one line, it likely took some non-negligible thinking time from the programmer

What about E = mc^2 ? Mathematics and physics equations are not copyrightable.

but those aren't only mathematics. There's the choice of variable names, the order in which things are called (maybe to optimize the performance on some CPU, we don't know), etc
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