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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

#441

Post by AmericanChopper »

dataflow wrote: post #365
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SCO v. IBM[1] included claims of sections as small as "…ranging from five to ten to fifteen lines of code in multiple places that are of issue…" in some of the individual claims of the case. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Internation... .

The "..." part you redacted out explicitly said "it is many different sections of code". It was (quite obviously) not one or two 5-line blocks of code, let alone "simple" ones like FizzBuzz.

So your claim is that the code in the OP tweet is actually not copyrightable, and it would only become a copyright violation if you also copied many additional code blocks from the same copyrighted work?

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

#442

Post by bugfix-66 »

ISL wrote: post #408
theteapot wrote: post #392

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. Sounds like MS has devised a massive automated code laundering racket.

Seems more like a massive class-action copyright target, potentially at ($50k/infraction) x (the number of usages).

Good. Where do I sign up?

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

#443

Post by orbital-decay »

dawnerd wrote: post #22
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…

In theory AI should never return an exact copy of a copyrighted work or even anything close enough you could argue is the original “just changed”. If the styles are the same I think that’s fine, no different than someone else cloning it. But there’s definitely outputs from stable diffusion that looks like the original with some weird artifacts. We need regulation around it.

This is like saying "we need a regulation around bugs in software", with similar consequences. ML models are generally too large to ensure that there's no bugs. Same with software.

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

#444

Post by nabakin »

speedgoose wrote: post #428
nabakin wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are variable names randomized before being trained on? If so, that could prove something else is going on because all of the variable names Copilot outputted were the same.

Copilot is good at naming variables, I don’t think you should randomise them.

I'm thinking Copilot may be good at naming variables and still use randomized variable naming in their training set

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

#445

Post by lmm »

danielheath wrote: post #427
binarymax wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Later in the thread he stated the code was not on the machine he tested copilot with. Copilot training data should have been sanitized better. In addition: any code that is produced by copilot that uses a source that is licensed, MUST follow the practices of that license, including copyright headers.

Right - but if someone pushes the same code to github and changes the licence file to say "public domain", what's the legally correct way to proceed? What's the morally correct way to proceed?

Legally, if you're publishing a derived work without legitimate permission then you're civilly liable for statutory + actual damages, the only thing you're avoiding is the treble damages for wilful infringement.

Morally I'd say you should make a reasonable good faith effort to verify that you have a real license for everything you're using. When you're importing something on the scale of "all of Github" that means a bit more effort than just blindly trusting the file in the repository. When I worked with an F500 we would have a human explicitly review the license of each dependency; the review was pretty cursory, but it would've been enough to catch someone blatantly ripping off a popular repo.

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

#446

Post by andreareina »

shadowgovt wrote: post #111
ianbutler wrote: post #85

I just tested it myself on a random c file I created in the middle of a rust project I'm working on, it reproduced his full code verbatim from just the function header so clearly it does regurgitate proprietary code unlike some people have said, I do not have his source so co-pilot isn't just using existing context. I've been finding co-pilot really useful but I'll be pausing it for now, and I'm glad I have only been…

Searching for the function names in his libraries, I'm seeing some 32,000 hits. I suspect he has a different problem which (thanks to Microsoft) is now a problem he has to care about: his code probably shows up in one or more repos copy-pasted with improper LGPL attribution. There'd be no way for Copilot to know that had happened, and it would have mixed in the code. (As a side note: understanding why an ML engine ou…

"It's too hard" isn't a valid reason for me to not follow laws and/or social norms. This is a predictable result and was predicted by many people; "oops we didn't know" is neither credible nor acceptable.

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

#447

Post by tomcam »

_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…

That’s a whole lot of words that don’t address TFA at all.

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

#448

Post by leni536 »

minhazm wrote: post #404
svnt wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t at all address the primary issue, which is one of licensing. Is it a valid defense against copyright infringement to say “we don’t know where we got it, maybe someone else copied it from you first?” If someone violated the copyright of a song by sampling too much of it and released it in the public domain (or failed to claim it at all), and you take the entire sample from them, would that hold up in a le…

It does address it, although not that clearly. This happens all the time with news media. They will post a picture and say they got permission from X person, but X person actually didn't even own the copyright in the first place. That doesn't make any of it okay, but it does mean that the organization has legal cover in this case and the worst that will happen is that they'll have to take the content down. In GitHub'…

If that's true, than Github is just "washing its hands". Not at all reassuring for copyright holders and users of copilot.

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

#449

Post by csallen »

ghoward wrote: post #288
csallen wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while at the same time, they take power away from individuals. Stable Diffusion and DALL-E give a ton of power to individuals, hence why they are popular. It feels like you're doing a cost analysis instead of a cost-benefit analysis, i.e. you're only looking at the negatives. It's a bit like saying cars are bad because they give more power to the big companies who sell them + put horse and buggy operators out of a…

I explained more in my comment at [1]. The big difference is that cars were a tool that helped regular people by being a force multiplier. Stable Diffusion and DALL-E are not force multipliers in the same way. Sure, you may now produce images that you couldn't before, but there are far fewer profitable uses for images than for cars. Images don't materially affect the world, but cars can. [1]: https://news.ycombinator…

This isn't super convincing to me. You're basically predicting that some new innovation will be limited in its usefulness, but you have no real way of knowing that, because the variables are too complex.

This is why we have a market. We let billions of individuals vote on what they think is useful or not, in real-time, multiple times a day, every day. If AI-generated images are less desirable than what came before, then people won't use them or pay to use them in the long run. They'll die like other flash-in-the-pan fads have died, artists will retain their jobs en masse, and OpenAI won't gain much if any power.

The entire idea of the market is to ensure that if some entity is gaining money/power, that's happening as a result of it providing some commensurate good to the people. And if that's not happening, or if the power is too great, that's why we have laws and regulatory bodies.

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

#450

Post by scrame »

enragedcacti wrote: post #154
shadowgovt wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searching for the function names in his libraries, I'm seeing some 32,000 hits. I suspect he has a different problem which (thanks to Microsoft) is now a problem he has to care about: his code probably shows up in one or more repos copy-pasted with improper LGPL attribution. There'd be no way for Copilot to know that had happened, and it would have mixed in the code. (As a side note: understanding why an ML engine ou…

Expanding on that, even if Microsoft sees the error of their ways and retrains copilot against permissively licensed source or with explicit opt-in, it may get trained on proprietary code the old version of copilot inserted into a permissively licensed project. You would have to just hope that you can take down every instance of your code and keep it down, all while copilot keeps making more instances for the next ve…

> Microsoft

> sees the error of their ways

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