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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

#451

Post by sngz »

carom wrote: post #429
_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…

Copilot is the largest disrespect to open source software I have ever seen. It is a derivative work of open source code and it is not released under the same license. It is also capable of laundering open source code. Congratulations for working on the "extinguish" phase of embrace, extend, extinguish for open source.

I really wonder what all those people who said Microsoft acquisition of Github was a good thing for opensource think now. I'm sure there will still be mental gymnastics involved.

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

#452

Post by lofatdairy »

fweimer wrote: post #436
lofatdairy wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That's a good point. I was thinking that during the curation phase of the dataset they should check for a LICENSE.txt file in the repo, and just batch exclude all copyleft/copyright containing repositories. This obviously won't handle every case as you say, and when it does generate copyleft code it will fail to attribute, but hopefully not having copyleft code in its dataset or less of it reduces the chance it generates code that perfectly satisfies its loss function by being exactly like something its seen before.

The main problem I see with generating attribution is that the algorithm obviously doesn't "know" that it's generating identical code. Even in the original twitter post, the algorithm makes subtle and essentially semantically synonymous changes (like the changing the commenting style). So for all intents and purposes it can't attribute the function because it doesn't know _where_ it's coming from and copied code is indistinguishable from de novo code. Copilot will probably never be able to attribute code short of exhaustively checking the outputs using some symbolical approach against a database of copyleft/copyrighted code.

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

#453

Post by 314 »

crazygringo wrote: post #223

As some other commenters have noted, it seems like the copyrighted code is being copied and pasted into many other codebases (shadowgovt says they found 32,000 hits), which are then (illegally) representing an incorrect license. So obviously the source of the error is one or more third parties, not Microsoft, and it's obviously impossible for Microsoft to be responsible in advance for what other people claim to licen…

I don't think that Microsoft can claim to be blameless here "because it is too hard".

If we have 32 000 copies of the same code in a large database with a linking structure betwen the records then we should be able to discern which are the high provenance sources in the network, and which are the low provenance copies. The problem is after all, remarkedly similar to building a search engine.

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

#454

Post by snotrockets »

crazygringo wrote: post #223

As some other commenters have noted, it seems like the copyrighted code is being copied and pasted into many other codebases (shadowgovt says they found 32,000 hits), which are then (illegally) representing an incorrect license. So obviously the source of the error is one or more third parties, not Microsoft, and it's obviously impossible for Microsoft to be responsible in advance for what other people claim to licen…

They could have spent effort (read: money) to validate the content of the corpus the model is trained on.

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

#455

Post by avereveard »

mjr00 wrote: post #11

Same issue with Stable Diffusion/NovelAI and certain people's artwork (eg Greg Rutkowski) being obviously used as part of the training set. More noticeable in Copilot since the output needs to be a lot more precise. Lawmakers need to jump on this stuff ASAP. Some say that it's no different from a person looking at existing code or art and recreating it from memory or using it as inspiration. But the law changes when…

Not really, unless you can produce a verbatim copy of existing artwork out of stability's stable diffusion.

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

#457

Post by zarzavat »

deepspace wrote: post #140

This shows how copyright is all screwed up. Let's say the code in question is based on a published algorithm, maybe Yuster and Zwick, (I did not check). What exactly gives Davis a better claim to the copyright than the inventors of the algorithm? Yes, I know software is copyrightable while algorithms are not, but it is not at all clear to my why that should be the case. The effort of translating an algorithm into cod…

Algorithms cannot be copyrighted. What is copyrighted is the creative expression of an algorithm. The variable names, the comments, choosing a for loop vs a while loop, or a ternary operator over an “if”, the order of arguments to a function, architectural decisions, etc.

Copyright is formed when a human makes a choice about equivalent ways of implementing an algorithm.

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

#458

Post by Spivak »

andreareina wrote: post #446
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…

"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.

It’s not “oops we didn’t know” it’s, “someone published a project under a permissive license which included this code.”

If your standard is “Github should have an oracle to the US court system and predict what the outcome of a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement for a given snippet of code would be” then it is literally impossible for anyone to use any open source code ever because it might contain infringing code.

There is no chain of custody for this kind of thing which is what it would require.

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

#459

Post by guitarbill »

carom wrote: post #429
_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…

Copilot is the largest disrespect to open source software I have ever seen. It is a derivative work of open source code and it is not released under the same license. It is also capable of laundering open source code. Congratulations for working on the "extinguish" phase of embrace, extend, extinguish for open source.

The chilling effect of this decision is something everybody who uses open source software should be worried about.

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

#460

Post by cycomanic »

judge2020 wrote: post #416
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…

> 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?” I mean, in humans it's just referred to as 'experience', 'training', or 'creativity'. Unless your experience is job-only, all the code you write is based on some source you can't attribute combined with your own mental routine of "i've been given this problem and need to emit cod…

> > 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?”

> I mean, in humans it's just referred to as 'experience', 'training', or 'creativity'. Unless your experience is job-only, all the code you write is based on some source you can't attribute combined with your own mental routine of "i've been given this problem and need to emit code to solve it". In fact, you might regularly violate copyright every time you write the same 3 lines of code that solve some common language workaround or problem.

Aren't you moving the goal posts? This is not 3 lines, but instead is 1 to 1 reproducing a complex function that definitely has enough invention height to be copyright able.

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