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

461–470 of 806 posts

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

#461

Post by fulafel »

zarzavat wrote: post #457
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.

Also this depends on jurisdiction.

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

#462

Post by snotrockets »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #182
D13Fd wrote: post #176

If the code is public, my guess is that someone else stole it and added it to an open source repo without authorization. Microsoft may have then picked it up from there.

This just means that if you use Copilot for work, you're exposing yourself and/or your employer to unknown legal liability. =)

Even if you use it for personal projects.

To be safe, we'd have to get Microsoft to agree to indemnify users (if they really believe using this is safe, they should do so), or wait until a court case on copyright as it regard to training corpus for large models is decided and appeals are exhausted.

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

#463

Post by anujdeshpande »

Out of curiosity - has no one sued OpenAI/GitHub for this? I remember seeing threads like this since Copilot was launched. If there was enough legal pressure, I'd imagine OpenAI/Github training this using opt-in repos instead of using the model which they currently have.

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

#464

Post by fireant »

This exact code can be found 1000 times on github and many of those are MIT licensed https://github.com/search?q=%22cs+*cs_transpose+%28%22&type=.... Copilot, or any other developer or person, has no way of knowing where the original implementation came from or it's original license. The cat is out of the bag, get used to it.

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

#465

Post by cycomanic »

_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…

2 things:

1. you make it out like a translation from e.g. English to Spanish wouldn't fall under copyright. That's incorrect, in most juristictions I am aware of, it actually fall under the copyright of the original work and fall under its own copyright.

2. When will copilot be released open source, it is pretty clear by now that it is a derivative of all the OSS code so how about following the licensing?

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

#467

Post by avereveard »

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?

You keep track of where each external dependency, file and code snippet come from, link to the source, link to the source license.

If someone has lied about the license of something down the chain of links, he's the one on the hook for it.

If you have licensed code in your software and no license to show for it or cannot produce the link to it then you're on the hook.

And here's the issue at hand copilot must have seen that code under permissive license somewhere, but now cannot produce a link to it.

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

#468

Post by cycomanic »

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?

It is responsibility of the entity (Microsoft in this case) publishing the code to make sure that they have the right to publish. The Linux kernel generally requires non anonymous contributions for that reason. As a guarantee that the person has the right to contribute.

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

#469

Post by Spivak »

fencepost wrote: post #259

Seems simple enough to start addressing. Don't sue Microsoft, subpoena them as part of your suit against unnamed companies violating the license. Request information on all public and private repositories that were generated in part using Copilot and which contain relevant code from which the licensing info has been stripped. After all, Microsoft may not itself be infringing so there may not be a cause of action agai…

> Request information on all public and private repositories that were generated in part using Copilot and which contain relevant code from which the licensing info has been stripped.

No court is ever going give you that subpoena nor would it even be possible to comply with it even if granted. You might get “show me all the repositories used in the training data for Copilot that contain that snippet.”

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

#470

Post by choppaface »

_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…

Your long long paragraph about neighboring code editors is disproven: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227395

You’re really not going to solve this problem with marketing (“blog posts”) or some pro-Github story from data scientists. You need a DMCA / removal request feature akin to Google image search and you need work on understanding product problems from the customer perspective.

Post reply on HN