491–500 of 734 posts
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 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…
Hacker News hates everything, especially if it seems to work. Don't read into it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it only happens to be hosted on GitHub and browsable (but not copyable) by people. So would you say that it's publicly visible?
Publicly visible, yes. Publicly available, yes. Public code, no.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
which is a different issue to my point, but still very valid. what terms are implied if no license is specified? I would argue attribution should be expected if used, but I also wouldn't go near any code without a specific license attached as there's no express permission given - just because a license isn't disclosed doesn't mean it isn't there. you can't go copying anything and everything just because nobody has to…
It's stronger than that: if GitHub is correct that they don't need a license then they are allowed to train on publicly visible code even if it is labeled with "no one has any provision to use this for anything at all, especially training models"
I would hope GitHub (and Microsoft) did the legal work to cover this, and not just ploughed ahead with the plan to drown any legal challenges. From my perspective, they're doing the latter.
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.
https://twitter.com/kylpeacock/status/1410749018183933952
https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
https://twitter.com/pkell7/status/1411058236321681414/photo/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However - Copilot directly recites code. You make that statement as an absolute, but in the interests of clarity, all evidence so far shows that it directly recites code very rarely indeed. Even the Quake example had to be prompted by the specific variable names used in the original code. In practice, the output code is heavily influenced by your own context — the comments you include, the variable names you use, e…
> all evidence so far shows that it directly recites code very rarely indeed. _Once_ is enough for it to be infringing. The law is not very forgiving when you try and handwave it away.
I tend to think it would be covered (provided it there were relatively small snippets and not entire functions).
I think it’s pretty easy to defeat MS in court. We just need to bring the music industry into this! For example: Let’s train a network on Beatles music to generate new Beatles songs. I’m pretty sure music lawyers will find a way to prove that the trained network is violating the label’s copyright, as they always manage to do that. And then we just need to use the precedent and argue that music is the same thing as co…
In ancient Rome they didn't have a police force. What they had was essentially muscle for hire, mercenary bands paid by rich and powerful folks to do their bidding. As a regular person, the only thing that could have protected you from one of these groups was another such group. Same today with the licensing system.
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 alte…
I think it’s pretty easy to defeat MS in court. We just need to bring the music industry into this! For example: Let’s train a network on Beatles music to generate new Beatles songs. I’m pretty sure music lawyers will find a way to prove that the trained network is violating the label’s copyright, as they always manage to do that. And then we just need to use the precedent and argue that music is the same thing as co…