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GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

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Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#51

Post by dogma1138 »

hmfrh wrote: post #15
iliekcomputers wrote: post #3

If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes, I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someone who's written quite a lot of MIT code. (And charging for a product which adds value to your developer experience and needs money to be run is not a bad thing)

> If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes Uploading it to Github does not transfer ownership or imply allowances for any use. If you upload it without a license it is a copyright violation to copy the code. Even with an MIT license it is a copyright violation to copy the code without attribution. > I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someon…

Snyk did the same with Snyk code to build their “ML driven SAST” offering.

Pretty much anyone can scrape GitHub and train their model.

What exactly is the legal implications of this has yet to be tested.

Pretty much every model is susceptible to some sort of model inversion or set inclusion attack.

By their own admissions Co-Pilot sometimes outputs PII that part of the code and code snippets verbatim, even if it’s rare iirc around 0.1% it’s still a huge legal liability for anyone who uses the tool, especially since it’s unclear how these inclusions are spread out and what triggers them. For example it could be that a particular coding / usage of Co-Pilot style or working on a specific subset of problems increases the likelihood of this occurring.

ML is too new to have been tested in court this has more ramifications beyond just licensing, for example if you use PII to train a dataset and receive a GDPR deletion request do you need to throw away and retrain your model?

I don’t think people should be angry however I also think that this needs to be test in court and multiple times before this can be “safe to use”.

But I also don’t think that the ML model is necessarily a derivative work.

For example if you use copyleft material to construct a CS course someone would be hard pressed to argue that the course now needs to be released freely yet alone that anything that the students would write after attending the course would fall under derivative work too.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#53

Post by ghaff »

ineedasername wrote: post #38

Can't you host code on GitHub that is not "free" for commercial use? If GitHub scraped these projects then it's a problem. Otherwise, Into honestly trying to have a conversation on this to understand the objections because I haven't made up my mind but struggle to see the problem. So pease consider the following: if the code was not encumbered by restrictions I don't see an obvious problem with this. Using code or da…

If an individual hypothetically painstakingly searched through GitHub to see how others wrote an API call and copy-pasted, almost no one would have a problem with that even if they didn't attribute every little code snippet. But some are bringing out the pitchforks because ML can basically do that painstaking search (yes, I know it's not literally a search) so efficiently that it's actually (maybe) useful as a tool. But it's not fundamentally different from what many programmers do all the time.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#54

Post by ghoward »

iliekcomputers wrote: post #3

If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes, I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someone who's written quite a lot of MIT code. (And charging for a product which adds value to your developer experience and needs money to be run is not a bad thing)

All of my open source licenses require attribution, but Copilot does not give that attribution. So while my code is open source, Copilot is still violating the open source license. Just because it's open source doesn't mean there are not any terms that must be abided by.

I believe that gives me the right to be mad and to demand they fix their violations, one way or another.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#56

Post by neolog »

jwalton wrote: post #24
hmfrh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes Uploading it to Github does not transfer ownership or imply allowances for any use. If you upload it without a license it is a copyright violation to copy the code. Even with an MIT license it is a copyright violation to copy the code without attribution. > I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someon…

> Even with an MIT license it is a copyright violation to copy the code without attribution. That was my take originally, but apparently this is not as cut and dry as you may think: https://www.technollama.co.uk/is-githubs-copilot-potentially...

> People share code for the betterment of society, and while copyleft used to be popular early on, the software industry has been moving towards less problematic and more permissive licences. The spirit of open source is to share code, and make it possible to use it to train machine learning.

It sounds like this writer doesn't understand the point of the GPL or the distinction between free software and open source. Also quite a crude historical perspective given the increasing number of major projects licensed virally. Claiming that MITL's popularity justifies pirating GPL code makes no sense.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#57

Post by arp242 »

dopaminefasting wrote: post #18
SamWhited wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you write MIT code you expect them not to strip your license out in derivative works. This is exactly what license are for and GitHub is blatantly violating it while people applaud.

Maybe read the MIT license before you grab the pitchforks: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all COPIES OR SUBSTANTIAL PORTIONS of the Software." Reusing a snippet doesn't require reproducing the MIT license. People who publish MIT software know they're basically giving their code out with basically no strings attached. However, GitHub should be careful with the GPL variety.

What counts as a "substantial portion"? Personally I'd say that a function is substantial, whereas one or two lines would not be.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#58

Post by fartcannon »

detaro wrote: post #16
toomuchtodo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So sue them and a court opinion can demonstrate where the line is and how much code can be replicated before attribution is required (and the product can be refined to ensure compliance). Innovation should push boundaries.

They could push boundaries and publish one trained on all of Microsofts internal source code. Would for me be a great demonstration that they believe the "it's fair use and not violating copyright on the training data" argument.

It's more likely they'd sue someone who used it to develop something that ate into their lunch by saying it infringed on one of their 'secret' Linux patents they sabre rattle about every now and then.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#59

Post by bphogan »

iliekcomputers wrote: post #3

If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes, I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someone who's written quite a lot of MIT code. (And charging for a product which adds value to your developer experience and needs money to be run is not a bad thing)

I think you're missing my point. I have tons of MIT code out there, including a node.js project used by lots of companies. I don't care about people using my code for money because I open sourced it under a permissive license. So I'm not really objecting to that.

But what's bothering me about this is that it's not a small company doing this. It's a company that's got crazy amounts of cash, who has been trying to trade on a "we're nice now and we love open source" image in the last few years, now taking all the open source code and balling it up in a closed-source app they will charge us for.

I'd be fine if I got to use it for free, extend it to whatever editing platform I like through its open API, and it was a part of an open project.

But right now it looks like they'll charge, and that bugs me.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#60

Post by greatgib »

I'm a big proponent of open source and I'm usually not nice with bad moves of GitHub. For example, i find stupid to use vscode and believe that it is open source when it is a lie.

But, in that case, I think that the things that are put to charge GitHub are not right.

I think that the idea is nice and it is fair from open source code. Anyone is free of downloading free software and doing something similar, and it is nice.

I just find the product itself is stupid, and it is for users to be smart enough not to use that knowing that their is a risk of them being sued for involuntary violating copyright. And GitHub might be at risk if it is a paid service as the companies could sue them back by pretending that they expected the code generated by GitHub to be safe for commercial use.

Also, I would think that GH would have abused if they used 'private repo' codes to train their model without permission.

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