Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

github.blog

51–60 of 127 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#51

Sadly, "simple license management" here just refers to "who in your organization has a license to use this tool", rather than "where did this code come from and what license is it under". This tool remains the equivalent of money laundering for violation of Open Source licenses (or software licenses in general).

Where's the part of the Copilot EULA that indemifies users against copyright infringement for the generated code? If the model was trained entirely using code that Microsoft has copyright over (for example: the MS Windows codebase, the MS Office codebase, etc.) then they could offer legal assurances that they have usage rights to the generated code as derivative works. Without such assurances, how do you know that th…

Ultimately I think MS is right betting on the fact that this will not matter in the long run. All AI tools are trained on copyrighted data. The tools are too useful to cripple with restrictive laws written for a previous era.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#52

An extra $9/mo for: * Simple license management * Organization-wide policy management * Industry-leading private * Corporate proxy support Wow. Who’s going to pay a 90% premium for these features? Edit: OK seems like different marketing pages have different features. The list above comes from https://github.com/features/copilot/ . Still seems like a very steep increase over the base. And I cannot believe there are on…

If you want to make a conversation awkward, ask your account team about the indemnification for the AI’s potential copyright violations.

"Notwithstanding any other language in your Agreement, GitHub will defend you against any claim by an unaffiliated third-party that your use of GitHub Copilot misappropriated a trade secret or directly infringes a patent, copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property right of a third party, up to the greater of $500,000.00 USD or the total amount paid to GitHub for the use of GitHub Copilot during the 12 months preceding the claim."

From here: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-spe...

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#53

Sadly, "simple license management" here just refers to "who in your organization has a license to use this tool", rather than "where did this code come from and what license is it under". This tool remains the equivalent of money laundering for violation of Open Source licenses (or software licenses in general).

Where's the part of the Copilot EULA that indemifies users against copyright infringement for the generated code? If the model was trained entirely using code that Microsoft has copyright over (for example: the MS Windows codebase, the MS Office codebase, etc.) then they could offer legal assurances that they have usage rights to the generated code as derivative works. Without such assurances, how do you know that th…

>Are you comfortable risking your company's IP by unknowingly using AGPLv3-licensed code that Copilot "generated" in your company's products?

This would not risk your company's IP.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#54
post #24

So the code suggestion comes from the same data trained for the public version, which could include GPL code or have other issues? I doubt any company would use this in their production code. Internal tools, maybe.

Microsoft itself uses and suggests this internally for production code.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#55
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah we were told not to use it by the lawyers at work and have an official policy against using it. Not having that would open us up for liability if we’re sued as there’s no defence that what we did was clean room if we admitted using it. We’ll hang back until other companies have litigated their way to some legislation around it.

Same here. Told to steer clear of this (in fairness, not only CoPilot, also ChatGPT and stuff), until somebody else pipeclean this in the courts. No matter what is said, there are no license guarantees on the generated code, as you don’t know the exact provenance, so it seems only sensible to be on the safe side.

The lawyers on my last job were terrified to know that we store tracking information on website visitors computers that is used to track them by third party corporations.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#56
post #19

Is Copilot HIPAA compliant? It sends data to the cloud, so if you paste PHI…

Source: Ex Hospital IT.

I wouldn't risk it. It is too easy to write the wrong prompts and leak PHI.

ChatGPT:

"Write me a parser for this HL7 message..."

Copilot:

"Using this example message please write a parser for it..."

Yeah... If it was compliant, people would write those in a heartbeat.

Unless sold as HIPAA compliant, and the conditions of use for that compliance are known... don't trust it, for SAAS.

This is stuff covered in your yearly HIPAA briefing folks.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#57

Sadly, "simple license management" here just refers to "who in your organization has a license to use this tool", rather than "where did this code come from and what license is it under". This tool remains the equivalent of money laundering for violation of Open Source licenses (or software licenses in general).

It's an unpopular opinion which is why I'll cowardly write it under a throwaway account. Josh, I have a ton of respect for your work just btw. I can't help but see a headline like this and think "Okay the license argument has to be the top comment already". To me this whole thing is like pandora's box and it will not in any way be put back into the box. In the long run isn't arguing about the code it generates and ho…

Agreed. Copyright is not a fundamental law of physics, its something we invented to help incentivize creation. The moment AI tools show to help spur creation, they are now more useful than copyright so society will simply rewrite the laws to adapt.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#59
post #19

Is Copilot HIPAA compliant? It sends data to the cloud, so if you paste PHI…

Not an answer to your overall question of compliance, but to the specific point: > Copilot for Business does not retain any telemetry or Code Snippets Data. https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/configuring-github-copilo...

And if that page changes without notifying you?

... Unless they are selling the compliance as a feature, be careful.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#60

Sadly, "simple license management" here just refers to "who in your organization has a license to use this tool", rather than "where did this code come from and what license is it under". This tool remains the equivalent of money laundering for violation of Open Source licenses (or software licenses in general).

It's an unpopular opinion which is why I'll cowardly write it under a throwaway account. Josh, I have a ton of respect for your work just btw. I can't help but see a headline like this and think "Okay the license argument has to be the top comment already". To me this whole thing is like pandora's box and it will not in any way be put back into the box. In the long run isn't arguing about the code it generates and ho…

OpenAI/GPT products at MS making same exact bet
Post reply on HN