501–510 of 838 posts
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Unfortunately the way IP law works, at least in the US, is that you can use essentially whatever you want as training data and it's up to the user to make sure none of the generated code violates licensing agreements.
Did you just make that up? Github is distributing the copied code to users.
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They own their code and it either has a license for use or is implicitly rights retained if not. If Copilot regurgitates their code, from a project that is public but with a non-permissive license they are having their IP rights violated so are totally correct in being unhappy about that. Just because you’ve made something cool doesn’t give you the right to harm others in the process. If MS or OpenAI don’t think this…
The entire point of a fair use right is that you don’t need the copyright owner’s permission to be able to exercise it. Fair use allows you to do things that the copyright owner doesn’t like. Is fair use on a massive scale still fair use? Courts generally think so, otherwise Google would have been out of business a long time ago.
The SCO vs IBM lawsuit was over only a few lines of code, after all.
I cant use a derivative of Mickey Mouse in my product, even if I change his colour and give him a hat, even if these changes were made by an AI. Why would it be different for code? I cab only use Mickey Mouse as fair use if its done for a specific barrow set of proposes (satire, news reporting etc).
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Owning code snippets sounds ridiculous to me, like can I own this snippet? def average(*numbers): return sum(numbers)/len(numbers) if not is it because it is too small? what’s the minimum line number that ownership kicks into? what if I change the function name and the variable names?
If that's under a copyleft license, I can't just copy & paste it under my non-copyleft licensed code and call it mine. That's as simple as that.
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3 lines of fairly generic code? That's not what copyright is protecting.
Just for the record I was providing some evidence to support this question: "Do we have any evidence that copilot doesn't check/filter by license?"
I believe github's lawyers would have had hundreds of hours of dicussion about this and at this point, they believe they are in the right, and anybody who disagrees should use the legal system to resolve the matter.
In the meantime, what it is and isn't doing wrt licenses seems to be poorly understood externally.
It is now proven that copilot returns code from codebases with non-permissive licenses [1]. I'm curious - what are the legal implications of this going forward? I've so many questions. 1. Will Microsoft ever face lawsuits for these license violations? 2. If so, who/how? Class-action? 3. Will copilot be forced to open-source in the future? Under which license? Some open source licenses are incompatible with others, bu…
"jethrodaniel" does not appear to have the copyright to offer that license, but it's hard for Github to determine that in general, so I doubt they would be liable for the error.
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> Have you ever read GitHub's conditions to know whether they also have the right to use your code that way, no matter how you decide to license it? I feel that you are overly focused on the legal part here, which I'm sure was handled by Microsoft's lawyers. I'm more interested in the question of principle. I have, and there is not. Neither could there be — in many cases the person uploading code to GitHub is not the…
>> Have you ever read GitHub's conditions to know whether they also have the right to use your code that way, no matter how you decide to license it? > I have, and there is not. At least one IP lawyer strongly disagrees, suggesting anything you host on GitHub is fair game [1]. [1] https://fossa.com/blog/analyzing-legal-implications-github-c... > The person writing an SO answer is intelligent and capable of conceptual…
The question is whether Copilot's users can use the regurgitated code without following the license terms, not whether Copilot was allowed to train their model on it. I agree it's likely fine for them to train the model, but the use of Copilot would seem to be a legal minefield.
A little thought makes it clear that an affirmative answer would be absurd. This would mean that using a simple tool (let's say `cat`) to make a copy of some code and subsequently ignoring its license terms is infringement, but if the software used to make the copy is more complex (or perhaps if it has the "AI" label stuck to it!) the same actions are not infringement.
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That sounds like a problem that could be better solved through language and library design rather than an AI that sucks up all the code in the world.
And yet after all of these decades, after countless advances in libraries and languages, I am still writing boilerplate in C, JS, Python, et al. I’m not sure that a language or library can ever understand the context of code without following an ML approach. Languages and libraries will always allow for more than the immediate task at hand. The innovation is that this tool understands which specific language or libra…
It is now proven that copilot returns code from codebases with non-permissive licenses [1]. I'm curious - what are the legal implications of this going forward? I've so many questions. 1. Will Microsoft ever face lawsuits for these license violations? 2. If so, who/how? Class-action? 3. Will copilot be forced to open-source in the future? Under which license? Some open source licenses are incompatible with others, bu…
My question is, if it isn't a copyright infringement issue to use copilot in its current form right now, why not just claim copilot was used whenever accused of copyright infringement hence forth?
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> I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge. Because they shared the code under a license, and they have the right to complain if people use that code but don't follow the license. For example, what happens if Github Copilot spits a copy of some copyrighted code verbatim? Is laundering open source co…
I've done a fair number of technical due diligence projects on acquisitions and potential partnerships, and on some project I've hired outside firms to analyze the code and figure out its origins and what licenses apply. There are tools that will analyze a codebase and identify where chunks of varying size seem to come from. Mostly to determine if the code is encumbered by problematic licenses, but also to detect whe…
It's as if Microsoft were banking on the fact that most violations will be unnoticed
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Sure. https://jtip.law.northwestern.edu/2021/05/28/copyright-issue... However, even if infringement occurs during machine learning, training AI with copyrighted works would likely be excused by the ‘fair use’ doctrine.[ii] For example, in Authors Guild v. Google, Inc.[iii], Google had scanned digital copies of books and established a publicly available search function. The plaintiffs alleged that this constituted inf…
That's training for search to lead to a full copy of the original work with citations, not training for regurgitating verbatim chunks of copywritten works to be incorporated at scale into other copyrighted works while obfuscating their original source. The Second Circuit's tests listed in your citation specifically fail in this case. It's not highly transformative since it's just regurgitating snippets to be used in…