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

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

#501

Post by bayindirh »

Aeolun wrote: post #290
bayindirh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, with my software developer hat, am not excited by AI. Not a bit, honestly. Esp. about these big models trained on huge amount of data, without any consent. Let me be perfectly clear. I'm all for the tech. The capabilities are nice. The thing I'm strongly against is training these models on any data without any consent. GPT-3 is OK, training it with public stuff regardless of its license is not. Copilot is OK, trai…

> training on with GPL/LGPL licensed code without consent is not That’s actually fine (kind of the idea of specifying a license). What is not fine is using that code in non-GPL licensed code.

> That’s actually fine...

Actually yes. I'm not against the tech. I'm against using my code without consent for a tool which allows to breach the license I put my code under.

IOW, if Copilot understood code licenses and prevented intermixing incompatibly licensed code while emitting results for my repository, I might have slightly different stance on the issue.

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

#502

Post by olliej »

Vetch wrote: post #481
nightski wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just don't use Github.

This scenario is specific to neither github nor copilot. It will always happen for any combination of a code generating LLM trained on all publicly available code.

Correct. All of those “models” are simply violating copyright - the post alone demonstrates that the model itself contains that code, so the entire model is also covered by that license.

I would put money on it also containing gpl3 code, which I suspect means that the model itself is probably also required to be public under the terms of gpl3

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

#503

Post by olliej »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #479
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not using Github doesn't stop others from posting your code on Github with incorrect licenses. It becomes a massive game of whack-a-repo

Or just don't give a hoot. Takes practice, but it's a skill that can be mastered like any other.

That’s why we should simply accept that companies don’t have to publish source when they include gpl code, right?

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

#504

Post by olliej »

_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…

Hi, copilot is very clearly and unambiguously violating people’s IP, and as the model is not public also likely violating gpl3 publication requirements.

I look forward to the entire product you have made being available, as is required for any product built using gpl3’d software.

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

#505

Post by cycomanic »

Vetch wrote: post #489
cycomanic wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Is it a valid defense against copyright infringement to say “we don’t know where we got it, maybe someone else copied it from you first?” > I mean, in humans it's just referred to as 'experience', 'training', or 'creativity'. Unless your experience is job-only, all the code you write is based on some source you can't attribute combined with your own mental routine of "i've been given this problem and need to emit…

With high probability, what's happened here is this code is an important piece of code-infrastucture in that it's copied into a fair number of places. Which means humans are copying it without attribution or downstream of someone who did while relevant license is not propagated anywhere near as reliably. It doesn't change licensing issue but it does mean people are already copying and using copyrighted code without r…

>With high probability, what's happened here is this code is an important piece of code-infrastucture in that it's copied into a fair number of places. Which means humans are copying it without attribution or downstream of someone who did while relevant license is not propagated anywhere near as reliably.

The original poster said it was in a private repository.

>It doesn't change licensing issue but it does mean people are already copying and using copyrighted code without respecting original license and no AI involved.

I don't get the argument. Many people are copying/pirating MS windows/MS office. What do you think MS would say to a company they caught with unlicensed copies and they used the excuse "the PCs came preinstalled with Windows and we didn't check if there was a valid license"?

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

#506

Post by krageon »

dmix wrote: post #486
socialismisok wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Ryan! Have you ever done any reading on the Luddites? They weren't the anti technology, anti progress social force people think they were. They were highly skilled laborers who knew how to operate complex looms. When auto looms came along, factory owners decided they didn't want highly trained, knowledgeable workers they wanted highly disposable workers. The Luddites were happy to operate the new looms, they just…

What alternative are you suggesting? Things turned out pretty great economy-wise for people in the UK. So that's a poor example even if Luddites didn't hate technology. Not working on the technology wouldn't have done the world any favours (nor the millions of people who wore the more affordable clothes it produced). I personally think it'd be rewarding to make developers lives easier, essentially just saving the cou…

The luddites were right. Everything is worse because they did not win, which is obvious if you spend a second thinking about what them not winning means: more concentrated wealth, more disenfranchised workers.

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

#508

Post by d1sxeyes »

lmm wrote: post #445
danielheath wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Legally, if you're publishing a derived work without legitimate permission then you're civilly liable for statutory + actual damages, the only thing you're avoiding is the treble damages for wilful infringement. Morally I'd say you should make a reasonable good faith effort to verify that you have a real license for everything you're using. When you're importing something on the scale of "all of Github" that means a…

How do you know GH didn't? Maybe they only included repos with LICENSE.MD files which followed a known permissive licence?

What if a particular piece of code is licensed restrictively, and then (assuming without malice) accidentally included in a piece of software with a permissive license?

What if a particular piece of code is licensed permissively (in a way that allows relicensing, for example), but then included in a software package with a more restrictive licence. How could you tell if the original code is licensed permissively or not?

At what point do Github have to become absolute arbiters of the original authorship of the code in order to determine who is authorised to issue licenses for the code? How would they do so? How could you prove ownership to Github? What consequences could there be if you were unable to prove ownership?

That's before we even get to more nuanced ethical questions like a human learning to code will inevitably learn from reading code, even if the code they read is not permissively licensed. Why then, would an AI learning to code not be allowed to do the same?

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

#509

Post by somenameforme »

314 wrote: post #453
crazygringo wrote: post #223

As some other commenters have noted, it seems like the copyrighted code is being copied and pasted into many other codebases (shadowgovt says they found 32,000 hits), which are then (illegally) representing an incorrect license. So obviously the source of the error is one or more third parties, not Microsoft, and it's obviously impossible for Microsoft to be responsible in advance for what other people claim to licen…

I don't think that Microsoft can claim to be blameless here "because it is too hard". If we have 32 000 copies of the same code in a large database with a linking structure betwen the records then we should be able to discern which are the high provenance sources in the network, and which are the low provenance copies. The problem is after all, remarkedly similar to building a search engine.

There is no formal linking structure in many, if not most cases. Ctrl+V is the weapon of choice of many a programmer. To say nothing of somebody then adding superficial changes to the code to, for instance, fit their personal style or adapt it into their project. And then of course on top of it, Github is not the alpha and omega of code. The original code have been published anywhere, or even nowhere in a case such as theft.

Then there's also parallel discovery. People frequently come to the same solution at roughly the same time, completely independently. And this is nothing new. For instance, who discovered calculus? Newton or Leibniz? This was a roaring controversy at the same time with both claiming credit. The reality is that they both likely discovered it, completely independently, at about the same time. And there's a whole lot more people working on stuff than than in Newton's time!

There's also just parallel creation. Task enough people with creating an octree based level-of-detail system in computer graphics and you're going to get a lot of relatively lengthy code that is going to look extremely similar, in spite of the fact that it's a generally esoteric and non-trivial problem.

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

#510

Post by danielheath »

avereveard wrote: post #467
danielheath wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

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

In this case, all you have on them is an email address. Pretty sure you're still on the hook.

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