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All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

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Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#521

Post by jeremyjh »

cormacrelf wrote: post #400
blendergeek wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a decent bit of caselaw indicating that computers reading and using a copyrighted work simply "don't count" in terms of copyright infringement -- only humans can infringe copyright. I have read variations of "computers don't commit copyright" more times than I can count in the past few days. How is Copilot different from a compiler? (Please give me the legal answer, not the technical answer. I now the diffe…

"Computers don't commit copyright" is a complete misreading or misunderstanding of another proposition, that "computers cannot author a work". Authoring is the act that causes a work to be copyrightable. In most jurisdictions, authoring a work automatically causes copyright to subsist in the work to some degree. The purpose of the copyright system is to encourage people to author new, original works, by rewarding tho…

I think this is more cogent analysis than anything else I've seen yet on this topic. You should consider submitting a blog post so this can become a top-level topic.

Also, I loved this quote:

> Copying is one of the exclusive rights you have when you own the copyright in a work, that you may then license out.

I've been paying attention to software copyright topics for more than twenty years and never thought of it in exactly these terms. Its right there in the name - the right to copy it - and determine the terms under which others can copy it is exactly what a copyright is!

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#522

Post by frumper »

sp332 wrote: post #451
Hamuko wrote: post #183

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.

If you post your code to the public, I wouldn't be shocked if people copy it verbatim without regard to license. I'm not suggesting that is a proper thing to do, just accepting that it can happen when I post code.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#523

Post by nowherebeen »

albertzeyer wrote: post #518
nowherebeen wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is intent. When Github reads public code, their only intent is to profit from it. Depending on the license, that's a violation.

A human also often intends to make profit (by using the gained knowledge).

No, they intent to learn from it or find a solution to their problem. It's much harder to argue human intent in court than GitHub blantantly doing so.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#524

Post by jeremyjh »

stingraycharles wrote: post #519
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but may also use the same chord progressions, lyrics, or melodies. Could even say it contains snippits of the actual recordings, depending on how you look at it

Sure but then it’ll definitely be harder to prove it’s actual copyright infringement, especially when only a very small part of the song may have some snippets of the Beatles. Could it then, perhaps, be considered fair use?

Yes you'd have exactly the same kind of lawsuits and arguments that already exist today around fair use. It doesn't matter if a tool creates the new work or a person creates it (without tools?!!?) because ultimately it is a person who claims the new work as their own and distributes it, and that is the person who will get sued by the record companies if their work is too derivative. Establishing the line for "too derivative" in any particular case is a very lucrative field already I'm sure.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#525

Post by jcheng »

salawat wrote: post #502
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " However - Copilot directly recites code. " Sounds like that wouldn't be difficult to fix? Transform the code to an intermediate representation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_representation ) as a pre-processing stage, which ditches any non-essential structure of the code and eliminates comments, variable names, etc., before running the learning algorithms on it. Et voila, much like a human learning…

At that point, can we all just agree IP is the stupidest concept to ever be layered on top of math (which programming is) and move on with non-copyrightable code?

Only if you agree that copyleft licenses are also stupid; without copyright, there's no way to prevent companies from making closed-source forks of code you wrote and intended to stay open.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#526

Post by croes »

AaronFriel wrote: post #193
keonix wrote: post #185

If the training set contains verbatim (A)GPL code does this mean that Copilot also should be distributed by Microsoft under GPL? Because without it Copilot (as it is distributed by Microsoft) couldn't be built, wouldn't it make it a derivative work of GPL'd code (and obviously every other license)? I see a lot of people comparing human learning to machine learning in the comments, but there is a huge difference - we…

No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies befo…

Can you still apply Fair Use if they make Copilot a payed service?

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#527

Post by coding123 »

keonix wrote: post #185

If the training set contains verbatim (A)GPL code does this mean that Copilot also should be distributed by Microsoft under GPL? Because without it Copilot (as it is distributed by Microsoft) couldn't be built, wouldn't it make it a derivative work of GPL'd code (and obviously every other license)? I see a lot of people comparing human learning to machine learning in the comments, but there is a huge difference - we…

copilot isn't distributing copies of itself either.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#528

Post by croes »

leventov wrote: post #475
habitue wrote: post #353

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…

Perhaps people on HN start sensing that successors of Github Copilot will take their programming job. Rightly so. Personally, I think that in the age of AI programming any notions of code licensing should be abolished. There is no copyright for genes in nature or memes in culture; similarly, these shouldn't be copyright for code.

>There is no copyright for genes in nature

Since when are humans not a part of nature?

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#529

Post by tylersmith »

stingraycharles wrote: post #500
neonihil wrote: post #457

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…

Wouldn’t a more accurate metaphor be “let’s train a network on all music, to generate new music”, which includes Beatles, and may generate songs that contain the same chords as the Beatles used?

Or contain new chords that it synthesized from its knowledge of the ones the Beatles used.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#530

Post by random314 »

AaronFriel wrote: post #193
keonix wrote: post #185

If the training set contains verbatim (A)GPL code does this mean that Copilot also should be distributed by Microsoft under GPL? Because without it Copilot (as it is distributed by Microsoft) couldn't be built, wouldn't it make it a derivative work of GPL'd code (and obviously every other license)? I see a lot of people comparing human learning to machine learning in the comments, but there is a huge difference - we…

No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies befo…

If copilot was trained using the entirety of the linux kernel, wouldn't the neural network itself need to be GPLed, if not its output.
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