Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 806 posts

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

#521

Post by [deleted] »

krageon wrote: post #506
dmix wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#522

Post by yywwbbn »

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 first few decades of the 19th century were exceptionally grim in the UK though. Poverty and inequality both increased and a reactionary government enacted draconian policies curtailing freedom of speech as Britain was probably closest to the brink of a social revolution as it ever was. It took several decades for things to actually start improving for most common people and most of the actual progress in that area only occurred in the 1940s and 50s.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre for example

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

#523

Post by kph_ »

crazygringo wrote: post #376
BeefWellington wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh, I'm gonna have to disagree hard on this take: > 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 license. Copilot is Github's product, and Microsoft owns Github. They are responsible for how that product functions. In this case, they should be held responsible for the training…

> Giving them the benefit of the doubt here, at minimum they chose which random third parties to believe were honest and correct. Well probably no, they didn't pick and choose at all, they just "chose" everyone who put code online with a license. Which is a legal statement of ownership by each of those people, and implies legal liability as well. > is that the fault of Stephen King or the person selling the robot? We…

It seems to me this would lead to a "Copyright Jesus" who could fraudulently publish all copyrighted works in the world under MIT. Then, before they are taken down, each ML model can train on the works and launder the output into actual MIT. Is this absurd?

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

#524

Post by IneffablePigeon »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #508
lmm wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

The “it’s really hard” argument isn’t a very good argument in my opinion?

If we hold reproductions of a single repository to a certain standard, the same standard should probably apply to mass reproductions. For a single repository, it’s your responsibility to make sure it’s used according to the license.

Are there slightly gray edge cases? Of course, but they’re not -that- grey. If I reproduced part of a book from a source that claimed incorrectly it was released under a permissive license, I would still be liable for that misuse. Especially if I was later made aware of the mistake and didn’t correct it.

If something is prohibitively difficult maybe we should sometimes consider that more work is required to enable the circumstances for it to be a good idea, rather than starting from the position that we should do it and moulding what we consider reasonable around that starting assumption.

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

#525

Post by eurasiantiger »

krageon wrote: post #506
dmix wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yet the public narrative centers around perceived anti-technologism and implied anti-comfortism, wholly ignoring the societal underpinnings of the issue: an increase in power and income inequality amounting to disenfranchisement.

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

#526

Post by [deleted] »

choppaface wrote: post #470
_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…

Your long long paragraph about neighboring code editors is disproven: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227395 You’re really not going to solve this problem with marketing (“blog posts”) or some pro-Github story from data scientists. You need a DMCA / removal request feature akin to Google image search and you need work on understanding product problems from the customer perspective.

[deleted]

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

#527

Post by mattigames »

shadowgovt wrote: post #111
ianbutler wrote: post #85

I just tested it myself on a random c file I created in the middle of a rust project I'm working on, it reproduced his full code verbatim from just the function header so clearly it does regurgitate proprietary code unlike some people have said, I do not have his source so co-pilot isn't just using existing context. I've been finding co-pilot really useful but I'll be pausing it for now, and I'm glad I have only been…

Searching for the function names in his libraries, I'm seeing some 32,000 hits. I suspect he has a different problem which (thanks to Microsoft) is now a problem he has to care about: his code probably shows up in one or more repos copy-pasted with improper LGPL attribution. There'd be no way for Copilot to know that had happened, and it would have mixed in the code. (As a side note: understanding why an ML engine ou…

It doesn't matter that there is not way for copilot to know what happened, doing something illegal because hundreads of people did it before it's never a valid excuse under the rule of law; nor it is "I didn't know it was illegal". Regardless if it's copying code without permission or jaywalking.

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

#528

Post by quickthrower2 »

krageon wrote: post #506
dmix wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tax is supposed to deal with this to some extent but the rich have the resources to avoid it!

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

#529

Post by MichaelCollins »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #525
krageon wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yet the public narrative centers around perceived anti-technologism and implied anti-comfortism, wholly ignoring the societal underpinnings of the issue: an increase in power and income inequality amounting to disenfranchisement.

Who wrote and popularized that narrative? The industrialists with printing presses.

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

#530

Post by [deleted] »

andreareina wrote: post #446
shadowgovt wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searching for the function names in his libraries, I'm seeing some 32,000 hits. I suspect he has a different problem which (thanks to Microsoft) is now a problem he has to care about: his code probably shows up in one or more repos copy-pasted with improper LGPL attribution. There'd be no way for Copilot to know that had happened, and it would have mixed in the code. (As a side note: understanding why an ML engine ou…

"It's too hard" isn't a valid reason for me to not follow laws and/or social norms. This is a predictable result and was predicted by many people; "oops we didn't know" is neither credible nor acceptable.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN