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

Post by unsafecast » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 8:21 AM UTC

dark-star wrote: post #542

svnt wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t at all address the primary issue, which is one of licensing. 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?” If someone violated the copyright of a song by sampling too much of it and released it in the public domain (or failed to claim it at all), and you take the entire sample from them, would that hold up in a le…

> 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?” If you do something, it's ultimately you who has to make sure that it is not against the law. "I didn't know" is never a good defense. If you pay with counterfeit cash, it is you who will be arrested, even if you didn't know it was counterfeit. If you use code from somewhere else…

Post by CrimsonRain » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 8:25 AM UTC

socialismisok wrote: post #472

_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…

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…

Post by LtWorf » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 8:35 AM UTC

CrimsonRain wrote: post #553

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…

The Luddites can use auto looms on their own and be their own owners. Labor force wants salary + profit but entirely missing from accepting loss. Funny stuff.

Post by VonGallifrey » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 8:36 AM UTC

hnbad wrote: post #541

olliej wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, so if a news agency publishes a picture without knowing where it came from, the originator can sue them for violating copyright. There is no “I don’t know who owns the IP” defense: the image has a copyright, a person owns that copyright, publishing the image without licensing or purchasing the copyright, is a violation. The fine is something like $100k per offense for a business.

FWIW this in consequence means you can't legally use Copilot without becoming liable to copyright violations because it's essentially a black box and you have no insight into where the code it generates originated and even if it isn't a 1-to-1 copy it might be a "derivative work". This is why I'm gnashing my teeth whenever I hear companies being fine with their employees using Copilot for public-facing code. In terms…

Post by roer » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 8:42 AM UTC

polymatter wrote: post #490

Spivak wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not “oops we didn’t know” it’s, “someone published a project under a permissive license which included this code.” If your standard is “Github should have an oracle to the US court system and predict what the outcome of a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement for a given snippet of code would be” then it is literally impossible for anyone to use any open source code ever because it might contain infringing cod…

Exactly, the chain of custody is absolutely required for this to be legal because no oracle can exist. It must be able to attribute exactly who contributed the suspect code. It must be able to handle the edge case where some humans might publish code without permission. Either that or we effectively get rid of software copyright as copilot can be used (or even claim to be used) to launder code of license restrictions…