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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

#571

Post by LtWorf »

judge2020 wrote: post #416
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?” 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 cod…

Humans have creativity.

The first C developers wrote C code despite lacking a training set of C code.

AI can't do that. It needs C code to write C code.

See the difference here?

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

#572

Post by gureddio »

carom wrote: post #429
_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…

Copilot is the largest disrespect to open source software I have ever seen. It is a derivative work of open source code and it is not released under the same license. It is also capable of laundering open source code. Congratulations for working on the "extinguish" phase of embrace, extend, extinguish for open source.

The code that the tweet refers to is not open source. That's the scandal here.

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

#573

Post by LtWorf »

mahogany wrote: post #358
_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…

> This is a new area of development, and we’re all learning. I’m personally spending a lot of time chatting with developers, copyright experts, and community stakeholders to understand the most responsible way to leverage LLMs. Given that there have been major concerns about copyright infringements and license violations since the announcement of Copilot, wouldn't it have been better to do some more of this "learning…

And why not train it on microsoft windows and office code?

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

#574

Post by robertlagrant »

LtWorf wrote: post #555
CrimsonRain wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"risk" -_-' Because no private business has ever been bailed out or received any public funding, right?

Yes, that is also bad. Public bodies choosing to give private companies money because otherwise they'd fail is bad stewardship of our taxes.

But also this point is silly. Plenty of money and effort is risked and lost with no bailout. Bailouts are extremely unusual in the grand scheme of things.

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

#575

Post by LtWorf »

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…

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

Since copilot famously outputs GPL covered code… no, we have proof they didn't do that.

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

#576

Post by drran »

defasdefbe wrote: post #242
bmitc wrote: post #87

What does > with "public code" blocked mean? Are you able set a setting in GitHub to tell GitHub that you don't want your code used for Copilot training data? Is this an abuse of the license you sign with GitHub, or did they update it at some point to allow your code to be automatically used in Copilot? I'm not crazy about the idea of paying GitHub for them to make money off of my code/data.

> We built a filter to help detect and suppress the rare instances where a GitHub Copilot suggestion contains code that matches public code on GitHub. You have the choice to turn that filter on or off during setup. With the filter on, GitHub Copilot checks code suggestions with its surrounding code for matches or near matches (ignoring whitespace) against public code on GitHub of about 150 characters. If there is a m…

WTF is «public code»?

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

#577

Post by LtWorf »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #180
mjr00 wrote: post #11

Same issue with Stable Diffusion/NovelAI and certain people's artwork (eg Greg Rutkowski) being obviously used as part of the training set. More noticeable in Copilot since the output needs to be a lot more precise. Lawmakers need to jump on this stuff ASAP. Some say that it's no different from a person looking at existing code or art and recreating it from memory or using it as inspiration. But the law changes when…

> Some say that it's no different from a person looking at existing code or art and recreating it from memory or using it as inspiration. Hah, no, the model encodes the code that it was trained on. This is not "recreating from memory", this is "making a copy of the code in a different format." (Modulo some variable renaming, which it's probably programmed to do to in order to obscure the source of the code.)

If I hear a song on the radio and then sing it, I still won't own the copyright.

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

#578

Post by enriquto »

Just a heads-up that the person who writes this is Tim Davis[0], author of the legendary CHOLMOD solver[1], which hundreds of thousands of people use daily when they solve sparse symmetric linear systems in common numerical environments.

Even if CHOLMOD is easily the best sparse symmetric solver, it is notoriously not used by scipy.linalg.solve, though, because numpy/scipy developers are anti-copyleft fundamentalists and have chosen not to use this excellent code for merely ideological reasons... but this will not last: thanks to the copilot "filtering" described here, we can now recover a version of CHOLMOD unencumbered by the license that the author originaly distributed it under! O brave new world, that has such people in it!

[0] https://people.engr.tamu.edu/davis/welcome.html

[1] https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis

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

#579

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#580

Post by robertlagrant »

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…

But - the only reason anyone makes money (other than tax money) is because they're useful to someone else. Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large numbers of people buying their clothes. So they are useful to us.

Similarly, the reason Europe put 30% of its populace "out of work" by industrialising agriculture is why we don't have to all go work in fields all day. It is a massive net positive for us all.

Moving ice from the arctic into America quickly enough before it melted was a big industry. The refrigerator put paid to that, and improved lives the world over.

Monks retained knowledge through careful copying and retransmission of knowledge during the medieval times in the UK. That knowledge was foundational in the incredible acceleration of development in the UK and neighbouring countries in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the printing press, that rendered those monks much less relevant to culture and academia, was still a very good idea that we all still benefit from today.

Soon, millions of car mechanics who specialise in ICE engines will have to retrain or, possibly, just be made redundant. That may be required for us to reduce our pollution output by a few percent globally, and we may well need to do that.

The exact moment in history when workers who've learned how to do one job are rendered obsolete is painful, yes, and they are well within their rights to what they can to retain a living. But that doesn't mean those workers are somehow right; nor that all subsequent generations should have to delay or forego the life improvement that a useful advance brings, nor all of the advances that would be built on that advance.

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