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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

#621

Post by devetec »

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…

Note: that already exists, it's called Jukebox! https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#622

Post by devetec »

mqus wrote: post #580
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…

Or Why not find some leaked windows/office source code and try to train a model to reconstruct microsoft software, then open source it? This surely must be legal, they're doing it themselves after all :D (Maybe bring oracle into this :D)

It would be legal! But it wouldn't "reconstruct" Microsoft software. The way Copilot works is just that, a copilot. It's not the pilot. It's your own fault for what you do with it, it's just giving you some help along the way.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#623

Post by devetec »

_Understated_ wrote: post #92

Ok, my curiosity has been fired here... I have conjured up two scenarios here: Let's say I use copilot to generate a bunch of code for an app, something substantial, and it regurgitates a load of bits and pieces from many sources it got from GitHub, I'd assume there won't be any attribution in it... it will be as if Copilot made the code itself (I know it sort of does but lets not split hairs!). I'm guessing the prev…

Copilot isn't a retrieval model. It's a generative model. It learns the coding techniques, not retrieving snippets. Only 0.1% of code it generates is regurgitated, and even that is usually pretty common code.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#624

Post by bdowling »

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…

> ...the non-obvious thing for many developers is that fair use is an exception to copyright itself.

More precisely, fair use is an affirmative defense to an claim of copyright infringement. A fair use defense basically says, "Yes, I am copying your copyrighted material and I don't have a license (or am exceeding a licensed use), but my usage is allowed under the fair use doctrine (codified in 17 USC 107 in US law)."

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#625

Post by mceachen »

mikewarot wrote: post #614
mceachen wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely possible. What I'm building into PhotoStructure is typically called "transfer learning." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_learning PhotoStructure is entirely self-hosted, including model training and application: the public domain base models (trained on huge datasets) are fetched and cached locally. By design, none of your data (or even metadata) leaves your server. (I expect to ship this in an upco…

I want to label all the faces in the photos I've taken since 1997, and save them in the metadata. I'll be glad to run it against my photos. Windows 10, WSL, and/or Virtual Machine with Linux of your choice.

I've got desktop builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux, as well as "headless" builds for Docker and even "directly" via Node.js. Instructions here: https://photostructure.com/install

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#626

Post by bdowling »

Causality1 wrote: post #470
AaronFriel wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Read the Authors Guild v Google dismissal. The court considered it fair use because Google's project was built explicitly to let users find and purchase books, giving revenue to the copyright holders. Copilot does not do that.

> ... giving revenue to the copyright holders.

That's a reference to factor four of the fair use test, "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." (17 USC 107).

None of the factors are dispositive, however. For example, a scathing book review that quotes a passage to show how bad the writing is might eviscerate sales of the book, but such a use is usually protected. For a counter-example, see Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539 (1985).

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#627

Post by jspaetzel »

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.

Memes are absolutely copyrightable, heard of Grumpy Cat?

New genetic sequences are patentable, not copyrightable, but that because of the process involved in creating new genetic sequences more then the genes themselves.

Sure naturally occurring genes aren't patentable, but it's not like we have code growing on trees. So that's a terrible comparison.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#628

Post by systematical »

The solution here seems simple. If you don't want your code used for AI/ML like co pilot, then place a license in your code that explicitly forbids it. Looking at the MIT License as-is, which is used by many maintainers on github, there is nothing that forbids co-pilot. It's easy to add a few sentences to that which explicitly forbid the code being used by AI, ML, code generation or other code automation and calling it something else like the Free For Human Use License.

The sticky part may be: does GitHub T/C overrule these licenses?

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#629

Post by curiousgal »

systematical wrote: post #628

The solution here seems simple. If you don't want your code used for AI/ML like co pilot, then place a license in your code that explicitly forbids it. Looking at the MIT License as-is, which is used by many maintainers on github, there is nothing that forbids co-pilot. It's easy to add a few sentences to that which explicitly forbid the code being used by AI, ML, code generation or other code automation and calling…

This reminded me of those Facebook status updates that people used to post back in the day in which they forbid Facebook from using their data lmao

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#630

Post by bdowling »

tedunangst wrote: post #229
indymike wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books (mostly) are not distributed under the GPL.

Does the GPL forbid fair use? Why don't book publishers use a license that forbids fair use?

> Why don't book publishers use a license that forbids fair use?

They couldn't do it with a license, which only imposes conditions for the license to be valid. Fair use applies even if the copier has no license at all.

Potentially they could do it with a contract. A license is not a contract and imposes no covenants on the parties.

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