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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

#661

Post by isworenot2 »

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.

Industry always saw open source as a cost cutting measure.

I think the real lesson to learn is if you look at the sheer amount of energy (wattage) used to replace humans it's clear that brains are really calorie efficient at doing things like producing the kinds of code that Copilot creates...but it doesn't matter because eliminating labor cost will always be attractive no matter what the up front cost is to do it. They literally can't NOT do it based on the rules of our game.

If it wasn't MS it would be someone else and is...you think IBM isn't doing this? Amazon? GTFOH. So is every other large company that has a pool of labor that is valued as a cost.

Maybe a better question would be how and why major parts of human life are organized in ways that are bad for the bulk of humanity.

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

#662

Post by FeepingCreature »

jefftk wrote: post #650
vasco wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how long till new software licenses that prohibit any use of code for model training purposes? I'd be willing to bet there's a significant group of people that won't be happy either its literal or not, the fact that it was used in the training might be enough.

The claim that most people training models make is that what they are doing is sufficiently transformative that it counts as fair use, and doesn't require a license. That means putting something in a software license that prohibits model training wouldn't do anything. In this case, what the model is doing is clearly (to me as an non-lawyer) not transformative enough to count as fair use, but it's possible that the co…

Prohibiting training would not affect the produced source, but it would make the training itself illegal.

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

#663

Post by abduhl »

Moissanite wrote: post #601
cdogl wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s difficult for me to see how 2022 is worse than 1816 all things considered.

Everything is worse than it could have been now, not directly compared to 200 years ago. I find it very hard to believe you didn't understand the suggestion.

>> Everything is worse than it could have been now

Prove it.

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

#664

Post by robertlagrant »

CPLX wrote: post #651
robertlagrant wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 positi…

You see this argument over and over again but it’s the exception that proves the rule. Most of the time when it’s made it’s just papering over yer another situation where a surplus is being squeezed out of a transaction by a parasitic manager class using principal-agent problem dynamics. The people who invented this stuff are always trying to tell you they’ve invented the cotton gin or something when in fact they’ve…

What was described wasn't the principal-agent problem. If I'm an employee and my job becomes simpler or more productive through an automation investment by someone else, I don't think I deserve part of the increased profit unless I'm part of a profit-sharing agreement that would also see me absorb losses.

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

#665

Post by concordDance »

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…

This takes place with or without copilot. The problem would be people copying code and releasing it under a different license.

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

#666

Post by KennyBlanken »

_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.

Being a new area of development doesn't release you from your obligation to make sure what you're doing is ethical and legal FIRST.

> 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.

And yet oddly nowhere did the phrase "I reached out to OP to discuss with with them" appear anywhere in your response." Nope. Being part of GitHub's infamous Social Media "incident response" team was more important than actually figuring out what was going on.

You don't even say that you will look into the situation with OP, or speak to them.

waves to all the github employees who will be reading this comment because someone on Github's marketing team links to it

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

#667

Post by zelphirkalt »

_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 response expresses some of the things, that are to criticize about MS' Copilot project. But also I don't like the instant attempt to subtle discredit the report by dropping something like "I don’t know how the original poster’s machine was set-up" in the first (or second, if you want to be technical) phrase.

First consider that you made a mistake yourself, _then_ ask, whether the fault could be on the other side. I really dislike this high-horse down-talking tone. Maybe it was not meant to sound like that, maybe this kind of talk has become a habit without noticing. Lets assume that, giving a benefit of a doubt.

Onto the actual matter:

> 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 files. For example, this is how Copilot includes variable and method names relevant to your project in suggestions.

How comes, that Copilot hasn't indicated, where the code came from? How can it ever seem, like the code came from elsewhere? That is the actual question. We still need Copilot to point us to repositories or snippets on Github, when it suggests copies of code (including just renaming variables). Otherwise the human is taken out of the loop and no one is checking copyright infringements and license violations. This has been requested for a long time. Time for Copilot to actually respect rights of developers and users of software.

> It’s also possible that your code – or very similar code – appears many times over in public repositories.

So basically it propagates license violations. Great. Like I said, the human needs to be kept in the loop and Copilot needs to empower the user to check where the code came from.

> This is a new area of development, and we’re all learning.

The problem is not, that this is a new development or that we are all learning. That is fine. Sure, we all need to learn. However, when there is clearly a problem with how Copilot works, it is the responsibility of the Copilot development team to halt any further violations and first fix that problem, before letting the train roll on and violating more people's rights. The way this is being handled, by just shrugging and rolling on, maybe at some point fixing things, is simply not acceptable.

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

#668

Post by robertlagrant »

LtWorf wrote: post #608
robertlagrant wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not rarer than bankrupcy.

Are you sure? According to Statistica there were over 700k bankruptcies in the US from 2000-2020 [0]. How many bailouts have there been?

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/817918/number-of-busines...

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

#669

Post by concordDance »

bamboozled wrote: post #587
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…

So I’m working on a side project and it’s hosted on GitHub, does this mean the code (which I consider precious and my own) can just be stolen and injected into my competitors codebase who is using co-pilot? If this is the case, I can imagine people migrating of GitHub very quickly. I can also imagine some pretty nice lawsuits opening up.

A good rule of thumb is if you're worried about code being copied you really shouldn't put it on github. Even if most large companies respect copyright, that small studio in Russia certainly won't.

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

#670

Post by jefftk »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #662
jefftk wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim that most people training models make is that what they are doing is sufficiently transformative that it counts as fair use, and doesn't require a license. That means putting something in a software license that prohibits model training wouldn't do anything. In this case, what the model is doing is clearly (to me as an non-lawyer) not transformative enough to count as fair use, but it's possible that the co…

Prohibiting training would not affect the produced source, but it would make the training itself illegal.

Probably not? Models are trained on restrictively licensed things all the time, such as images that are still in copyright. This is generally believed to be fair use, though I think this has not been tested in court?
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