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

Copilot sells code other people wrote

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 838 posts

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#681

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

nickjj wrote: post #535

This might be overreacting but is there a way to opt-out of Copilot using your code in open source repos? It feels morally wrong to me that I can spend thousands of hours working on projects on my own free will but then a company can sell the code I wrote to others in the form of snippet completion as a service. In fact they end up selling your code back to yourself if you plan to use the service. If the answer is no…

It would be kind of cool if Github could show some stat that code you wrote has been used 50,000 times for 12,000 people.

Being a top CoPilot contributor should at least have value to signal on your resume.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#682

Post by collegeburner »

nescioquid wrote: post #619
borishn wrote: post #602

Copilot is fair use, get over it! Copilot is not writing your code any more that Google search is writing your code. You are writing your code, and Copilot is just making suggestions. US constitution secures limited copyright to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". Copilot is just that, get over it!

Not an expert, but fair use generally covers education, criticism, parody, and satire. There is a test for meeting fair use and it includes things like amount copied and commercial or non-profit interest. The amount copied from any particular source might be small, but an aggregate strip-mining of many copyrighted sources is an interesting twist. Another might be, as you suggest, it might be a machine that itself doe…

Google does the same thing taking snippets out of pages or even completely caching them so you can see the entire page from their servers.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#683

Post by ellyagg »

nickjj wrote: post #535

This might be overreacting but is there a way to opt-out of Copilot using your code in open source repos? It feels morally wrong to me that I can spend thousands of hours working on projects on my own free will but then a company can sell the code I wrote to others in the form of snippet completion as a service. In fact they end up selling your code back to yourself if you plan to use the service. If the answer is no…

Well, I hope your viewpoint doesn't win the day, because making code as freely shareable and remixable as possible is a huge boon for humanity.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#684

Post by Guid_NewGuid »

ozim wrote: post #679
Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they haven't paid it forward, or back, but why fight on the occupier's territory. By calling for legal frameworks to enforce this we accept the language and terms of the dominant party. By using courts and the law and creating new law for copyright we actually move further from the goal of abolishing copyright and IP entirely. Every time we use courts to enforce IP we're strengthening the Walt Disneys and Nintend…

Funny thing is ALL these legal frameworks are there to protect these 3 people like you. If there would be no enforcement of IP/licensing or legal enforcement - M$, Google etc. would not be nice - they would just come over and kick your doors cut your head off because they could do so. With legal framework they at least have to ask someone else. You just have to understand you don't stand a chance with your 3 buddies…

This is a slight misreading of my general political position. I am pro-government in general. I find the term "monopoly on violence" to generally indicate someone who lives a very cosseted and easy life who can spend time getting mad about like, seatbelt laws or speed limits, so I use it somewhat tounge-in-cheek.

There's quite a lot of possibilities between DMCAs of youtube-dl repositories and Big-co death-squads decapitating people in their homes. I'd prefer where we are now to the Brazil end of that spectrum but we can imagine better models of digital and intellectual 'property'.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#685

Post by mynameisvlad »

Engineering-MD wrote: post #496
542458 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's Kate Downing, an IP lawyer specializing in software license: > According to Downing, the answer depends to a certain extent on where that code is hosted. If it’s on GitHub, there very clearly would not be copyright infringement. > “If you look at the GitHub Terms of Service, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features,”…

To me regardless if it is technically legal, it certainly doesn’t feel right. Furthermore, contracts rely on people understanding what they are agreeing to, and I don’t think many developers would agree to letting the code be used outside the terms of the license they uploaded it under. I am very surprised there hasn’t been a legal challenge to it.

What, exactly, is there to challenge?

“I’m sorry your honor I didn’t understand what I was signing” I don’t think has ever been a valid reason in a courtroom, similar to “I’m sorry I didn’t know I was committing a crime” is not a valid defense.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#686

Post by celeritascelery »

ellyagg wrote: post #683
nickjj wrote: post #535

This might be overreacting but is there a way to opt-out of Copilot using your code in open source repos? It feels morally wrong to me that I can spend thousands of hours working on projects on my own free will but then a company can sell the code I wrote to others in the form of snippet completion as a service. In fact they end up selling your code back to yourself if you plan to use the service. If the answer is no…

Well, I hope your viewpoint doesn't win the day, because making code as freely shareable and remixable as possible is a huge boon for humanity.

Code being freely shareable and remixable is great. Selling that open source code for profit is not.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#687

Post by eikenberry »

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #569

I find this whole topic very annoying, this is like the 3rd variation to reach the front page today. But it has made me realize why I instinctively dislike Free Software as a movement. Copyright and licensing are bad, actually. Stop getting worked up about the idea of using courts to punish theft. Stop getting into a frenzy of arousal about the police kicking down doors to drag Billy Gates to jail because 80 characte…

There is a license for that, the MIT-0 or the MIT No Attribution License.

https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT-0

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#688

Post by jnsie »

ellyagg wrote: post #683
nickjj wrote: post #535

This might be overreacting but is there a way to opt-out of Copilot using your code in open source repos? It feels morally wrong to me that I can spend thousands of hours working on projects on my own free will but then a company can sell the code I wrote to others in the form of snippet completion as a service. In fact they end up selling your code back to yourself if you plan to use the service. If the answer is no…

Well, I hope your viewpoint doesn't win the day, because making code as freely shareable and remixable as possible is a huge boon for humanity.

It's just as shareable on Gitlab, no? And the issue isn't that code is not shareable - it's that a huge corporation is profiting from this code without consent from the developer.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#689

Post by lin83 »

ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #301
lin83 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m deeply disturbed that you think this form of plagiarism is universal This thread is an eye opener for me too. Do engineers not get trained on their legal obligations? My company is old and not a tradition tech company but we have been running workshops on the issue for years. Even if they don't, what about their legal teams? Or CI tools to scan for licence violations? Some of the responses here are so naive it'…

Obviously we do. Don't copy paste 10 pages of source code unaltered and sell it as your own. But that's something entirely different from small code snippets, changed and adapted to solve the same problem a thousand other people already had. Nothing else are developers doing going on GitHub, StackOverflow or any other website to find answers to their questions. That's not naivety, that's how coding works (partially).…

There isn't a threshold for copyright violation. If you copy a 3 line function from a GPL library, you have to comply with the licence. Tools like BlackDuck will pick it up.

Snippets aren't exactly defined but I see them as more than just a single line like "here's how to flatten a list in Python", it's some functionality - e.g. an algorithm implementation or some task.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#690

Post by widjit »

jonny_eh wrote: post #558
nickjj wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your code is using a license that allows it, how could you possibly opt-out aside from using a different license? A repo setting that instructs Github not to use your code for Copilot, it could be a similar option as turning Discussions on / off. If they really want to win developers over they would even have Copilot scanning disabled by default but that'll never happen.

Sounds like you want a new license that just prohibits use by one company for one purpose.

is there something wrong with that?
Post reply on HN