GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code • Hacker News Board

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

#711

Post by mafuy » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 2:47 PM UTC

fireant wrote: post #464

This exact code can be found 1000 times on github and many of those are MIT licensed https://github.com/search?q=%22cs+*cs_transpose+%28%22&type=... . Copilot, or any other developer or person, has no way of knowing where the original implementation came from or it's original license. The cat is out of the bag, get used to it.

Strong disagree with your conclusion.

That something is effectively public domain does not make it legal to use. This movie was in a thousand torrents, yet one gets still sued for uploading a kilobyte of it.

That it is hard or impossible to know if it is legal to use does not mean it is ok to do so. You need a source for the license that is able to compensate you for the damages you incur in case their license was invalid.

I'm not happy about either of these points, but that's how it is currently and just closing your eyes and hoping it will go away won't work.

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

#712

Post by omnimus » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 2:55 PM UTC

matkoniecz wrote: post #254

omnimus wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its clear where the knowhow was lifted from it doesnt matter that if the final image is somewhat unique (almost every image is).

style is not copyrightable under current rules

But it means the models were trained on images that are under copyright. In fact many of these models were trained exclusively on such images without any permission. For example Midjourney is clearly trained on everything on artstation.com where almost all images have commercial purpose / licenses.

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

#713

Post by rtkwe » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 3:01 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #370

rtkwe wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm dubious of that in cases where the training set isn't distributed. If we call the training copyright infringement is downloading an image infringement? is caching?

I think it's more a question of derivative work. Normally derivative work is an infringement unless it falls under fair use. Now a human can take inspiration from like 100 different sources and probably end up with something that no one would recognize as derivative to any of them. But it also wouldn't be obvious that the human did that. But with an ML model, it's clearly a derivative in that the learned function is…

The real kink in that application of derivative work to me is the entire dataset goes into the model and is to some vanishingly small extent is used in every output how can we meaningfully assign ownership through that transition and mixing. And when we do how do we do it without exacerbating the extant problem of copyright in art? We already can't use characters and settings made during out own lifetimes in our own expression because Disney got life + 70 through Congress.

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

#714

Post by enragedcacti » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 3:21 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #687

latexr wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only reason anyone makes money (other than tax money) is because they're useful to someone else. Stealing, scamming, gambling, inheriting, collecting interest, price gouging, slavery, underpaying workers, supporting laws to undermine competitors… Plenty of ways to make money without being useful—or by being actively harmful—to someone else. > Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large n…

> Plenty of ways to make money without being useful—or by being actively harmful—to someone else. I don't equate, say, "making money" with "stealing money". I mean the way people do things within the law. Inheriting is different; the money is already made. Interest is being useful to someone else, via the loan of capital.

> I don't equate, say, "making money" with "stealing money". I mean the way people do things within the law.

Laws shouldn't be equated to ethics. There have been and will be countless ways to make money legally and unethically in any society.

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

#715

Post by noobermin » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 3:50 PM UTC

I just have to say, it's quite ironic now that it's happening to software code, people here are understanding and trying to earnestly find solutions vs. saying things like "guys like him are standing in the way of progress" and "someone is worried about losing their jobs!" and "horse and buggies are striking back" and the like.

I know cognitive biases are strong, but amongst a community that is at least reputed to be somewhat intellectual, the lack of similar sympathy for artists who say their work is being stolen is a bit too much of an irony here to ignore.

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

#716

Post by avereveard » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:10 PM UTC

avereveard wrote: post #455

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…

Not really, unless you can produce a verbatim copy of existing artwork out of stability's stable diffusion.

"I cannot produce proof but I dislike the argument, so I must downvote" - the HN community being the rational actor that it always is

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

#717

Post by BenFrantzDale » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

The weird thing about CoPilot to me is that all the examples seem like bad examples: I don’t want my team writing new functions to count the bits in an int; I want them to call the function to count the bits. The real potential of CoPilot would be if GitHub uses it to design libraries for various languages that do the things people keep wanting done. Imagine if instead of autocompleting the body of `std::size_t count_bits(int)`, it would suggest “Try `#include ` and call `GitHubLib::count_bits`.”

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

#718

Post by Spivak » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

vincnetas wrote: post #514

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…

This reminds me my 4 year old daughter. She often comes from kindergarten with new toys. When i ask here, where did she get it, she tells that her friend gave this as a gift to her. When i dig deeper and ask around, i turns out that the friend who were gifting her things were not real owners of the gift. I see why i could be difficult for children to understand concept of ownership and that you should not gift things…

> and does not question if the person gifting was the real owner of the gift

If you can figure out a method of determining whether someone owns the code that doesn't involve, "try suing in court for copyright infringement and see if it sticks" then we're kinda stuck. Because just because a codebase contains an exact or similar snippet from another codebase doesn't mean that snippet reaches the threshold of copyrightable work. Or the reverse being that just because two code snippets look wildly different doesn't mean it's not infringement and detecting that automatically is solving the halting problem.

The thing you want for software to actually solve this is chain of custody which we don't have. If you require everyone assume everyone else could be lying or mistaken about infringement then using any open source project for anything becomes legal hot water.

In fact when you upload code to Github you grant them a license to do things like "display it" which you can't do if you don't actually own the copyright or have a license so even before the code is ever slurrped into Copilot the same exact legal situation arises as to wether Github is legally allowed to host the code at all. Can you imagine if when you uploaded code to Github you had to sign a document saying you owned the code and indemnifying Microsoft against any lawsuit alleging infringement o boy people would not enjoy that.

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

#719

Post by MichaelCollins » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:43 PM UTC

dark-star wrote: post #627

unsafecast wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BitTorrent doesn't automatically download a pirated copy of Lion King when you ask it for something to watch...

BitTorrent (and, to a larger degree, EDonkey) did and still do that. Who tells you that what you're downloading is indeed what you think it is. You can click on a magnet link that claims to download a Debian ISO just to find out later that it's something else entirely. To make matters worse, BitTorrent even uploads to potentially hundreds of other clients while you're still downloading, so while downloading something…

> You can click on a magnet link that claims to download a Debian ISO just to find out later that it's something else entirely

This is just fear mongering, the same exact thing can happen with a web browser, I click a link to view an image of a cat but... oops, it was actually a Getty copyrighted picture of a dog! Oh nooooo.

On the web that sort of thing is actually common, but bit torrent? I have never downloaded a torrent to find it was something other than what I expected. Never have I seen a movie masquerading as a Debian ISO. That's nothing more than a joke people use to make light of their (deliberate) copyright infringement.

Furthermore, is there even any bit torrent client that will recommend copyrighted content to you, rather than merely download what you tell it to? I've not seen one. Search engines, in my browser, do that sort of recommendation but bit torrent clients do what I tell them to. Including seeding to others, which is optional but recommended for obvious reasons.

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

#720

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

fsloth wrote: post #515

CamperBob2 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just don't give a hoot. Takes practice, but it's a skill that can be mastered like any other.

This may be an acceptable approach if the code is not produced in a professional context and not of professional quality. One of the keystones of open source is professionals have had an ecosystem where they can deliver value to an open forum but still have at least a semblance of control how their contribution is used via various licenses they can select.

Sounds a lot like Oracle's justification for owning the Java API ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_.... ) in which de minimis things like variable and structure declarations were used by Oracle to justify a copyright-maximal approach that would have utterly laid waste to open source development.

The code in question is not something that anyone needs to own. Rather, it's what anyone would write, faced with the same problem. It's stupid to make humans do a robot's job in the name of preserving meaningless "IP rights".