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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

#751

Post by logifail »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #741
logifail wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Sorry, what? Downloading copyrighted content is very, very rarely the problem. It's the uploading (the sharing!) of copyrighted content where you actually get into trouble.

If you actually care, then simply configure your client to leech. Every client I've ever used or heard of supports this. But more to the point, getting tricked into seeding a copyrighted movie by a torrent masquerading as a Debian ISO isn't something that actually happens. That's absurd FUD.

Errm, you posted:

> "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."

No-one cares whether you download an open-sourced photo of a cat or a copyrighted photo of a dog.

Why would anyone claim that?

It's a terrible comparison to torrents.

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

#752

Post by kbelder »

kitsune_ wrote: post #556
shadowgovt wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searching for the function names in his libraries, I'm seeing some 32,000 hits. I suspect he has a different problem which (thanks to Microsoft) is now a problem he has to care about: his code probably shows up in one or more repos copy-pasted with improper LGPL attribution. There'd be no way for Copilot to know that had happened, and it would have mixed in the code. (As a side note: understanding why an ML engine ou…

There'd be no way for Copilot to know that had happened? What? YT uses Content ID. GH could set up a similar program for OSS.

>GH could set up a similar program for OSS.

What a nightmare.

I'd say that constant code copying is massively pervasive, with no regard to licensing, always has been, and that's not really a bad thing, and attempts to stop it are going to be far more harmful than helpful.

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

#753

Post by latexr »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #652
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…

>sold by emotionally exploiting people in rich countries under the guise of “fashion”. only emotionally crippled people like fashion, if they were healthy they would all dress in gray unitards and march in formation towards the glorious future! hey I too have often been carried away by my own rhetoric but come on!

> only emotionally crippled people like fashion

Please don’t straw man¹. That’s neither what I said, nor what intended to convey, nor what I believe.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#754

Post by omgomgomgomg »

esskay wrote: post #560
_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…

Hi Ryan, thanks for posting here. So I had something similar happen to the OP a couple of days ago. I'm on friendly terms with a competing codebase's developer and have confirmed the following with them, both mine and it are closed source and hosted on github. Halfway through building something I was given a block of code by copilot, which contained a copyright line with my competitors name, company number and email…

Well, they have been published now.

If this can leak so easy, it makes me wonder how safe api keys are. They are supposed to be hidden away, we know, but so is proprietary code.

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

#755

Post by latexr »

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 mean the way people do things within the law.

The examples considered that: gambling, collecting interest, price gouging, underpaying workers, supporting laws to undermine competitors.

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

#756

Post by kyleee »

itronitron wrote: post #644
minhazm wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does address it, although not that clearly. This happens all the time with news media. They will post a picture and say they got permission from X person, but X person actually didn't even own the copyright in the first place. That doesn't make any of it okay, but it does mean that the organization has legal cover in this case and the worst that will happen is that they'll have to take the content down. In GitHub'…

I may be misinformed but my understanding of copyright is that it protects the 'expression' of something (like an algorithm or recipe) so someone can rewrite a copyrighted chunk of code into another language and be free of the original copyright, while also able to assert their own copyright on their new expression. If that is true then one way to get around copyright restrictions on existing code is to create a new…

fascinating idea, copilot could do the translations internally and also work torwards widening the pool of suggestions to all languages instead of the individual lamguage a user is using (bit then again, they might be writing in the "new" language already

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

#757

Post by qu4z-2 »

teddyh wrote: post #205
qu4z-2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I introduce you to a concept called copyright? Is it fine if an author publishes a short story publicly on the web for someone else to submit it to a contest as their own work?

Please don’t use plagiarism as an argument for keeping copyright. They are not related. Plagiarism is already illegal or disallowed for obvious reasons, but copyright is a different matter.

I brought up plagiarism because it's what happened in this case. Maybe I shouldn't've mentioned copyright at all.

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

#758

Post by vrndlijke-buur »

avereveard wrote: post #716
avereveard wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Lawmakers need to jump on this stuff ASAP

Maybe not as soon as possible, probably a lot of other problems that need immediate attention.

But some attention maybe? Nobody likes it if someone does a repost of a post, but some reposting could be seen as going "viral" so as a creator you're cool with it. If someone else does the whole going "viral" with your work, maybe it's less cool.

In spirit of the thread, if co-pilot generates some code to create a stable diffusion prompt explicitly for "Greg Rutkowski" art and it writes code your friend wrote for a small gig, well can you re-use his code for your own gig?

Can "Greg" even claim it was his art in your opininion, even though it's probably not a verbatim copy

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

#759

Post by aziaziazi »

colinmhayes wrote: post #735
aziaziazi wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Durability, quality and reparability. Most fabrics build today are so fragile and needs to be replaced soon, despite the advance in material and weaving. Most highly qualified workers loves what they do and would stand for keeping they’re output quality up. On the contrary interchangeable cheap workers have no real incentive to that. The factory’s manager is left alone in charge to balance quality versus cheapness, a…

> Most fabrics build today are so fragile and needs to be replaced soon Because that's what people want. You can get high quality clothes for much cheaper than you could in 1816, but people prefer disposable clothes so they can change their look more often. This is just producers responding to demand.

“People want so producers responds” is a nice but candide eco theory, 2022 looks more like “producers pay for marketing that makes people want” oh and by the way, who’s really paying for the marketing at the end ?

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

#760

Post by grecy »

elcomet wrote: post #689
grecy wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An equally simple answer is that copilot is pulling code (or at least analyzing) from repositories that are not public.

I think that's very unlikely, they said and repeated that they are not using private code. People catching them lying on this would be very bad for GitHub.

Bugs and unexpected behaviour catch us all.

I’m not saying they’re intentionally lying, but that one possible explanation is it looking through non public repositories

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