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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#771

Post by imtringued »

williamcotton wrote: post #754
leereeves wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior art matters for patents, not copyrights. Carmack's code is still protected by copyright even if he didn't invent the algorithm. And copyright doesn't prevent someone else from implementing the same algorithm, only from copying the code. If Microsoft had been able to copyright the fast inverse square root function, Carmack could still have written his own version and even copyrighted that version himself.

Prior art has been used for copyright in plenty of court cases, and increasingly so! Here’s an example: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=728470765881077... It seems particularly apt to consider prior art for use in software IP if only for the similarities with the patentable invention of mechanical parts.

What? You are free to reverse engineer any non patented object and reproduce an almost identical object. Prior art for copyright is meaningless unless it is about authorship. You can still do a clean room implementation and ignore prior art.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#772

Post by gopiandcode »

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.

I feel like you're missing the forest for the trees here - making code freely shareable and remixable is exactly the purpose of GPL and other free-software licenses, but you can bet that the proprietary codebases Copilot will be used in will go out of their way to prevent any such uses of _their_ particular code snippets.

IMO, the only way to use Copilot's output in an ethically sound way is to only use the output it produces in AGPL licensed projects (assuming that Copilot has not been trained on any non-free software codebases which in itself is a strong assumption).

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#773

Post by gopiandcode »

bayindirh wrote: post #714
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…

> I find this whole topic very annoying, this is like the 3rd variation to reach the front page today. Me too. I also find three iterations of the same subject not enough discourse. We need to take this matter more seriously. > But it has made me realize why I instinctively dislike Free Software as a movement. On the other hand, this whole discourse reminds me why I absolutely love Free Software as a movement. > Copy…

> > Copyright and licensing are bad, actually.

> This is why we have "Copyleft".

This. Exactly. It's suprising how many developers have strong anti-copyleft/anti-GPL opinions while being completely uninformed on what they're talking about (but hey, I guess "uninformed but strongly opinionated" is HN in a nutshell). The purpose of GPL and other copyleft licenses is exactly to combat the insanity of intellectual slavery.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#774

Post by rurban »

tzs wrote: post #728
rurban wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. They are mostly the same across countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_copyright_treati... There are just minor deviances, not relevant to this case, such as how long Disney bullied the countries to protect a work. Software is usually considered a work. The AI needs to know if has permissions to copy and use the code, and then offer derived work on the proper terms and conditions. copilot…

What are examples of Disney getting countries to extend copyright terms? In the US there have only been two extensions of copyright terms since Disney came into existence. The first was in 1976, as part of a major overhaul of US copyright law to update the previous law (from 1909) to take into account the large changes in technology since then, and to make US law work more like the rest of the world to pave the way f…

I was referring to the extension in 1976 from 28 to 50 years, and the subsequent extension in 1998 to 70 years, which everybody agreed upon that both were on Disney's request (hence its name "Micky-Maus-Schutzgesetz"). Other lobbying partners were the George Gershwin heirs and the Movie Industry (Jack Valenti).

Here you see the countries which did not extend it the 2nd time to 70 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...

There was of course no widespread support for these extensions, as all its arguments were flawed and not only violated logic but also several constitutions. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#G... (the en version is mostly cleaned on these counter arguments)

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#775

Post by bayindirh »

alar44 wrote: post #691
sirsinsalot wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this isn't everyone's feeling. And they have a right to choose how their work is used. Thats the basis of commerce being possible here. The mechanised license ignorance and the way original authors are not compensated is the issue. If you had a repo you'd worked really hard on, and offered a commercial license or GPL depending on the use (so you can be funded to work on it) ... do you think it is fair that copilo…

Saying an auto complete of a line of code is "using their work" is a massive stretch.

When it's demonstrated that it can generate whole function bodies intact (fast inverse square root debacle), and autocomplete it with a wrong license, it's not a stretch anymore.

See: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#776

Post by dx034 »

mojuba wrote: post #64
para_parolu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem may not be boring. Typing boilerplate code is. I work on games as hobby. Sometimes I implement mechanics requiring vector math. Working on mechanics is interesting. Writing down math is not. Copilot helps with later.

Then another hypothesis: you probably haven't found the right tools for it yet. I find myself writing biolerplate mostly around some obscure system framework calls (iOS/macOS), but that's rather rare. But even OS API's and frameworks do evolve over time into requiring less boilerplate. Just take the evolution of CoreAudio, the modern Swift interface is so much better. So at the end of the day it's about the tools and…

I'd rather use Copilot than including yet another library just to avoid writing one function.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#777

Post by dobin »

eloisius wrote: post #212
dobin wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I neither see it "stealing". The neuronal network was trained with code as input. It's creating code as output. The output has nothing to do with the input once it is trained. Do people dont know how neuronal network work? It's like saying GPT-3 created text is copyright infringement, because some author used the same sentence in a book before.

So if I fit a network to output entire chapters of a book when given the chapter number as input, I can print and sell copies of it that way?

1) Copilot is not designed to output the source code for a project source file 2) It does not re-create the whole source code, just parts of it (sentences, not chapters) 3) The source code license, e.g. BSD, works on "the code" - copying a line like "void main(void) {" will not trigger it, obviously

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#778

Post by concordDance »

midasuni wrote: post #568
concordDance wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also one more question: 5. Even if it is illegal, is it actually bad? No one can possibly sell code snippets, the transaction costs are many orders of magnitude greater than any reasonable price. In my opinion, at least in this case the benefits massively outweigh the costs and the law should not apply here.

Some people won’t let you use their copyrighted work no matter how much you pay, that’s reasonable. By all means allow repos to opt in, although if it’s licensed under something like GPL there’s no way to convert it to non gpl without permission from every contributor. I for one am not interested in Microsoft or anyone else paying me to close my code. Allowing people to pay $xxx to copy my copyrighted work without my…

> Some people won’t let you use their copyrighted work no matter how much you pay, that’s reasonable.

Is it really? From a consequentialist utilitarian perspective?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#779

Post by concordDance »

kraf wrote: post #757
concordDance wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also one more question: 5. Even if it is illegal, is it actually bad? No one can possibly sell code snippets, the transaction costs are many orders of magnitude greater than any reasonable price. In my opinion, at least in this case the benefits massively outweigh the costs and the law should not apply here.

Of course it's bad. Noone who put up their work as open source wants some huge company taking it and selling it to get even more competitive advantage and influence in the world. And that's without mentioning the people who put that into their license pretty much explicitly. Taking GPL code and getting away with it is a failure of our justice system, and that can't be made right with throwing pennies at developers.

In this case it seems obvious to me that the huge time savings for thousands of developers outweigh the fact that the original writers are offended.

A world with copiloted snippets seems like a better one to live in than a world without.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#780

Post by antihero »

afiori wrote: post #90
antihero wrote: post #31

I mean, if it's autocompleting a fairly simple line, and can do that because it's analysed a lot of lines, I don't really see that as "stealing anything". If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying. But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. I think the first use case is far more…

The when Oracle won its copyright lawsuit against google it was because of a 8 line bound checking utility function.

I was talking more about ethics than the law. I try to live adjacent to the law (to an extent that is reasonable and sane) in all fairness, as it will never be in-line with my ethics.
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