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The landing page for it states the below, so hopefully not too much of an issue (though I guess some folks may find a 0.1% risk high). > GitHub Copilot is a co
by billti 5y ago
The landing page for it states the below, so hopefully not too much of an issue (though I guess some folks may find a 0.1% risk high).
> GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before. We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set.
- jgworks 5y agoI'd be surprised if a company's legal department would be OK with that 0.1% risk.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoLike wouldn’t be entertaining without the License Nazis. No code for you! (Seinfeld reference)
- viraptor 5y agoGoogle already learned that one. "There's only a tiny chance we may be copying some public code from Oracle." may not be a good explanation there.
- varispeed 5y agoDid they have a license to use public source code as a data source for data set though?
- smackjer 5y agoYes, it's public source code.
- haimez 5y agoPublic doesn’t mean it’s not encumbered by copyrights
- ggreer 5y agoPretty much everything is trained on copyrighted content: machine translation software, TWDNE, DALL-E, and all the GPTs. Software people are bringing this up now because it's their ox being gored. It's the same as when furries got upset about This Fursona Does Not Exist.[1][2] 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093911 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/gfam2y/furries_creator_of_this_fursona_does_not_exist/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/gfam2y/furries_...
- tremon 5y agoTo expand on your argument, pretty much every person is trained on copyrighted content too. Doesn't make their generated content automatically subject to copyright either.
- user-the-name 5y agoThis is an argument for why this is a bigger problem, not a smaller one.
- malka 5y agoyeah, except that Oracle and google have way more lawyer power than furries artists.
- ganzuul 5y agoYou have no idea how much money they make. Some of them have payment plans for commissions.
- oalae5niMiel7qu 5y agoIf it's BSD-licensed, the encumbrance doesn't matter much.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoGod I wish contracts were encoded semantically rather than as plain text. I just tried to look through Github's terms of service[1]. I'd search for "Github can <verb> with <adjective> code" if I could. Instead I'm giving up. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...
- int_19h 5y agoA world in which all laws and contracts were required to be written in Lojban would be interesting.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoThat looks hard. More politically feasible might be a language I've unfortunately forgotten the name of, ordinary English but with some extra rules designed to eliminate ambiguity -- every noun has to carry a specifier like "some" or "all" or "the" or "a", etc.
- ganzuul 5y agoLegalese might be similar to code, and there is lots of interest in making law machine readable. So don't give up; check back later.
- rictic 5y agoIf you pulled a marble out of a bag ten times a day, with a 0.1% chance each time that it was red: after a day you'd have a 1% chance of seeing a red marble, the first week you'd have a 6.7% chance, the first month you'd have a 26% chance, and the first working year you'd have a 92.6% chance of having seen at least one red marble. Probabilities are fun!
- ganzuul 5y agoWell within the margin of fair use.
- marcan_42 5y agoThat's not how fair use works. It doesn't matter how unlikely it is, if Copilot one day decides to "suggest" a significant snippet of ckxd from a GPLed app, you'd better be planning to GPL your project.
- hakre 5y agoNo, and this has been outlined in the past why that is not the case. e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/61292/ https://lwn.net/Articles/61292/ and most likely only one opinion. on the other hand, it would be interesting to learn about what the copyright implications are of a) creating a utility like copilot (it is a software program) and contains a corpus based on copyrighted material (the database that has been trained) b) using it to create code based on the corpus and resulting in software as a work under copyright.
- geekraver 5y agoAnd you would have a whole lot of blue marbles.
- propertymagnate 5y agoI only murdered them once isn't the best of legal defenses.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoAutomatic refactoring could be useful for avoiding a lot of dumb legal disputes. I say dumb because I am, perhaps chauvinistically, assuming that no brilliant algorithmic insights will be transferred via the AI copilot, only work that might have been conceptually hard to a beginner but feels routine to a day laborer. Then again that assumption suggests there'd be nothing to sue over.
- Gh0stRAT 5y agoTrue, but that definitely wouldn't stop Oracle from suing over it anyway. (See the rangeCheck chapter of Oracle v Google [0]) Also, Oracle v Google opens the possibility of a fair-use defense in the event that Copilot does regurgitate a small snippet of code. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722514