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I thought this was a pretty good thread (by an ex-Wikipedia lawyer) on Twitter about the IP meaning of Copilot. https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/141024

• mmastrac 5y ago
  > Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. This would be interesting to test with AI and pop music.
  • encryptluks2 5y ago
    This is a stupid argument that the Twitter author made. Saving music digitally is reading by robot, so recording music that wasn't digital into a digital format is fair use.
    • extra88 5y ago
      > recording music that wasn't digital into a digital format is fair use If you’re doing it from an analog format you bought for your own use (format shifting), it is fair use.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    Perhaps the final judgment would say "AI cannot infringe on copyright provided that only other AIs consume the result of the first AIs work". And suddenly there is a world of robots composing, writing and painting for other robots. With us humans left out. There should be a /s at the end, but legal world sometimes produces such convolutions. See, for example, the interpretation of the Commerce Clause in Gonzales v. Reich.
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    As far as IP protections go, they're similar, but the incentives are so different that you get songwriters going to court over bits of melodies that might be worth millions. Outside of quantitative trading, it's hard to find an example of 10 lines of code that are worth millions and couldn't easily be replaced with another implementation.
• SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  > Nobody is really being hurt when a new tool makes it easier to copy little bits of code from the internet. Quite the opposite. We all get a tiny bit better with good information like this. This is what the internet should be for, evolving, learning from past mistakes, information availability. If the discussion was “I clicked this button and got someone’s entire chat platform” that would be different. Words and sentences aren’t copy written, books are, so when exactly are a collection of words a book? There is nuance, and the linked page has none. But that’s fine, that guy is free to pull his content off GitHub. This seems like a useful feature for other people who want to make things first and foremost.
  • IncRnd 5y ago
    > Words and sentences aren’t copy written, books are, so when exactly are a collection of words a book? If that were true, then 20 people could each steal a single chapter from a book, and one of the people could combine those 20 chapters into a new copyright-free book. That's clearly false.
    • SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      Did I say anything about paragraphs or chapters? Didn’t I specially write there is nuance? And for your strawman, the assembly of uncopywritable components into a copywriten work, would still be a violation. So we agree that copywriter is somewhere between the paragraphs and chapters and the book. So why are tiny code excerpts “a problem”?
• jcelerier 5y ago
  > As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. Of course not. Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs - you can't become a wine contributor if it can be shown you ever read Windows source code and most likely conversely. Likewise, you can't ever write GPL VST 2 audio plug-ins if you ever had access to the official Steinberg VST2 SDK. Etc etc... Did people forget why black box reverse engineering of software ever came to be ?
  • messe 5y ago
    It's dependent on jurisdiction. Black box reverse engineering is only required in certain countries. If I remember correctly, most of Europe doesn't require it.
  • crazygringo 5y ago
    That's not what GP is saying. In general, you're absolutely allowed to learn programming techniques from anywhere. You can contribute software almost anywhere even if you've read Windows source code. Re-using everything you've learned, in your own creative creation, is part of fair use. Your example is the very specific scenario where you're attempting to replicate an entire program, API, etc., to identical specifications. That's obviously not fair use. You're not dealing with little bits and pieces, you're dealing with an entire finished product.
    • saurik 5y ago
      This model doesn't learn and abstract: it just pattern matches and replicates; that's why it was shown exactly replicating regions of code--long enough to not be "de minimis" and recognizable enough to include the comments--that happen to be popular... which would be fine, as long as the license on said code were also being replicated. It just isn't reasonable to try to pretend Copilot--or GPT-3 in general--is some kind of general purpose AI worthy of being compared with the fair use rights of a human learning techniques: this is a machine learning model that likes to copy/paste not just tiny bits of code but entire functions out of other peoples' projects, and most of what makes it fancy is that it is good at adapting what it copies to the surrounding conditions.
• deleted 5y ago
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• throwaway_egbs 5y ago
  Just when I thought tweetstorms couldn't get any worse, here's one where every tweet is a quote-tweet of the author. I don't even understand how I'm supposed to read this. > Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. Surely there's a limit to this. If I use a machine to produce something that just happens to exactly match a copyrighted work, now it's not infringement because of the method I used to produce it? That seems nonsensical, but maybe there's precedent for this too? (I have no idea what I'm talking about.)
  • neolog 5y ago
    Ctrl-c is a robot, so copyright doesn't apply to it
  • rcxdude 5y ago
    That quote is basically entirely nonsensical. 'copyright' hasn't decided anything (nor has any legislative body nor the courts). All that's happened is that OpenAI has put forward an argument that using large quantities of media scraped from the internet as training data is fair use. This argument for the most part does not rely on the human vs machine distinction (in fact it leans on the idea that the process is not so different from a human learning). The main place this comes up is the final test of damage to the original in terms of lost market share where it's argued that because it's a machine consuming the content there's no loss of audience to the creator (which is probably better phrased as the people training the neural net weren't going to pay for it anyway). A lot does ride on the idea that the neural net, if 'well designed', does not generally regurgitate its training data verbatim, which is in fairly hot dispute at the moment. OpenAI somewhat punts on this situation and basically says the output may infringe copyright in this case, but the copyright holder should sue whoever's generating and using the output from the net, not the person who trained and distributed the net.
    • noobermin 5y ago
      This argument is very convenient for OpenAI.
    • 5y ago
• IncRnd 5y ago
  > Nobody is really being hurt when a new tool makes it easier to copy little bits of code from the internet. That's the first time I've heard copilot get described as copying little bits of code from the Internet. Copilot aggregates all github source code, removes licences from the code, and regurgitates the code without licenses. Furthermore, both github and the programmers using copilot know this. Look at any one of these threads written by programmers about copilot. Using copilot is knowingly stealing the source code of others without attribution. Using copilot is literally humans stealing source code from others. Copilot was written for the purpose of taking other's code.
  • IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
    It's not "literally" stealing, because it doesn't deprive anyone of the use the source code. Those two points were somehow extremely obvious to everyone here as long as it was music and movies we were talking about. And Github themselves have stated that only 0.1% of the Copilot output contains chunks taken verbatim from the learning set. Of those, the vast majority are likely to be boilerplate so generic it's silly to claim ownership, and maybe sometimes impossible to avoid.
    • IncRnd 5y ago
      > It's not "literally" stealing, because it doesn't deprive anyone of the use the source code. That's simply not true. You might be confusing idealism about software freedom with how both law and society define theft. Edit: In this comment I refer to the US.
      • mdpye 5y ago
        It is actually true, in the UK at least the legal definition of theft includes the deprivation of the owner of the property in question. The copyright lobby hedge the term as "copyright theft" (i.e. not actual theft) in order to shift the societal understanding. Whish appears to have worked. This is not a value judgement on copyright infringement. Just that technically it doesn't meet the legal definition of theft. cf. The rather amusing satire of the "you wouldn't steal a handbag" campaign in the UK, which ran "you wouldn't download a bear!"
• a3w 5y ago
  In germany, there is no fair use exception to copyright. Also, there is no IP most software principles: e.g. writing a specific loop, that even an (weak) AI could suggest, would probably be too simple to be protected. What could be valid is a right to not mimic collections, but that would mean you cannot clone the Copilot, as input is mapped to a non-trivial collection of outputs. Disclaimer: IANAL, but I do dabble in IT-law.
• shakow 5y ago
  > Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Until someone trains a DNN to generate Mickey Mouse-like cartoons I assume.
  • dmitriid 5y ago
    There was a joke that all ML will be immediately banned the moment there's a Copilot for RIAA-licensed songs.
    • lstodd 5y ago
      There were at least three PoCs AFAIK. Surely there were more. Problem is, the results too closely replicate the source, as in "Suck just as much". And thus there is no demand for this kind of thing.
    • yencabulator 5y ago
      Nudge Copilot to produce Mickey Mouse as ASCII art.
• pubby 5y ago
  The issue isn't an AI reading copyrighted code, the issue is an AI regurgitating the lines of copyrighted code verbatim. To be clear, humans aren't allowed to do this either. And sure, nobody cares about your stupid binary tree, but do they care about GNU and the Linux kernel? Imagine someone trained an AI to specifically output Linux code, and used it to reproduce a working OS. Is that fair?
  • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > the issue is an AI regurgitating the lines of copyrighted code verbatim. To be clear, humans aren't allowed to do this either. That's a little broad. There's a wide range of licenses for software that explicitly allow precisely this.
    • temac 5y ago
      Tons of licences require at least attribution.
  • 29athrowaway 5y ago
    I think this is an important stepping stone towards automating some development tasks. But the execution went wrong... They used raw data from repositories for training, without any kind of pre-processing.
• 41209 5y ago
  Copilot is lifting entire functions from GPL code. Legal technicality aside , I know I'd be upset if I gpl'ed some code and someone stole large parts of it.
  • ralph84 5y ago
    Why would you GPL the code in the first place if you didn't want other people using it? It's perfectly within the license for someone to do basically whatever they want with GPL code as long as they're not redistributing it. That includes using it for the internal operations of a Fortune 500 company, using it to run a dictatorship, or building a SaaS business on top of it. If you don't want people to "steal" your code, the GPL isn't the right license.
    • shakna 5y ago
      > It's perfectly within the license for someone to do basically whatever they want with GPL code as long as they're not redistributing it. Copilot is redistributing it without the license.
• josefx 5y ago
  > Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. So wait, if I write my own AI, lets call it cp, and train it on gnu-gcc.tar.gz with the goal of creating a commercial-compiler.tar.gz then I can license the result any way I want? After all most of the work was done by the computer.
  • axismundi 5y ago
    Sorry, you can't. You are not rich enough to get away with it.
• blibble 5y ago
  there's a nice example here of it reproducing carmack's famous inverse square root function from Quake 3 (sans GPL, of course) https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 this is clearly copyright infringement, and if it isn't: it should be
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • dang 5y ago
    Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 - July 2021 (625 comments)
  • astrange 5y ago
    Calling it Carmack's rsqrt is an attribution issue already since it seems to have been invented a decade earlier and used at SGI.
  • lacker 5y ago
    I don't think it should be infringement. You can't copyright an algorithm, and Carmack's function is like six lines of code. If you just read Carmack's source code, then rewrote the same algorithm with different variable names, it would clearly not be infringement. Is it really so bad if you keep his precise variable names, comments, and indentation? How does it hurt Carmack to reproduce this tiny snippet of code exactly, rather than with a small rewrite?
  • bootlooped 5y ago
    That function appears in hundreds, if not thousands of GitHub repos. It's plausible that it's the most famous block of code ever. Are all those repos guilty of copyright infringement? https://github.com/search?q=float+Q_rsqrt%28+float+number+%29&type=code https://github.com/search?q=float+Q_rsqrt%28+float+number+%2... The only ways this argument could be less alarming to me is if people were bothered that it was writing the same Hello World as somebody else, or that it was naming variables "foo" and "bar". Let's wait until we have a bulletproof, egregious, and inexcusable case of it lifting code until we panic.
• boxfire 5y ago
  So what happens when someone makes a transformer network that can read fanfics and animate them live trained from the whole collection of MPAA movies? I mean its inevitable. Given the history of the MPAA, I don't think they're gonna lie down and just take it. I feel like we're in a slippery slope to provoke the "IP lords" into brutally draconian measures that will make the Disney copyright extensions look like a tax deferral.
  • runawaybottle 5y ago
    We are toeing the crater line. Quite frankly, there’s clear evidence that humans have little regard for plagiarism versus inspiration. Will co-pilot offer royalties for auto suggestions that are committed to code bases? I’m sure our ML can track how similar the commits were. It’s always fascinating to me how we have the tech to take, but never to give. Pay the motherfucker you stole this shit from. The proverbial: https://youtu.be/6TLo4Z_LWu4 https://youtu.be/6TLo4Z_LWu4
• croes 5y ago
  Looks like more than a minor infringement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 And reading is no infringement but writing maybe is.
• jhgb 5y ago
  > Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. But ultimately the human is OK-ing the code and committing it, basically as his own work most of the time. I'm reasonably sure that this may matter to courts.
• janoc 5y ago
  Sorry but it is not a robot publishing the "lifted" code but a human. So the copyright will very much apply. That's an argument like saying CTRL+C/CTRL+V is OK because it is a "computer doing it". Plus it is not "minor infringement" but code is being lifted verbatim - e.g. as has been demonstrated by the Quake square root code. Feel free to test this theory in court ...
• dathinab 5y ago
  Fair use for training and "independent creation" are one think a AI "remembering and mostly verbatim copying code over" an another. Many of the current Machine Learning application try to teach AI to understand the concepts behind their training data and use that to do whatever they are trained to do. But most (all?) fail to properly reach the goal in any more complicated cases, at least the kinds of models which are used for things like Copilot (GPT-3?). Instead what this models learn can be described as a combination of some abstract understanding and verbatim snippets of input data of varying size. As such while they sometimes generate "new" things based on "understanding" they also sometimes just copy things they have seen before!! (Like in the Quake code example where it even copied over some of the not-so "proper" comments expressing programmers frustration). It's like a human not understanding programming or english or Latin letters but has a photographic memory and tries to somehow create something which seems to make sense by recombining existing verbatim snippets, sometimes while tweaking them. I.e. if the snippets are small enough and tweaked enough it's covered by fair use and similar, BUT the person doing it doesn't know about this, so if a large remembered snippet matches verbatim it will put it in effectively copying code of a size which likely doesn't fall under fair use. Also this is a well known problem, at least it was when I covered topics including ML ~5 years ago. I.e. good examples included extracting whole sequences of paragraphs of a book out of such a network or (more brilliantly) extracting thinks like peoples contact data based on their names or credit card information (in case of systems trained on mails). So that Copilot is basically guaranteed to sometimes copy non super smalls snippets of code and potential comments in a way not-really appropriate wrt. copyright should have been a well know fact for the ML specialist in charge of this project.
• thunderbong 5y ago
  IMHO, Threadreader does a better job of reading these kind of tweets
• bcrosby95 5y ago
  > Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. Reading by a robot doesn't count. But injecting a robot between copyright material and a product doesn't magically strip the copyright from whatever it produces.
• niekverw 5y ago
  > Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. This is silly. Co pilot is not reading by itself, someone pushed buttons telling it to read and write. If I clone the entire github without the licenses I am telling a robot to do it, doesn't make it right.
• yumraj 5y ago
  It all comes down to this: this has not been tested in the court. The above opinion, or for that matter any opinion from any lawyer or not-a-lawyer, is just that, an opinion. As a business it is your responsibility to determine if this code-copying is worth a risk to your business. Based on my experience, I'm pretty sure all corporate lawyers will disallow such code copying, till it has been tested in the court. It's just a matter of who will be the guinea pig.
• niekverw 5y ago
  "I am not a lawyer,“ STOP READING
• robbrown451 5y ago
  "reading by robots doesn’t count." It should be obvious that if the robot is simply scraping web sites and reproducing their text verbatim (without permission and without giving credit) that would be an infringement. There are a lot of shades of gray between that and the other extreme, which is where it is scraping millions of sites, learning from them, and producing something that isn't all that similar to any of them. Both ends of the spectrum, and everywhere in between, are things that humans can do, but as machines get more capable this is getting trickier and trickier to sort out. In this case, it sounds like it might be closer to the first example, since significant parts of the code will be verbatim. Ultimately, I am hoping that such things cause us to completely rethink copyright law. The blurriness of it all is becoming too much to make laws around. We just need better mechanisms to reward people for creating valuable IP that they allow people to freely use as they please.
  • IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
    Copyright requires a certain amount of creativity involved in its creation. I strongly suspect most code snippets of a few lines just don't qualify.
    • robbrown451 5y ago
      Yeah well I haven't looked at what this thing actually produces. Regardless the statement that "robots don't count" is ridiculous.
• lamontcg 5y ago
  I'm more concerned with all the poor code and security issues that Copilot has been trained on. Garbage In, Garbage Out.
  • Quekid5 5y ago
    Hit the nail on the head, at least as far as my concerns go. Security is a constant issue with humans writing code. Do we really want an "AI" that understands neither code nor security spitting out snippets of code to pasted into network services? If Copilot ever becomes truly popular it's going to be an absolute security nightmare both from the code it suggests (just bad code, GIGO as you say), but also because adversaries will be gaming it by posting bad code for it to pick up and "learn" from. It's insanity.
    • lamontcg 5y ago
      Wikipedia's code quality tends to be "sophomoric". Most of the algorithms aren't production quality and have poor edge conditions. I suspect Copilot won't even be up to that standard.
      • Quekid5 5y ago
        Disagree slightly with the "sophomoric" bit -- it's just that wiki code is usually meant to be Pseudocode, I think. My objection to that term is only because being at the beginning of a learning curve isn't bad per se. Neither is writing Pseudocode. Your conclusion is right, however.
• j4yav 5y ago
  Wouldn’t this make for a simple license laundering system?
• lucideer 5y ago
  There's a lot of sibling commenters disagreeing with this take but I think they miss that ultimately this comes down to how legal experts interpret tech, rather than what tech experts think law should apply. This is, imo, unfortunate, as often the legal interpretation is based on a gross misunderstanding of how the tech works, but this is the way. I don't think copilot should be legal according to my own interpretation but in this (rare) case I feel the "IANAL" tag applies not because I lack (legal) knowledge, but rather because I have (tech) knowledge that is likely absent from actual decision making on legal outcomes (therefore leading to different legal outcomes than how I would see things working).
• pdonis 5y ago
  > nobody cares if my ten-line "how to invert a binary tree" snippet is the same as someone else's. Maybe nobody cares about that, but the problem is that Github's automated tool is not telling you what code it shows you is actually an exact copy of existing code, or how much of that existing code is being copied, or whether the existing code is licensed, or, if it is licensed, whether your copying is in accordance with the license or not. And without that information you can't possibly know whether what you are doing is legal or ethical. Sure, you could try to guess, but that sort of thing is not supposed to rely on guessing.
• erhk 5y ago
  An AI isnt learning from it. Its effectively copying prior work when it solves a problem. There is no novel out of bounds data generation by modern ai approaches
• exo762 5y ago
  > As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. An AI should be allowed to do the same thing. This is a very false equivalency. AI and humans are different. First, AI is at best a slave, and likely a slave of a capital. Second - scale makes difference.
• abeppu 5y ago
  Well, maybe the interpretation will change if the right people are pissed off. At this point, how hard would it be to produce a structurally similar "content-aware continuation/fill" for audio producers, film makers, etc, which suggests audio snippets or film snippets, trained from copyrighted source material? If prompted by a black screen with some white dots, the video tool could suggest a sequence of frames beginning with text streaming into the distance "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away ..." and continue from there. Normally we don't try to train models to regurgitate their inputs, but if we actually tried, I'm sure one could be made to reproduce the White Album or Thriller or whatever else.
  • visarga 5y ago
    NeRFs (neural radiance fields) are neural nets that exactly encode one input, kind of like a JPEG. They can reconstruct from novel viewpoints.
• dehrmann 5y ago
  I think the law will allow what copilot eventually becomes. As others have said, right now, it's too apt to reproduce code verbatim.
• intricatedetail 5y ago
  There is a difference when human learns vs multi billion dollar company train their models without paying a penny. Saying it is just like user, maybe they start paying taxes like individuals without access to creative accountants pay. Leeches without morals - Micro$oft
• nabilhat 5y ago
  Autonomous programming will be explored. Potentially, Copilot is a proof of concept, an early step in that direction. If it is, the corrections made by Copilot users will be applied to the development of the future of unattended programming. Whether it is or not, it's close enough that any legal outcomes experienced by Copilot users will contribute to the definition of liability boundaries relevant to the future of autonomous programming. Copilot users are numerous enough that the incidence of risk is low of ending up under the foot of a copyright owner with the means and will to crush a user, but no one should take such a risk to use a novelty like Copilot in production code.
• temac 5y ago
  I will completely follow that opinion the day MS includes the whole Windows codebase into the training of copilot. Until then, it's basically "GPL" (and other licences) laundering with one-sided excuses.
• cnma 5y ago
  > Nobody is really being hurt when a new tool makes it easier to copy little bits of code from the internet. Of course people are hurt, namely the original creators who spent years of work and whose work is potentially laundered, depending on how good this IP grabbing AI will get. If it gets really good, some smug and well connected loser (e.g. the type who posts pictures of himself with a microphone on GitHub) will click a button, steal other people's hard work and start a "new" project that supersedes the old one.
• deleted 5y ago
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• patrickthebold 5y ago
  There might be a slippery slope here: suppose there's a GPL version of product X in the training set. I'm building a proprietary competitor. Then let's say copilot makes it a little bit easier and cheaper for me to build my product. Now suppose it's 10 years from now and it's trivial to build a proprietary competitor.
• Causality1 5y ago
  You sure about that? You aren't allowed to read it outside of the license attached to it. Downloading pirated source code, reading it, and then typing it out from memory doesn't magically give you a right to use it in any way. I would argue the licenses attached to most copyrighted code are being violated the moment the code is scraped and replicated without permission.
• deleted 5y ago
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• test_epsilon 5y ago
  > As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. An AI should be allowed to do the same thing. This is a non-sequitur. Why should it? > And nobody cares if my ten-line "how to invert a binary tree" snippet is the same as someone else's. Are you going to make up a rule for every length and type of code? What about twenty line? If ten lines are fine then surely twenty would be? How about pictures? If some code is then surely a picture or two wouldn't hurt? Let's just tweak the AI slightly so it regurgitates more code verbatim -- or do courts have to examine any change made to the AI and okay them? > Nobody is really being hurt when a new tool makes it easier to copy little bits of code from the internet. The Windows source code can be found on the internet. As a human you're allowed to read that if you have it. Try making an AI that copies bits of that into your code and release that on the internet.
• BlueTemplar 5y ago
  > I am capable of summarizing the thoughts of lawyers Then, I'm sorry, but you seem to have done a pretty bad job of summarizing that paper ? My own take on summarizing it's conclusion would be : "If the program can pass the Turing Test, then it should be legally liable, just like a human would." (Yes, emphasis on the should here, but the way that you're presenting that quote might make readers think that that paper's conclusion is the opposite one !) ---- > Nobody is really being hurt when a new tool makes it easier to copy little bits of code from the internet. Some of the examples from that paper are A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster (no comment) and White Smith Music Publ’g Co. v. Apollo Co. (piano rolls), and in that latter case we pretty much (?) got the whole Copyright Act of 1909 the very next year, where these “mechanical reproductions” were subjected to a statutory compulsory license. So at the very least there should be concern about how Copilot might be eventually considered by the courts to facilitate copyright infringement and at the very least have to provide the source of its "insights" ? (Attribution being the bare minimum that most of the software licenses require.)
• ablekh 5y ago
  > Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. This is a ridiculous conclusion. The ultimate destination of the robot actions' product is its user, i.e. a human. It is a clear corollary of the transitive law. Therefore, all human-focused legal concepts, including infringement, are applicable in such cases. The absurdness of the conclusion cited above can be easily illustrated, as follows. Suppose that a person owns or rents an advanced robot (say, like Boston Dynamics' Spot, but better). He/she then programs it to break into someone's house and steal something valuable. All goes by the plan, the robot delivers the stolen goods to the rendezvous point and, if rented, gets returned. Now, according to the conclusion's logic, since a robot has done the actual "work", "it's fair use". Nonsense, right? Just to clarify: I like the concept of GitHub Copilot (even though I have not yet tried this particular product). It offers various benefits, from pedagogical to adopting software engineering best practices to improving engineering productivity. However, I think that IP and legal aspects of this approach and specific product should be carefully studied and resolved in a consistent manner (e.g., prevent the model or system to output exact source code snippets).
• dwild 5y ago
  > As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. Plenty of examples show that it didn't learn that much and copy literal parts of code. At my school that would have been ground for plagiarism which weren't treated lightly.
• heavyset_go 5y ago
  > As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. An AI should be allowed to do the same thing. You're taking the "learning" metaphor too literally. Machine learning models do not learn. They can and do encode their training material into their weights and biases, too. That's what Copilot was doing, regurgitating parts of its training data line for line. To me, that is not much different from transforming a copyrighted piece of work with, say, compression, a lossy codec or cropping. There are plenty of people who can learn to play Metallica songs really well, but if they copied specifics aspects of their work it would be copyright infringement, as well. A human being can literally learn. We can understand abstract principles from one copyrighted work and apply them to another without actually infringing its copyright. A ML model does not understand, it is a statistical model. It is inherently a derivative work, and it often encodes the copyrighted work into was trained on into the model itself.
• ruined 5y ago
  >Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. Glad to hear this. My warez group from here on out will only release binaries written collaboratively with a neural net trained on the best proprietary software available
• swiley 5y ago
  >When computer do it it's fair use Like when cp does it?
• LdSGSgvupDV 5y ago
  I have a question. How to define the AI? In an extreme case, could I say copy-paste is the AI if I implement it in hundreds of thousands of NN layers and it output piece of the origin work (e.g. 30s of music from 3mins with small modification).