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> 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 jo

> 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.
  - the8472 5y ago
    This is called prompt engineering. If you find a popular, frequently repeated code snippet and then fashion a prompt that is tailored to that snippet then yes the NN will recite it verbatim like a poem. But that doesn't mean it's the only thing it does or even that it does it frequently. It's like calling a human a parrot because he completed a line from a famous poem when the previous speaker left it unfinished. The same argument was brought up with GPT too and has been long debunked. The authors (and others) checked samples against the training corpus and it only rarely copies unless you prod it to.
    - saurik 5y ago
      I don't know if I agree with your argument about GPT-3, but I think our disagreement seems to be besides the point: if your human parrot did that, they would--not just in theory but in actual fact! see all the cases of this in the music industry--get sued for it, even if they claim they didn't mean to and it was merely a really entrenched memory.
      - the8472 5y ago
        The point is that many of the examples you see are intentional, through prompt engineering. The pilot asked the copilot to violate copyright, the copilot complied. Don't blame the copilot. There also are cases where this happens unintentionally, but those are not the norm.
  - moyix 5y ago
    Have you used Copilot? I have not, but I have trained a GPT2 model on open source projects (https://doesnotexist.codes/ https://doesnotexist.codes/). It does not just pattern match and replicate. It can be cajoled into reproducing some memorized snippets, but this is not the norm; in my experience the vast majority of what it generates is novel. The exceptions are extremely popular snippets that are repeated many many times in the training data, like license boilerplate. Perhaps Copilot behaves very differently from my own model, but I strongly suspect that the examples that have been going around twitter are outliers. Github's study agrees: https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitation https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio... (though of course this should be replicated independently).
- doytch 5y ago
  This is true, but there's also a murkier middle option. I used to work for a company that made a lot of money from its software patents but I was in a division that worked heavily in open-source code. We were forbidden to contribute to the high-value patented code because it was impossible to know whether we were "tainted" by knowledge of GPL code.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    No you are not, guaranteed (I think, not a lawyer). At least from a copyright point of few. TL;DR: Having right, and having a easy defense in a law suite are not the same. BUT separating it makes defending any law-suite against them because of copyright and patent law much easier. It also prevents any employee from "copying GPL(or similar) code verbatim from memory"(1) (or even worse the clipboard) sure the employee "should" not do it but by separating them you can be more sure they don't, and in turn makes it easier to defent in curt especially wrt. "independent creation". There is also patent law shenanigans. (1): Which is what GitHub Copilot is sometimes doing IMHO.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - 0xdky 5y ago
    Same here. I worked at a NAS storage (NFS) vendor and this was a common practice. Could not look at server implementation in Linux kernel and open source NFS client team could not look at proprietary server code.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > 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. No - google's 9 lines of sorting algorithm (iirc) copied from Oracle's implementation were not considered fair use in the Google / Oracle debacle. Likewise SCO claimed that 80 copied lines (in the entirety of the Linux source code) were a copyright violation, even if we never had a legal answer to this.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    Sorry, but you're not recalling correctly. :) The Supreme Court decided Google v. Oracle was fair use. It was 3 months ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.#dummy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_... That's the highest form of precedent, the question has now been effectively settled (unless Congress ever changes the law). Edit: added a dummy hash to end of URL so HN parses it correctly (thanks @thewakalix below)
    - croes 5y ago
      The fair use was about Googled API reimplementation. It becomes a whole different case with a 1:1 copy of code. And don't forget fair use works in the US, not necessarily in the rest of the world. But I'm happy about all the new GPL programs created by Copilot
      - etothepii 5y ago
        I wonder if GPL would actually price to be that infectious.
    - thewakalix 5y ago
      There seems to be an issue with Hacker News's URL parsing. The final period isn't included as part of the link.
      - 5y ago
eatbitseveryday 5y ago
> > As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. > Of course not. Reading some copyrighted code can make 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. You can of course read the code. The consequences are thus increased limitations, like you say. What you mention is not an absolute restriction from reading copyrighted material. You perhaps have to cease other activities as a result.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Of course not. Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied. Those projects could hire people familiar with competitor code and assign them to competing projects if they wanted. The contributors could, in theory, write new code without using proprietary knowledge from their other companies. In practice, that's actually really difficult to do and even more difficult to prove in court, so companies choose the safe option and avoid hiring anyone with that knowledge altogether. Now the question is whether or not GitHub's AI can be argued to have proprietary knowledge contained within. If your goal is to avoid any possibility that any court could argue that GitHub copilot funneled proprietary code (accessible to GitHub copilot) into your project, then you'd want to forbid contributors from using CoPilot.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  In this case though we have machine learning model that is trained with some code and is not merely learning abstract concepts to be applied generally in different domains, but instead can use that knowledge to produce code that looks pretty much the same as the learning material, given the context that fits the learning material. If humans did that, it would be hard to argue they didn't outright copy the source. When a machine does it, does it matter if the machine literally copied it from sources, or first transformed it into an isomorphic model in its "head" before regurgitating it back? If yes, why doesn't parsing the source into an AST and then rendering it back also insulate you from abiding a copyright?
  - dTal 5y ago
    >When a machine does it, does it matter if the machine literally copied it from sources, or first transformed it into an isomorphic model in its "head" before regurgitating it back? You've hit the nail on the head here. If this is okay, then neural nets are simply machines for laundering IP. We don't worry about people memorizing proprietary source code and "accidentally" using it because it's virtually impossible for a human to do that without realizing it. But it's trivial for a neural net to do it, so comparisons to humans applying their knowledge are flawed.
dahart 5y ago
> Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs What provision of copyright law are you referring to? Are you conflating copyright law with arbitrary organizational policies?
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Who said it was a law?
  - dahart 5y ago
    Which “it” are you referring to? @lacker was talking about copyright in the comment @jcelerier replied to.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      Yeah... but they didn't say it was the law that got you excluded from working on some projects from reading copyright code. It's corporate policy that does that - it's not a law but they do it based on who owns the copyright. Not everything that impacts you is a law. They said > Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs And they're right. It's because of corporate policies. They never said it was because of a law - you imagined that out of nothing.
      - dahart 5y ago
        > They never say it was because of a law - you imagined that out of nothing. @jcelerier flatly contradicted the statement that copyright doesn’t prevent you from reading something. You’re right that @jceleier didn’t say their example was law, that’s because the example is a straw man in the context of what @lacker wrote.
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        Are you editing your comments out after they're been replied to? That's really poor form.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
burntoutfire 5y ago
> 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. If that's the case, it should be easy to kill a project like wine - just send every core contributor an email containing some Windows code.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  Nobody could grant if that thing is really windows code or a fake. Not without the sender self-identifying as a well known top MS employee having access to it. In that case the sender would be doing something illegal and against MS interests. The result would be WINE having an advantage to redo the snippet of code in a totally new and different way and MS being forced to show part of its private code, that would expose them also to patent trolls. Would be a win-win situation for Wine and a lose-lose situation for MS.
mhh__ 5y ago
In my experience open source has now become so prevalent that I think some young developers could be completely caught out if the pendulum swings the other way. Semi-related, the GNU/Linux copypasta is now more familiar to some than the GNU project in general - this is a shame to me as I view the copypasta to be mocking people who worked very hard to achieve what GNU has achieved asking for some credit.
k__ 5y ago
Wasn't that the entire premise of "Halt and Catch Fire"?
TheRealPomax 5y ago
I don't believe you on this in the slightest. This sounds like you making up an argument, so cite sources if you want people to believe your claims.
- notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  It's very clearly visible on the Wine wiki that people who have ever seen Microsoft Windows source code cannot contribute to Wine due to copyright restrictions: https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Who_can.27t_contribute_to_Wine.3F https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Who_can.27t_contribute... I think OP has a point here, personally.
- davidjytang 5y ago
  The limitations on those projects are well-known though.
  - TheRealPomax 5y ago
    To whom? Because I work with VST a lot, and that's sure news to me.
cush 5y ago
I've you've ever read a book or interacted with any product, you've learned from copyrighted material. You've extrapolated "some organizations don't allow you to contribute if you've learned from the code of their direct competitor" to "You're not allowed to learn from copyrighted code", which is absurd.
userbinator 5y ago
if it can be shown ...and the "if" is the important part. This is why Imaginary Property is so absurd.

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.
- the8472 5y ago
  This is called prompt engineering. If you find a popular, frequently repeated code snippet and then fashion a prompt that is tailored to that snippet then yes the NN will recite it verbatim like a poem. But that doesn't mean it's the only thing it does or even that it does it frequently. It's like calling a human a parrot because he completed a line from a famous poem when the previous speaker left it unfinished. The same argument was brought up with GPT too and has been long debunked. The authors (and others) checked samples against the training corpus and it only rarely copies unless you prod it to.
  - saurik 5y ago
    I don't know if I agree with your argument about GPT-3, but I think our disagreement seems to be besides the point: if your human parrot did that, they would--not just in theory but in actual fact! see all the cases of this in the music industry--get sued for it, even if they claim they didn't mean to and it was merely a really entrenched memory.
    - the8472 5y ago
      The point is that many of the examples you see are intentional, through prompt engineering. The pilot asked the copilot to violate copyright, the copilot complied. Don't blame the copilot. There also are cases where this happens unintentionally, but those are not the norm.
- moyix 5y ago
  Have you used Copilot? I have not, but I have trained a GPT2 model on open source projects (https://doesnotexist.codes/ https://doesnotexist.codes/). It does not just pattern match and replicate. It can be cajoled into reproducing some memorized snippets, but this is not the norm; in my experience the vast majority of what it generates is novel. The exceptions are extremely popular snippets that are repeated many many times in the training data, like license boilerplate. Perhaps Copilot behaves very differently from my own model, but I strongly suspect that the examples that have been going around twitter are outliers. Github's study agrees: https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitation https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio... (though of course this should be replicated independently).
doytch 5y ago
This is true, but there's also a murkier middle option. I used to work for a company that made a lot of money from its software patents but I was in a division that worked heavily in open-source code. We were forbidden to contribute to the high-value patented code because it was impossible to know whether we were "tainted" by knowledge of GPL code.
- dathinab 5y ago
  No you are not, guaranteed (I think, not a lawyer). At least from a copyright point of few. TL;DR: Having right, and having a easy defense in a law suite are not the same. BUT separating it makes defending any law-suite against them because of copyright and patent law much easier. It also prevents any employee from "copying GPL(or similar) code verbatim from memory"(1) (or even worse the clipboard) sure the employee "should" not do it but by separating them you can be more sure they don't, and in turn makes it easier to defent in curt especially wrt. "independent creation". There is also patent law shenanigans. (1): Which is what GitHub Copilot is sometimes doing IMHO.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- 0xdky 5y ago
  Same here. I worked at a NAS storage (NFS) vendor and this was a common practice. Could not look at server implementation in Linux kernel and open source NFS client team could not look at proprietary server code.
jcelerier 5y ago
> 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. No - google's 9 lines of sorting algorithm (iirc) copied from Oracle's implementation were not considered fair use in the Google / Oracle debacle. Likewise SCO claimed that 80 copied lines (in the entirety of the Linux source code) were a copyright violation, even if we never had a legal answer to this.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  Sorry, but you're not recalling correctly. :) The Supreme Court decided Google v. Oracle was fair use. It was 3 months ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.#dummy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_... That's the highest form of precedent, the question has now been effectively settled (unless Congress ever changes the law). Edit: added a dummy hash to end of URL so HN parses it correctly (thanks @thewakalix below)
  - croes 5y ago
    The fair use was about Googled API reimplementation. It becomes a whole different case with a 1:1 copy of code. And don't forget fair use works in the US, not necessarily in the rest of the world. But I'm happy about all the new GPL programs created by Copilot
    - etothepii 5y ago
      I wonder if GPL would actually price to be that infectious.
  - thewakalix 5y ago
    There seems to be an issue with Hacker News's URL parsing. The final period isn't included as part of the link.
    - 5y ago

eatbitseveryday 5y ago

> > As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. > Of course not. Reading some copyrighted code can make 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. You can of course read the code. The consequences are thus increased limitations, like you say. What you mention is not an absolute restriction from reading copyrighted material. You perhaps have to cease other activities as a result.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Of course not. Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied. Those projects could hire people familiar with competitor code and assign them to competing projects if they wanted. The contributors could, in theory, write new code without using proprietary knowledge from their other companies. In practice, that's actually really difficult to do and even more difficult to prove in court, so companies choose the safe option and avoid hiring anyone with that knowledge altogether. Now the question is whether or not GitHub's AI can be argued to have proprietary knowledge contained within. If your goal is to avoid any possibility that any court could argue that GitHub copilot funneled proprietary code (accessible to GitHub copilot) into your project, then you'd want to forbid contributors from using CoPilot.

ithkuil 5y ago
In this case though we have machine learning model that is trained with some code and is not merely learning abstract concepts to be applied generally in different domains, but instead can use that knowledge to produce code that looks pretty much the same as the learning material, given the context that fits the learning material. If humans did that, it would be hard to argue they didn't outright copy the source. When a machine does it, does it matter if the machine literally copied it from sources, or first transformed it into an isomorphic model in its "head" before regurgitating it back? If yes, why doesn't parsing the source into an AST and then rendering it back also insulate you from abiding a copyright?
- dTal 5y ago
  >When a machine does it, does it matter if the machine literally copied it from sources, or first transformed it into an isomorphic model in its "head" before regurgitating it back? You've hit the nail on the head here. If this is okay, then neural nets are simply machines for laundering IP. We don't worry about people memorizing proprietary source code and "accidentally" using it because it's virtually impossible for a human to do that without realizing it. But it's trivial for a neural net to do it, so comparisons to humans applying their knowledge are flawed.

dahart 5y ago

> Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs What provision of copyright law are you referring to? Are you conflating copyright law with arbitrary organizational policies?

chrisseaton 5y ago
Who said it was a law?
- dahart 5y ago
  Which “it” are you referring to? @lacker was talking about copyright in the comment @jcelerier replied to.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Yeah... but they didn't say it was the law that got you excluded from working on some projects from reading copyright code. It's corporate policy that does that - it's not a law but they do it based on who owns the copyright. Not everything that impacts you is a law. They said > Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs And they're right. It's because of corporate policies. They never said it was because of a law - you imagined that out of nothing.
    - dahart 5y ago
      > They never say it was because of a law - you imagined that out of nothing. @jcelerier flatly contradicted the statement that copyright doesn’t prevent you from reading something. You’re right that @jceleier didn’t say their example was law, that’s because the example is a straw man in the context of what @lacker wrote.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        Are you editing your comments out after they're been replied to? That's really poor form.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

burntoutfire 5y ago

> 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. If that's the case, it should be easy to kill a project like wine - just send every core contributor an email containing some Windows code.

pvaldes 5y ago
Nobody could grant if that thing is really windows code or a fake. Not without the sender self-identifying as a well known top MS employee having access to it. In that case the sender would be doing something illegal and against MS interests. The result would be WINE having an advantage to redo the snippet of code in a totally new and different way and MS being forced to show part of its private code, that would expose them also to patent trolls. Would be a win-win situation for Wine and a lose-lose situation for MS.

mhh__ 5y ago

In my experience open source has now become so prevalent that I think some young developers could be completely caught out if the pendulum swings the other way. Semi-related, the GNU/Linux copypasta is now more familiar to some than the GNU project in general - this is a shame to me as I view the copypasta to be mocking people who worked very hard to achieve what GNU has achieved asking for some credit.

k__ 5y ago

Wasn't that the entire premise of "Halt and Catch Fire"?

TheRealPomax 5y ago

I don't believe you on this in the slightest. This sounds like you making up an argument, so cite sources if you want people to believe your claims.

notsureaboutpg 5y ago
It's very clearly visible on the Wine wiki that people who have ever seen Microsoft Windows source code cannot contribute to Wine due to copyright restrictions: https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Who_can.27t_contribute_to_Wine.3F https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Who_can.27t_contribute... I think OP has a point here, personally.
davidjytang 5y ago
The limitations on those projects are well-known though.
- TheRealPomax 5y ago
  To whom? Because I work with VST a lot, and that's sure news to me.

cush 5y ago

I've you've ever read a book or interacted with any product, you've learned from copyrighted material. You've extrapolated "some organizations don't allow you to contribute if you've learned from the code of their direct competitor" to "You're not allowed to learn from copyrighted code", which is absurd.

userbinator 5y ago

if it can be shown ...and the "if" is the important part. This is why Imaginary Property is so absurd.