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There’s a curious tendency in these discussions to focus on the GPL as though it were special. If the original licenses apply, then you’ll be embedding code und

There’s a curious tendency in these discussions to focus on the GPL as though it were special. If the original licenses apply, then you’ll be embedding code under all kinds of different licenses—some of which are sure to be mutually incompatible. To be sure, the infectious nature of the GPL is likely to be a bigger deal, but permissive licenses will be violated by missing acknowledgement just as much as the GPL will be violated by not licensing your code GPL. If this license-washing doesn’t work, then you can’t just say “we’ll exclude GPL sources”, because you’ll still be breaking the rules on any copyrighted work that doesn’t have very specific public-domain-like do-whatever-you-like-and-don’t-acknowledge-me licensing. The whole thing truly does depend on the fair-use classification of ML models. If that falls apart, the entire thing’s done (and a lot of other ML stuff will be, too). And that’s where regurgitation becomes so problematic, because it directly undermines that fair-use exemption.

aliasEli 5y ago
The entire problem could have been avoided if they had just trained their models on code with a permissive license.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  No. A lot of weak licenses still require attribution.
  - blooalien 5y ago
    Yep. They would have had to filter their training data down to the most permissive licenses to be entirely safe. The WTFPL, CC0, and any others that give full "do as you please" permissions.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      WTFPL and CC0 apply to a tiny fraction of FLOSS software. More importantly, just because a chunk of code is published under CC0 on github that does not give you any guarantee that such code is not already breaching an existing copyright. It happened in various occasions that closed source code was leaked into FLOSS projects and if you reuse it you are in breach of the license as well.
- dtech 5y ago
  This is specifically addressed as not a solution in the article. For example MIT, one of the most permissive licenses there is, still requires you to include the MIT license and copyright notice "in all copies or substantial portions of the Software".
  - aliasEli 5y ago
    You might be one of the people that down-voted my submission. This is probably a language problem, I don't think the original MIT license is a permissive license at all in this case.
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      In the open source space, the term “permissive license” is well understood to mean licenses like MIT and Apache2 and CC-BY, which allow you to do whatever you like with the work so long as you acknowledge the author and license terms. It sounds like you meant something more like a public domain dedication like CC0, which is about the only way you can go more permissive past the likes of MIT/Apache2/CC-BY.
      - dtech 5y ago
        Also, CC0 etc. are not really called "permissive licenses", because they explicitly waive away any and all rights a license would entail. In the same way "off" isn't a TV channel. Creative commons specifically calls CC0 an "alternative to our licenses" [1] https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/ https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...
      - ksec 5y ago
        Or zero-clause BSD and ISC. Although both are generally discouraged and EU advise on using MIT instead, which we now end up with the acknowledgement problem.
pmlnr 5y ago
It's not "fair-use classification of ML models". If the ML black box: - produces an output - that output is the exact same thing - text, code, image, et c - that went in - that thing is licensed - fails to fulfill the requirements of the license than it's breaking the license. I don't see how it can be wiggled around. The black boxes that produce entirely different outputs, or the ones that slurped billions of photos without even blinking at license but never vomits actual images are, at least, not reproducing the source material.
- gravypod 5y ago
  I think another important analogy is that you couldn't do this same operation with a human. In my eyes a human and an ML algorithm are both "agents". An ML algorithm is a computerized actor on a system but they are still able to do something novel based on previous inputs. If we take these two scenarios: 1. A hypothetical employer asks an employee to find a really fast algorithm to find an inverse square root. The employee has a perfect memory and can regurgitate fast inverse square root from Quake 2. 2. A hypothetical employer asks an employee to find a really fast algorithm to find an inverse square root. The employee uses this ML algorithm to generate the code which essentially regurgitates the only previously seen inverse square root function it was trained on. At some point in time in the future id Software sees this is happening at our hypothetical company and sues. In neither situation is the "actor" held accountable since the "actor" was employed by the company which allowed for practices that enabled this infringement to take place. I think an important legal question is: Do we consider a ML algorithm being trained on data the same as a human reading prior art for an innovation?
  - jeremyjh 5y ago
    > I think an important legal question is: Do we consider a ML algorithm being trained on data the same as a human reading prior art for an innovation? It seems pretty obvious that it is the same thing to me. Instead of the human reviewing the prior art themselves the human has written a program to do so, but this can't change the acceptable outputs produced by the human's creative process (that includes the ML in this case).
goodpoint 5y ago
There is no such thing as the "infectious nature of the GPL". Just like any other license, it has restrictions. If you violate them you are breaching copyright law. Github contains plenty of software uploaded without any license, which, by default, means closed source. Similarly, if use significant portions of those you violate copyright law. There is no concept of "infection" and "virality" in copyright law.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  The fact that GPL isn’t special is exactly what I’m saying. But I think you know what I’m referring to by “the infectious nature of the GPL”: that such licenses as GPL and the CC-SA family require that derived works be under a similar license. And the fact of the matter is that people are likely to care about that a bit more than missed attribution, whether they should or not. But, as I say, it’s still violation.
  - johannes1234321 5y ago
    The thing is: The GPL is different. With other licenses if you distribute derived work, the distribution is illegal. With GPL in the mix the derived work becomes GPL as well.
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      No, that’s no different. With all licenses, derived work must comply with the terms or else be illegal. For something like MIT/Apache2, the burden is that your derived work must acknowledge the copyright and license of the original work. For something like GPL, the burden is that your derived work must acknowledge the copyright and license of the original work, and must be under a similar license to the original work. So yeah, it requires more of you, but it’s fundamentally the same proposition of “obey the terms or it’s illegal”.
      - johannes1234321 5y ago
        The legal conclusion of a case where one embeds GPL Code, but doesn't release their own code is, as always in law, hard to predict. However gpl-violations.org documents different court case which ended in publication of code based on GPL'd code.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
It’s a really interesting tendency. People treat GPL as more restrictive than the lack of a license. I was wondering about this in the thread on GPT-J last night. Maybe it’s easier to see an issue when the GPL specifically lays out the creator’s intent, compared to the nebulous intent and law that underlies unlicensed content. GPL focuses the discussion on a concrete license rather than the entire body of IP law around fair use. Or maybe it’s just easier to see an issue when it’s “our” community’s content being used.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
atq2119 5y ago
Even more interesting than GPL, what about AGPL? Perhaps somebody with an AGPL'd project on GitHub and deep enough pockets could force them to open source Copilot... (No, I don't think that's actually plausible, but the scenarios are fun to think about)
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  You seem to be missing the point: there’s nothing special about any particular license. No license will force them to do anything.

aliasEli 5y ago

The entire problem could have been avoided if they had just trained their models on code with a permissive license.

goodpoint 5y ago
No. A lot of weak licenses still require attribution.
- blooalien 5y ago
  Yep. They would have had to filter their training data down to the most permissive licenses to be entirely safe. The WTFPL, CC0, and any others that give full "do as you please" permissions.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    WTFPL and CC0 apply to a tiny fraction of FLOSS software. More importantly, just because a chunk of code is published under CC0 on github that does not give you any guarantee that such code is not already breaching an existing copyright. It happened in various occasions that closed source code was leaked into FLOSS projects and if you reuse it you are in breach of the license as well.
dtech 5y ago
This is specifically addressed as not a solution in the article. For example MIT, one of the most permissive licenses there is, still requires you to include the MIT license and copyright notice "in all copies or substantial portions of the Software".
- aliasEli 5y ago
  You might be one of the people that down-voted my submission. This is probably a language problem, I don't think the original MIT license is a permissive license at all in this case.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    In the open source space, the term “permissive license” is well understood to mean licenses like MIT and Apache2 and CC-BY, which allow you to do whatever you like with the work so long as you acknowledge the author and license terms. It sounds like you meant something more like a public domain dedication like CC0, which is about the only way you can go more permissive past the likes of MIT/Apache2/CC-BY.
    - dtech 5y ago
      Also, CC0 etc. are not really called "permissive licenses", because they explicitly waive away any and all rights a license would entail. In the same way "off" isn't a TV channel. Creative commons specifically calls CC0 an "alternative to our licenses" [1] https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/ https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...
    - ksec 5y ago
      Or zero-clause BSD and ISC. Although both are generally discouraged and EU advise on using MIT instead, which we now end up with the acknowledgement problem.

pmlnr 5y ago

It's not "fair-use classification of ML models". If the ML black box: - produces an output - that output is the exact same thing - text, code, image, et c - that went in - that thing is licensed - fails to fulfill the requirements of the license than it's breaking the license. I don't see how it can be wiggled around. The black boxes that produce entirely different outputs, or the ones that slurped billions of photos without even blinking at license but never vomits actual images are, at least, not reproducing the source material.

gravypod 5y ago
I think another important analogy is that you couldn't do this same operation with a human. In my eyes a human and an ML algorithm are both "agents". An ML algorithm is a computerized actor on a system but they are still able to do something novel based on previous inputs. If we take these two scenarios: 1. A hypothetical employer asks an employee to find a really fast algorithm to find an inverse square root. The employee has a perfect memory and can regurgitate fast inverse square root from Quake 2. 2. A hypothetical employer asks an employee to find a really fast algorithm to find an inverse square root. The employee uses this ML algorithm to generate the code which essentially regurgitates the only previously seen inverse square root function it was trained on. At some point in time in the future id Software sees this is happening at our hypothetical company and sues. In neither situation is the "actor" held accountable since the "actor" was employed by the company which allowed for practices that enabled this infringement to take place. I think an important legal question is: Do we consider a ML algorithm being trained on data the same as a human reading prior art for an innovation?
- jeremyjh 5y ago
  > I think an important legal question is: Do we consider a ML algorithm being trained on data the same as a human reading prior art for an innovation? It seems pretty obvious that it is the same thing to me. Instead of the human reviewing the prior art themselves the human has written a program to do so, but this can't change the acceptable outputs produced by the human's creative process (that includes the ML in this case).

goodpoint 5y ago

There is no such thing as the "infectious nature of the GPL". Just like any other license, it has restrictions. If you violate them you are breaching copyright law. Github contains plenty of software uploaded without any license, which, by default, means closed source. Similarly, if use significant portions of those you violate copyright law. There is no concept of "infection" and "virality" in copyright law.

chrismorgan 5y ago
The fact that GPL isn’t special is exactly what I’m saying. But I think you know what I’m referring to by “the infectious nature of the GPL”: that such licenses as GPL and the CC-SA family require that derived works be under a similar license. And the fact of the matter is that people are likely to care about that a bit more than missed attribution, whether they should or not. But, as I say, it’s still violation.
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  The thing is: The GPL is different. With other licenses if you distribute derived work, the distribution is illegal. With GPL in the mix the derived work becomes GPL as well.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    No, that’s no different. With all licenses, derived work must comply with the terms or else be illegal. For something like MIT/Apache2, the burden is that your derived work must acknowledge the copyright and license of the original work. For something like GPL, the burden is that your derived work must acknowledge the copyright and license of the original work, and must be under a similar license to the original work. So yeah, it requires more of you, but it’s fundamentally the same proposition of “obey the terms or it’s illegal”.
    - johannes1234321 5y ago
      The legal conclusion of a case where one embeds GPL Code, but doesn't release their own code is, as always in law, hard to predict. However gpl-violations.org documents different court case which ended in publication of code based on GPL'd code.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

It’s a really interesting tendency. People treat GPL as more restrictive than the lack of a license. I was wondering about this in the thread on GPT-J last night. Maybe it’s easier to see an issue when the GPL specifically lays out the creator’s intent, compared to the nebulous intent and law that underlies unlicensed content. GPL focuses the discussion on a concrete license rather than the entire body of IP law around fair use. Or maybe it’s just easier to see an issue when it’s “our” community’s content being used.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

atq2119 5y ago

Even more interesting than GPL, what about AGPL? Perhaps somebody with an AGPL'd project on GitHub and deep enough pockets could force them to open source Copilot... (No, I don't think that's actually plausible, but the scenarios are fun to think about)

chrismorgan 5y ago
You seem to be missing the point: there’s nothing special about any particular license. No license will force them to do anything.