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All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

• aliasEli 5y ago
  A direct confirmation from GitHub itself. This is problematic because Copilot sometimes outputs code that was present in its training set. https://fossbytes.com/github-copilot-generating-functional-api-keys/ https://fossbytes.com/github-copilot-generating-functional-a...
  • deviledeggs 5y ago
    This is the crux of copilot. When I saw it copying RSA keys I knew, it's overtrained. Most of the comments are waxing about philosophical possibilities of copilot copying GPL. Reality is clear in the case, it's copy pasting thousands of characters of GPL code with no modifications. Copyright violation clear as day
• Tenoke 5y ago
  The outrage-bait approach in this thread detracts from it. Yes, they trained it on everything. No, it's not clear if that's legal or not (probably is) or if that is much of a problem.
  • arp242 5y ago
    Indeed; the question is if copyright should apply at all. Harping on about licenses, GPL, and whatnot is a detraction from the actual issue at hand. Also, given that the author of this tweet called me a "bootlicker" last year in response to a somewhat lengthy nuanced post about GitHub, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that they're not all that interested in a meaningful conversation on this in the first place but are rather on a quest to "prove" GitHub is evil.
    • lifthrasiir 5y ago
      The possibility of GPL violation does show (one of) enormous ramifications of the question though. I think it's not a detraction as long as the question itself is also mentioned.
      • arp242 5y ago
        There isn't any of this here though: it just operates on the assumption that the GPL applies.
  • deviledeggs 5y ago
    It's not outrage bait. The thing reproduces GPL licensed code verbatim.
    • Tenoke 5y ago
      I'm talking about how it's presented. It starts with >oh my gods. they literally have no shame about this. Then continues with >it's official, obeying copyright is only for the plebs and proles, rich people and big companies can do whatever they want and > GitHub, and by extension @Microsoft , knows that copyright is essentially worthless for individuals and small community projects. THAT is why they're all buddy-buddy with free software types; they never intended to respect our rights in the first place At any rate, it's not even clear to me if me publishing code written with copilot (or even with a random tool that will wget from github) puts the blame on the toolmaker or on me. This post, however, doesn't attempt to look at that but uses language that paints GH/MS as doing something illegal (and evil) that others wouldn't even get away with but not caring about it.
      • deviledeggs 5y ago
        Is that not true? Google and Oracle had a 10 year multi billion dollar legal fight over ~20 lines of code identical between Android and JVM. A non rich individual has basically zero chance of challenging GitHub on these blatant violations, and they know it. > At any rate, it's not even clear to me if me publishing code written with copilot (or even with a random tool that will wget from github) puts the blame on the toolmaker or on me. It really depends on the license, which GitHub apparently doesn't care about at all.
        • cortexio 5y ago
          maybe you are correct, but i would agree that it's formulated in a childish/evil spirited way. It smells of outrage hype and cancel culture.
      • belorn 5y ago
        It seems that github did make a legal consideration when choosing to include public projects but exclude private ones, with many big companies having private projects for proprietary code bases. Users of public repositories are less likely to be able to fight github on the issue.
• sleavey 5y ago
  To be fair, this could just be a mistaken interpretation from the support staffer that answered the question - they didn't sound sure ("apparently"). It certainly needs an official response from GitHub senior management but I wouldn't call the foul yet (not that it's even clear that it is a foul).
• underyx 5y ago
  OP’s rhetoric, and most discussion I see, asserts that training a model on copyrighted data is a copyright violation. Personally I don’t find this to be so obviously the case. Think back to when we were listening to AI generated pop music, for instance. I don’t recall any concern in HN comments about the copyright holders’ music being used for learning.
  • thinkingemote 5y ago
    Did you miss the bit where copilot reproduced exactly a function including the comments? That's not some mashup or reinterpretation or inspiration it meets the definition of plagiarism in universities and is just copying.
    • underyx 5y ago
      I didn’t miss that, this still doesn’t make the answer obvious to me. I’m pretty sure I’ve unknowningly replicated licensed code as well during my time as an engineer, and I’ve written way less code over my 8 years than Copilot has.
      • fragileone 5y ago
        Then if you were discovered using it in a commercial project you can fairly be sued for it. Unless you're trying to argue that you should for some reason get an exemption?
        • underyx 5y ago
          Would I be found guilty if I could prove that I didn’t explicitly copy that code but rather just happened to write the same code by arriving at the same solution as the original one I had seen years before?
          • adn 5y ago
            Nobody can answer this because it depends on the code and the resources of the entity suing you, but in general yes. This is why clean room design is a well-defined strategy: depending on the code and company, you would indeed not be allowed to work on the project because of the fact you'd seen a competitors solution previously.
• encryptluks2 5y ago
  Really hoping to see a max exodus from GitHub after this. Microsoft back to their old tactics like we all knew they would.
  • Tenoke 5y ago
    If you have public repos anywhere people can train on them just as much.
    • ostenning 5y ago
      That's also my general sentiment. I assume anyone can do virtually anything with my public repos with little recourse from me. I wouldn't even know if they are indeed breaking my license agreements. Doesn't really help the situation though.
      • encryptluks2 5y ago
        GitHub only recently allowed non-paid private repos. Previously these were only reserved for paid plans. Also, GitHub has a specific section for license files. GitHub actually believes these license files mean something, and states that they must be included with the repo so they are downloaded with it. Just because you can teach a script to ignore a LICENSE file, doesn't mean that it still doesn't apply. That is like saying that because you can teach a robot to ignore restricted airspace, that it is allowed to fly around an airport.
  • ostenning 5y ago
    Any suggestions for an alternative? One thing I like about github is that it 'seems' to be a defacto standard for portfolios & public works. It also has excellent integration into AWS and alike
    • aloisdg 5y ago
      GitLab is the best alternative feature wise. https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ is great too if you are into this kind of things
• 0x0 5y ago
  To the people arguing it's "fair use" to use this for training an ML network. Where do you draw the line? What if you train an "ML network" with one or two inputs... so that they almost always "generate" exact copies of the inputs? Five inputs..? Ten? A thousand? A million?
  • Tenoke 5y ago
    I can imagine a requirement of the sort 'generated code needs to match at most X% to snippets of the training data as shown over Y amount of sampling' but I am not sure if you can get a much better requirement than that. Forbidding the training of AI on public code would definitely be a step too far though. Edit: I'd also like if they provide a tool for checking if your code matches copyrighted code too close so you can confirm if you are violating anything or not when you use copilot.
  • saint_abroad 5y ago
    > Where do you draw the line? My simplistic view is that the following is legally equivalent: input -> ai network -> output input -> huffman coding -> output So, whilst: * compressing and decompressing a copyright work is permissible; * output and weights are deterministic transformations of the inputs; thus: * not eligible for copyright (lacking creativity); and * are derivative works of the inputs;
    • ghoward 5y ago
      But at the same time, a compiler does a deterministic transformation of its inputs, and we still count its output as under copyright and license. copyrighted input -> compiler -> copyrighted output
      • saint_abroad 5y ago
        Perhaps I wasn't clear enough on this point: copyright of a derivative work is distinct (but not inseparable) to the copyright of the original work. So portions of a derivative work are covered by the original copyright, and other portions may be under a distinct copyright as a derivative work, and several copyrights may apply to a work as a whole. In the case of a Huffman transform, the transformed work does not meet the "creativity" requirements to be eligible for copyright, over that of the original works.
• danbruc 5y ago
  At least to some first approximation irrelevant because reading code is not subject to any license. What if a human reads some restrictively licensed code and years later uses some idea he noticed in that code, maybe even no longer being aware from where this idea comes? But what if the system memorizes entire functions? What if a human does so? What if you change all the variable names? What if you rearrange the control flow a bit? What if you just change the spacing? What if two humans write the exact same code independently? Is every for loop with i from 0 to n a license violation? I am not picking any side, but the problem is certainly much more nuanced then either side of the argument wants to paint it.
  • selfhoster11 5y ago
    The problem is that humans are limited in retention and rate of learning. An AI/ML is not, which makes (or should make) a difference.
    • danbruc 5y ago
      Sure, it might certainly be the case that different rules should be applied to humans and machines, but this makes the discussion only even more nuanced. But I don't think this could reasonably be used to ban machines from ingesting code with certain licenses even though it might restrict what they can do with this information.
  • jonfw 5y ago
    I agree that it's nuanced and it's difficult to draw the line. but where copilot sits is way over on the plagiarizing side of the spectrum. Wherever we agree to draw the line, copilot should definitely fall on the wrong side of it Copilot will replicate entire functions, including comments, from licensed code
    • kevincox 5y ago
      > but where copilot sits is way over on the plagiarizing side of the spectrum I think it is important to point out that not all Copilot output is on the plagiarizing side of the spectrum. However it does on occasion produce plagiarized code. And most importantly there is no indication when this occurs.
• Yoric 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, how do we define license violation in that case? I, as a human being, have trained by reading code, much of which is covered by licenses that are somehow not compatible with code I'm writing. Am I violating licenses? Asking seriously. It's really unclear to me where law and/or ethics put the boundaries. Also, I'd guess it's probably country dependent.
  • habosa 5y ago
    I am not a lawyer but I am sure that any legal standard for ML has to be different than "isn't it just doing what humans do, but faster?" GitHub scanning billions of code files to build commercial software is different than you learning at human pace, even if they're both "learning" and in the end they both produce commercial software.
    • danbruc 5y ago
      It does not have to be different but it certainly can be different, a difference in quantity can certainly be a difference in quality. People watching other people walk by and a camera - maybe with face detection - doing the same are not only a difference in quantity but also in quality.
    • leereeves 5y ago
      > isn't it just doing what humans do, but faster? The human activity most like training an ML system is memorizing a text by reciting from memory, checking against the original, adjusting, and repeating until there are acceptably few mistakes. And if a human did so for thousands of texts then publicly repeated those texts, they would be violating copyright too.
  • kzrdude 5y ago
    The training question seems much more difficult. The main problem that has been the topic is a simpler one - about the produced work. If you exactly reproduce someone's existing code (doesn't matter if you copy by flipping bits one by one or which technology you use), isn't it a copyright violation? I'm kind of imagining a Rube Goldberg machine that spells out the quake invsqrt function in the sand, now...
• sandruso 5y ago
  I don’t know how to approach this. As a human I can read all public code and learn from regardless the license and come up with new solutions. Machine can read everything too, but can't create new ideas or approach. How is copilot defined then? Should it be only smart system for general code snippets?
  • raspyberr 5y ago
    Well you can read public code all you like but you can't just take chunks of code and write them under different licenses like how copilot has been shown doing.
    • sandruso 5y ago
      If you grab chunk of licensed code and put into private repo, what prevents you from doing that? How much of licensed code is scattered across private projects? I’m curious how these license violations are detected.
      • kevincox 5y ago
        Copyright law "prevents" you from doing that. To be more specific copyright law specifies that you must comply with the license of the copyright holder in cases such as the one you have described. > How much of licensed code is scattered across private projects? Whether or not copyright violations regularly occur is not (directly) relevant to whether or not it is illegal. People download copyrighted movies without licenses all the time and it still isn't legal.
      • Spivak 5y ago
        I mean if you text and drive while a police officer isn't around to see it you still broke the law. Just because piracy is huuuuge and largely unpunished doesn't mean that copyright doesn't have to be respected in a huge publicly visible trying to be above-board project.
• monkeydust 5y ago
  Bit confused. If I have code on GitHub with most restrictive licence possible (no commercial reuse, no derived works) then how did Githubs legal get comfortable with this approach? What am I missing ?
  • Tenoke 5y ago
    There's an assumption that public repos can be read by humans and machines both which hasn't been questioned legally.
    • monkeydust 5y ago
      But the repos are provided under licenced terms no which can vary depending on publishers choice? Put another way, is there a licence that would prohibit reuse in this manner ?
      • Tenoke 5y ago
        You can likely write/find one but if you don't want your code seen perhaps it'd be simpler to use a private repo.
  • oauea 5y ago
    You uploaded your code to their service and agreed to their TOS.
  • mariusor 5y ago
    By using github you have acceded to their terms of use[1]: > Short version: You own content you create, but you allow us certain rights to it, so that we can display and share the content you post. You still have control over your content, and responsibility for it, and the rights you grant us are limited to those we need to provide the service. We have the right to remove content or close Accounts if we need to. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#d-user-generated-content https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...
• jand 5y ago
  Not a github user (*lab), also not a lawyer, so please excuse my ignorance. As this boils down to legal arguments, are there any clauses (maybe disputed) in the ToS allowing github/MS usage of public repos for such purpose? Would it even be legally possible to override a software license as a repo provider like "by using this service, you agree to..."?
• undecisive 5y ago
  I see a lot of people trying to compare its "machine learning" to human learning. Let's use this thought experiment: Imagine that Github's Copilot was just a massive array of all the lines of code from every github project, with some (magical automated whatever) tagging and indexing on each function, and a search engine on top of that. Now imagine that copilot simply finds the closest search result, and then when you press a button, it inserts the line from the array, and press it again and you get the next line, etc. Now hopefully nobody here thinks such a system would fulfil either the spirit or the law of any half-restrictive license. Yet that is a perfectly valid implementation of Copilot's aim - and it sounds like it's not that far from what actually happens, maybe with a bit of variable name munging. So my question is this: If you could build a line between the system I describe above and the system of human learning, where a human learns the patterns and can genuinely produce novel structures and patterns and even programming languages that it has never seen before. At what point along that line would you say that Copilot is close enough to human to not be violating licenses that require attribution?
  • leereeves 5y ago
    I don't think it matters where Copilot is on that line. A skilled human programmer at the far end of that line, fully capable of producing novel programs that they haven't seen before, would still be violating copyright if they reproduced a program they have seen before.
    • Spivak 5y ago
      I mean it answers the question pretty quickly if your agent isn't sophisticated enough to actually produce novel programs in the first place.
• belorn 5y ago
  So why did GitHub chose to exclude private repositories? Why not include everything, including the code for windows?
  • jefftk 5y ago
    In training on publicly accessible repositories, GitHub did something anybody could have done. If they also used private repositories, though, I would see that as abusing their position.
    • jefftk 5y ago
      Additionally, if they had trained on private repositories then they risk leaking code, and accidentally making it public. Even if that was within fair use it would still be a violation of the trust people put in them.
• greatgib 5y ago
  As I said in another thread, in my opinion there is no issue to have with whatever they did as training with whatever public data. And in the end, the output in itself is not really an issue. It is just a machine outputting random lines it encountered on internet. The problem is from the user side: Ok, you got random lines from random places. If you do nothing about it, then no issue. But if you try to use, publish, sell the code, then you are in deep shit. But somehow it's your fault. For GitHub, the problem is more to be sued by "customers" that assumed that the generated code was safe to use when it is not the case. And, as a general comment, I think that this case is very illustrative about the misconceptions about AI and machine learning for the general public: Here you can see that you don't really have an intelligent system that can learn and then create something new and innovative from scratch. But it is just a machine that copy code it already saw based on correlation with similarities in your current code.
• dariusj18 5y ago
  Wouldn't this question already have been asked and answered when AI's were trained on books and articles?
  • zinekeller 5y ago
    As far as I know, there isn't a formal copyright-related US court ruling (yet anyway) of training ML/AIs on any media (except for copying the code of an ML). So everything is actually on thin ice, much like the infamous "GIFs [from snippets of shows etc.] are widely believed to be fair use", which in reality is still untested. Let's not forget other countries, with much stricter copyright rules (especially moral rights).
• Causality1 5y ago
  Suppose you had some kind of AI Deepfake program operating off a large database of copyrighted photos and you asked it to "make a picture of a handsome man on a horse" and the man's head was an exact duplicate of George Clooney's head from a specific magazine cover, would that be infringement? Would selling the services of an AI that took copyrighted photos of celebrities and edited them into porn movies be infringement? I don't know the answers to those questions but I find it very weird that people think large blocks of typed text are less worthy of copyright protection than other forms of media.
  • dogma1138 5y ago
    That would potentially be an infringement of the copyright of the photographer but in any case it’s an infringement of the personality rights of George Clooney. You aren’t allowed to sell someone’s likeness without their permission. You don’t need an AI for this if you create a portrait of Clooney and sell it or make any use that isn’t covered by fair use he can sue you. Depending on the composition of the picture for example if Clooney is naked and say Putin is riding in the “bitch seat” of the saddle then you also are quite likely be open for a libel suit as well.
    • hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
      Satire does not usually fall under libel/defamation, though, right? >For example, in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988), Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, writing for a unanimous court, stated that a parody depicting the Reverend Jerry Falwell as a drunken, incestuous son could not be defamation since it was an obvious parody, not intended as a statement of fact. To find otherwise, the Court said, was to endanger First Amendment protection for every artist, political cartoonist, and comedian who used satire to criticize public figures. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1015/satire https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1015/satire
      • dogma1138 5y ago
        Depends on the legal system in question and the intent and usage. The US system isn’t the only one on the planet you know, the UK still has political cartoonists despite a very different definition for what defamation is which the example above can fall under.
• zinekeller 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27771742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27771742 The above thread is a dupe of this discussion but with interesting discussions already in place before being marked as a dupe.
• surfingdino 5y ago
  I am not surprised given who the owner of GitHub is. Now, let's assume for a while that a private repo is left marked as public by mistake and Copilot regurgitates it... Lawyers are going to have fun with that one.
  • Hamuko 5y ago
    The worse scenario for GitHub is when a leak is published on GitHub. It's not like it hasn't happened before. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16992626/apple-github-dmca-request-ios-iboot-source-code https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16992626/apple-github-dmca...
    • SXX 5y ago
      There actually tons of unlicensed and wrongly licensed code on GitHub right now that being accidentally leaked by employees of many companies.
• ssivark 5y ago
  Calling it “public” code feels like doublespeak. It’s most definitely NOT public domain code — it only happens to be hosted on GitHub and browsable (but not copyable) by people. “Source available for viewing” is very different from “public property” as the phrase is commonly understood: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_property https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_property
  • fragileone 5y ago
    The word they're actually referring to here is "source available", and trying to use "public" is just to confuse people into thinking they're referring to public domain only.
    • ghoward 5y ago
      Maybe they mean code that is in public (versus private) repos? And then use the word to make it seem like it's stuff in the public domain?
  • CyberRabbi 5y ago
    Movies are “public” too. That does not mean you are allowed to use them for any purpose. The term “Public” does not have specific legal consequences in copyright law outside of something being “public domain” as you say.
    • slownews45 5y ago
      You are allowed to watch them. Many moves take ideas from other movies, which took ideas from myths and earlier stories. In fact, I find modern movies highly highly derivative.
    • planb 5y ago
      The question is: are you allowed to train a neural network on movies (e.g. For an automated color grading algorithm) and then sell that as a service?
      • 5y ago
• hpcjoe 5y ago
  "All your code are belong to us" ... :(
• mikehearn 5y ago
  ML novice question: is this atypical when training models? Wasn't GPT-3 trained on a lot of copyrighted data? My gut instinct, which is based on very low-information, is that it would be pretty hard to train models if you could only use open-licensed material.
  • Tenoke 5y ago
    Yes, it would stiffle NLP research immensely and we likely wouldn't see anything better than gpt3 for years if such restrictions are put in place.
    • lumost 5y ago
      There is a difference between a model that achieves "fair use" of copyrighted work and one that regurgitates copyrighted work without attribution.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      You're basically seeing how some people would have had open source play out. You can look at and use the code but not to make money or in any other way that I personally disapprove of. This is a world where open source would have ended up being pretty much irrelevant.
      • La1n 5y ago
        Are we now also not seeing now why people would want to do that? A multi-billion dollar company using people work to make more profits without paying them. I definitely understand why people pick a license that disallows use someone doesn't agree with. Imagine baking cookies for your friends, and one of them reselling them. The material effect is the same to you, you gave away your cookies, but sometimes you make/do something for a certain group of people and not for other to make a profit of your work.
        • ghaff 5y ago
          People can do whatever they want with their work, including not sharing it at all. But a great deal of the value that's come from open source generally has been that open source licenses haven't imposed the sort of usage-based restrictions (e.g. free for educational use only) that were fairly common in the PC world. And, to your example, in the case of software the incremental copy that your friend sold cost you absolutely nothing. So it comes down to a purely emotional response to someone else making money off something you made.
• ghoward 5y ago
  This is why I relicensed my code [1] yesterday to a license I wrote [2], which is designed to poison the well for machine learning. [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/poisoning-github-copilot-and-machine-learning/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/poisoning-github-copilot-and... [2]: https://yzena.com/yzena-network-license/ https://yzena.com/yzena-network-license/
  • speedgoose 5y ago
    Since you allow new versions by default, can't someone just release a new version of your license allowing everything they want?
    • ghoward 5y ago
      That is a good point, but easily fixed. Will do that now. Edit: done. They are under the CC-BY-ND license now.
  • CyberRabbi 5y ago
    That’s safe but it’s probably not necessary to be protected from what GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft are doing. When these licenses were crafted there was no reasonable expectation that companies could use ML applications as a loop hole in existing copyright licenses, so just because there is no explicit clause denying it doesn’t mean they are in the clear for using copyright-protected code that way. Licenses give permission, they don’t revoke it. Copyright is broad, licenses are minimal. This must be the case otherwise they would not be very effective at protecting the work of creators. There is no explicit allowance for what GitHub is doing in most licenses so they do not have general permission to do so.
    • ghoward 5y ago
      I agree; my blog post says so. What my licenses are supposed to do is sow even more doubt in companies' minds about models trained on my code.
  • richardwhiuk 5y ago
• carlgreene 5y ago
  While I’m not trying to lessen the implications of something like this, but didn’t we all agree to them being able to do this when we agreed to their TOS?
  • unanswered 5y ago
    Yeah, but I don't think you're allowed to interrupt the circlejerk by pointing that out. Every piece of code pushed to GitHub comes with: an implied licence for GitHub and its users, which is an alternative to any explicit license in the code(!!!) and also a representation that you're authorized to grant such a license. Of course one imagines that in many cases uploaders are not actually authorized to grant such a license, such as if they're uploading something they themselves have received under GPL license, but IANAL.
  • lucasyvas 5y ago
    I don't believe ToS are ever legally binding.
  • MiddleEndian 5y ago
    Let's assume that is enforceable through the TOS (which I doubt), would that make hosting GPL'd code on Github a violation of the GPL? If programmer X releases GPL'd code on his website and programmer Y copies it to Github, then it could presumably be considered a bypass of the copyright.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• neom 5y ago
  Curious what the consensus is on how GH should have approached this to avoid such blowback. Best case scenario, they explained in advance on the GH blog they're going to be doing some work on ML and coding, and they'd like people to opt into their profile being read via a flag setting/or put a file in the repo that gives permission like robots.txt? Second best case scenario, same as first but opt out vs opt in, and least ideal would be something like not doing the first two, however, when they announced it, explained in detail how the model was trained and what was used, why, and when- kinda thing? Is that generally about right, or..?
  • tazjin 5y ago
    > Second best case scenario Not really, consider for example repositories mirrored to Github. It seems unclear who has the rights to grant this permission anyways (with free software licenses). Probably the copyright holder? Who that is might also be complicated.
    • neom 5y ago
      Good point, I would have thought GH requires you to agree in some TOS that you have permission to put the code on GH (but I don't know)? If so, could that point be put aside? (I'm not a software engineer so sorry if that made no sense. Super curious about the whole codepilot thing from a business and community perspective)
      • tazjin 5y ago
        > that you have permission to put the code on GH This is the complicated bit: All open-source licenses grant you permission to redistribute the code (usually with stipulations like having to include the license), so you are almost always allowed to upload the code to Github. What it doesn't mean however is that you're the copyright holder of that code, you're merely redistributing work that somebody else has ownership of. So who gets to decide what Github is allowed to do with it? I expect this will end up in courts and we won't get a definite answer before that.
• _Understated_ 5y ago
  Ok, my curiosity has been fired here... I have conjured up two scenarios here: Let's say I use copilot to generate a bunch of code for an app, something substantial, and it regurgitates a load of bits and pieces from many sources it got from GitHub, I'd assume there won't be any attribution in it... it will be as if Copilot made the code itself (I know it sort of does but lets not split hairs!). I'm guessing the prevailing theory (from GiitHub anyway) is that I'm legitimately allowed to do this. Now, let's say I generated all that code by manually copying and pasting chunks of code from a whole bunch of repos, whether they are open source, unlicensed, whatever. Would I not be ripe for legal issues? I could potentially find all the code that copilot generated and just copy and paste it from each of the sources and not mention that in my license. What if I told everyone "yeah, I just copied and pasted this from loads of Github repos and didn't put any attribution in my code". I'd assume that (morality aside) I'd be asking for trouble! Am I missing something? Am I misunderstanding the situation, or the capabilities of copilot?
  • lukeplato 5y ago
    Copilot is a commercial paid service that generates money for Microsoft
    • _Understated_ 5y ago
      Yeah, that bit I realise but the point I was getting at is this: if I take someone else's code, use chunks of it in my app, say that it's mine and make money from it is that not illegal? Or, at least in violation of the license? Superficially at least, Copilot (from my understanding) is "copying" code, letting me use it in my app, and making money from it. I'm just trying to wrap my head around it. Let's be clear, I am not a lawyer, but it seems... strange!
      • Diggsey 5y ago
        Also NAL, but I think there's far more of a case that users of Copilot might violate copyright rather than Copilot itself: - Only a very small proportion of Copilot generated code is reproduced verbatim, so if you specifically built a product just from copied-verbatim code, your act of selecting and combining those pieces of copyrighted code would be creating a derivative work. - GitHub is not selling the copyrighted code, they are selling the tool itself. Google is literally the same thing: you could theoretically create a product by googling for prefixes of copyrighted code and then copying the remainder straight out of the search results. It's you who would be violating copyright, not google.
• rvz 5y ago
  It's been admitted again. This contraption by GitHub is really causing chaos in the open source world and has been trained upon all public GitHub code; essentially those who have their code hosted there publicly, gave them permission to train copilot on their code. Now they are complaining about it after all these problems [0]. I warned against hosting source code on GitHub and going all in on GitHub Actions, mainly for them being unreliable for the past year. [1] (They go down every month). Now Copilot has gone and trained on every single public repo on GitHub as admitted right in this post, regardless of the copyright. Maybe for organisations with serious projects, perhaps now's the time to leave GitHub and self-host your own somewhere else? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27726088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27726088 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27366397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27366397
  • MayeulC 5y ago
    Well, if you write software under a free license, you can't really prevent someone from uploading the source on GitHub...
• mullikine 5y ago
  Public facing open-source code & media is going to be learned by language models because they're exposed to them. That's the simple truth. Nothing can stop that, not unless all public repos are made private. Everyone has access to the ability to create their own GPT, thanks to open-source. OpenAI is not actually very far ahead of open source anymore. The US seems well enough informed. As mentioned in the following report "AI tools are diffusing broadly and rapidly" and "AI is the quintessential “dual use” technology—it can be used for civilian and military purposes.". https://www.nscai.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Full-Report-Digital-1.pdf https://www.nscai.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Full-Report... I'm fully expecting that if I begin a story and put it on my blog or on github, and if I go away for a couple years, I'll see it completed for me when I return. I can use foresight to my advantage or I can pretend like it's still the 1990s as if placing some text at the top of the code I exposed publicly is going to prevent people from training on it. One thing for sure though, I don't think a large company such as Microsoft should be profiting from training their language model on open-source code. The best way to release Copilot in my opinion would be to make the entire thing open source and have separate models, even a private paid-for model so long it's trained on their own code. An open source model trained on code for specific licenses sounds fine, but then the model should also follow that same license as the code it was trained on. There's just something deeply unsettling about having a computer complete your thoughts for you without being able to question how or why.
• jensensbutton 5y ago
  Wouldn't it be the people publishing code written with Copilot that (potentially) violate any licenses? It doesn't seem to be that the tool violates anything, though it may put the _user_ at risk of violating something. Like, don't use it if you're worried about violating licenses, but I don't see how Microsoft could get in trouble for the tool. It doesn't write and publish code by itself.
  • cool_dude85 5y ago
    Sorry, we built this tool for you that auto violates licenses. Sure, we're owned by a huge megacorp with billions of dollars, but it's your responsibility to confirm - and yes, we recognize it's impossible to confirm - that what you release using our tool isn't violating the license. In short, github gets to make the license violator bot and push the violations off onto the small fry who actually use it? No thanks.
    • Naga 5y ago
      Isn't that sortof the justification behind bittorrent and trackers?
      • vharuck 5y ago
        I see the difference as BitTorrent being an ignorant tool that just processes the data it receives. If you point BitTorrent to copyright data, it emits copyright data. The fault is on the users. Copilot was built with and "contains" copyright data, which it can produce with non-copyright input.
  • fragileone 5y ago
    Microsoft are violating the licenses already when they initially show you the generated code without attribution and ignoring other license restrictions. How you use it yourself is separate from that.
    • palunon 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• laurowyn 5y ago
  Could this be the beginning of the true test of open source licenses? My understanding is that there has never been a ruling by a court to give precedence to the validity or scope of any open source license. I can see a class action suit coming on behalf of all GPL licensed code authors.
  • jcelerier 5y ago
    What ? There have been plenty of GPL cases defended in court. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license_litigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license_litigati...
    • laurowyn 5y ago
      All of the copyright cases were settled, so no precedence is set. Open source as a contract has been ruled legal, and licensors can sue for breach of contract - which is not the same as copyright infringement. I think my point still stands.
  • jefftk 5y ago
    GitHub used code that wasn't under any license at all, just publicly visible. Their claim is not that the license allows what they're doing, but that they do not need a license.
    • laurowyn 5y ago
      which is a different issue to my point, but still very valid. what terms are implied if no license is specified? I would argue attribution should be expected if used, but I also wouldn't go near any code without a specific license attached as there's no express permission given - just because a license isn't disclosed doesn't mean it isn't there. you can't go copying anything and everything just because nobody has told you that you can't. and I feel that's part of the purpose behind GPL. force a license on derivative code so that at least there's clear rights moving forwards.
      • 5y ago
• spywaregorilla 5y ago
  So playing devil's advocate. What if the courts just don't care, and rule that copying code verbatim is not a crime because you didn't copy it, and copilot is not a human so it can't commit crimes. What's the net effect of a system that draws upon all public code repos? It sounds... net beneficial to society? On the plus side, a large body of work effectively becomes public domain. On the negative side, copyleft licenses lose their teeth. You probably see more power shift to those with big budgets. You probably see fewer things made source available, because you either have the public license or the private license now. This feels like a bad path but I'm not convinced the end result isn't better still.
  • downrightmike 5y ago
    The really nice thing is that this basically creates a library of industry methods and practices. It'd be really nice to be able to destroy copyright trolls because what their patent "covers" is already a known and established industry method, or a prior art.
  • agilob 5y ago
    >copilot is not a human so it can't commit crimes I can setup my drone to detect me and attempt to crash into me. AI would be quite poor, probably would attempt to crash at any human. Would it be my fault it didn't crash into me and someone lost eyes? Can I setup torrent box that automatically downloads and seeds all detected links from public trackers? Would I be responsible for it?
    • spywaregorilla 5y ago
      Both of these examples include you creating something and then using it. I don't know how copilot works, but using the second example, if you wrote a script to download and seed trackers, and someone else used it, I don't think you would be held under any liability, especially if you don't profit off of it. Not a lawyer or even particularly well informed edit: I am reminded of the monkey selfie, in which it was ruled that a non-human cannot create copyrightable works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
• agilob 5y ago
  This means that also all illegally leaked codes from Apple, CDPR, Intel, NSA and Microsoft leaks are used in the models? iBoot, Witcher 3? Gwent? NSA backdoors? Does the copilot still learn from new repos? Can I post github enterprise code publicly to let it learn from it? Serious answers only please
  • BlueTemplar 5y ago
    I assume that this is a yes to most of those ? Of course using code generated by Copilot from those would still be illegal. See also : Napster (and other p2p), the bitcoin blockchain allegedly containing illegal numbers...
    • TingPing 5y ago
      So copyright doesn't apply unless copyright applies.
  • TuringNYC 5y ago
    IANAL but the serious answer -- i think -- is that you always use things at your own risk, even purchased tools, and are protected via indemnity agreements. If there is no indemnity agreement (is is the case here), you assume the risk. That said, if enough people are bitten by this, i'm not sure what happens -- does anyone know of a relevant case. One somewhat relevant case that caused mass pain was the SCO Linux Dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes
    • user5994461 5y ago
      If you're thinking about the liability waiver found in many licenses and contracts and EULA and other, they are often void, depends on the jurisdiction. The official answer from Github that they take all input on purpose doesn't play in their favor.
      • TuringNYC 5y ago
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  Open source developers need a new kind of license with a ML model training clause, so there is no more ambiguity if they don't want their code to be used in this way.
  • Hamuko 5y ago
    People have been suggesting this ever since Copilot was announced and it doesn't work on any level. They're using all code on GitHub, even the ones with no license and which you can't use for any purpose and the reasoning is that they see it as fair use - which supersedes any licenses and copyrights in the US.
    • ghoward 5y ago
      They only claimed that training the model was fair use. What about its output? I argue that its output is still affected by the copyright of its inputs, the same way the output of a compiler is affected by the copyright of its inputs.
  • ghoward 5y ago
    I made new licenses [1] [2] that attempt this. The problem with adding a clause against ML training is that that is (supposedly) fair use. What my licenses do is concede that but claim that the output of those algorithms is still under the copyright and license. I hope that even if it wouldn't work, it puts enough doubt in companies' minds that they wouldn't want to use a model trained by code under those licenses. [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/poisoning-github-copilot-and-machine-learning/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/poisoning-github-copilot-and... [2]: https://yzena.com/licenses/ https://yzena.com/licenses/
  • jefftk 5y ago
    That doesn't work: your suggestion applies at too late a stage in the flowchart. It looks like: 1. Do you need a license to use materials for training, or to use the output model? 2. If so, does the code's license allow this? GitHub is claiming 'no' for #1, that they do not need any sort of license to the training materials. This is reasonably standard in ML; it's also how GPT-3 etc were trained. Now, whether a court will agree with their interpretation is an interesting question, but if they are correct then #2 doesn't come into play.
• cortexio 5y ago
  i dont really care, if the code is public, it's public. If you can copy it, why cant a bot do it? But it would be a useful feature. Or does it also look at private repos? That would be scary.
• prepend 5y ago
  It’s not copyright violation to train ML on content. So the license doesn’t matter unless there’s some “can’t use this for ML training” license that I don’t know about (and doesn’t seem to be legal).
  • WoodenChair 5y ago
    > It’s not copyright violation to train ML on content. The training is not a copyright violation. That seems to be settled case law. Whether the verbatim copying as a result of that training is a copyright violation I think is less tested. Let’s flip the domains. Say we had an ML algorithm that could auto generate news stories and it at some point (not all the time) copied verbatim a Wall Street Journal article and posted it to a blog. Copyright violation? With copilot, we’re sometimes seeing “paragraphs” of source lines copying verbatim, so this analogy is not such a stretch. I think we need to think about how much our sharing culture in programming has tinted our view of the legality of this enterprise.
  • vharuck 5y ago
    >It’s not copyright violation to train ML on content. I agree. It'd be a nice gesture to reach out to the creators of the training data, like is usual with web scrapers. But collecting and analyzing data publicly available on the web is ok. >So the license doesn’t matter unless there’s some “can’t use this for ML training” license that I don’t know about (and doesn’t seem to be legal). I disagree. While Copilot is, at heart, a ML model, the copyright trouble comes from its usage. It consumes copyright code (ok), analyzes copyright code (still ok), and then produces code which sometimes is a copy of copyright code (not ok). The only way it'd be ok is if Copilot followed all licensing requirements when it produced copies of other works. Personally, I won't touch it for work until either Copilot abides by the licenses or there's robust case law.
    • prepend 5y ago
      > It'd be a nice gesture to reach out to the creators of the training data, like is usual with web scrapers. I don’t think this is practical. And who notifies people of scraping content? I would’ve annoyed if I got spam from sites that scraped my content.
• baby 5y ago
  The licensing game is really awful imo. It should be that releasing your code on github = fair game. Licenses are seriously hindering development. You either take part in open source or you don’t. I get anxious every time someone asks me to add a license to one of my project because I don’t know which license to use and wonder if it’ll prevent some people from using the software down the line. Once I tried writing my own license that basically said: I don’t care, do whatever. Yet someone complained with “yet another license”.
  • dylan604 5y ago
    yeah, no. Licensing is really awful, yes. "You either take part in open source or you don’t." I disagree. You can allow your software to be used and post the source code, but it is yours so you get some say in your intentions. Forking is what you're looking for. However, once you fork it, you still owe credit to those that did the heavy lifting before making whatever tweak it is you made and want to call it your own. There's nothing wrong with the original developers getting credit for the work they did. There's nothing wrong with the original devs willing to let other people use their work as long as it is used in the same spirit it was provided (FOSS). That also does not mean the original devs are wrong for wanting evilCorps that want to use their freesoftware to be included/distributed in their packages they sell and profit from to be restrictive.
• crazygringo 5y ago
  I mean, if it's considered "fair use" legally (which is surely their position), then why wouldn't they? Why would they distinguish between licenses if there's no legal need to? Licenses are only restrictions on top of fair use. Licenses can't restrict fair use. It would be interesting if someone takes them to court and a judge definitively rules on fair use in this particular case. Or I don't know if there's enough precedent here that the case would never even make it to trial. But with a team of top-paid Microsoft lawyers that gave this the green light, I'm pretty sure they're quite confident of the legality of it.
• floor_ 5y ago
  Road to hell paved with good intentions.
• mehdix 5y ago
  GitHub's Copilot looks like a "code laundering" machine to me.
  • lucasyvas 5y ago
    There's a phrase I never wanted to hear. But that sounds exactly like what it is.
  • qayxc 5y ago
    Why and how? I'm honestly interested in an answer here. What exactly is the difference between a machine learning patterns and techniques from looking at code and people doing it? Is every programer who ever gazed at GPL'ed code guilty of plagiarism and licensing violations because everything they write has to be considered derivative work now?
    • mehdix 5y ago
      I can think of certain things here. As human beings we have limitations. We get tired of gazing at code, GPLE'ed or not. GitHub's clusters don't. It puts fair use of copyrighted content under question. The next concern I have, is what happens when Copilot produces certain code verbatim? I saw the other day on HN that it produced some Quake code verbatim. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
      • qayxc 5y ago
        > As human beings we have limitations. That's a fair point. ML models don't seem memorise all the code they've seen either, it seems. Plus while the argument of human limitations applies to the vast majority of people, what about those with eidetic memory? > what happens when Copilot produces certain code verbatim? There are several options: suppress the result, annotate with a proper reference or mark the snipped as GPL'ed. There are technical solutions to this question, but it's also important to ask to which degree this is necessary. Is a search engine that returns code snippets regardless of license also a tool that needs to be discussed the same way? After all, code samples from StackOverflow or RosettaCode are copied on a regular basis and not every example provides a proper reference as to where it's been taken from. So maybe a hint like "may contain results based on GPL'ed code" suffices? I don't know, but that's a question best deferred to software copyright law experts.
• taytus 5y ago
  Microsoft has spent a lot of money and energy in earning developers' trust over the last 15 years. They have done an excellent job and succeeded in their goal. Now, with copilot they are about to lose it all.
• keonix 5y ago
  If the training set contains verbatim (A)GPL code does this mean that Copilot also should be distributed by Microsoft under GPL? Because without it Copilot (as it is distributed by Microsoft) couldn't be built, wouldn't it make it a derivative work of GPL'd code (and obviously every other license)? I see a lot of people comparing human learning to machine learning in the comments, but there is a huge difference - we don't distribute copies of humans
  • ghoward 5y ago
    This is a great argument.
  • AaronFriel 5y ago
    No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies before we reach the question of whether Google is obligated to provide anything beyond what it is doing. By comparison, Copilot is even more obviously fair use. I've had this conversation quite a few times lately, and the non-obvious thing for many developers is that fair use is an exception to copyright itself. A license is a grant of permission (with some terms) to use a copyrighted work. This snippet from the Linux kernel doesn't make my comment here or the website Hacker News a GPL derivative work: ret = vmbus_sendpacket(dev->channel, init_pkt, sizeof(struct nvsp_message), (unsigned long)init_pkt, VM_PKT_DATA_INBAND, VMBUS_DATA_PACKET_FLAG_COMPLETION_REQUESTED); This snippet from an AGPL licensed project, Bitwarden, does not compel dang or pg to release the Hacker News source code: await _sendRepository.ReplaceAsync(send); await _pushService.PushSyncSendUpdateAsync(send); return (await _sendFileStorageService.GetSendFileDownloadUrlAsync(send, fileId), false, false); Fair use is an exception to copyright itself. A license cannot remove your right to fair use. The Free Software Foundation agrees (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLFairUse https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLFairUse) > Yes, you do. “Fair use” is use that is allowed without any special permission. Since you don't need the developers' permission for such use, you can do it regardless of what the developers said about it—in the license or elsewhere, whether that license be the GNU GPL or any other free software license. > Note, however, that there is no world-wide principle of fair use; what kinds of use are considered “fair” varies from country to country. (And even this verbatim copying from FSF.org for the purpose of education is... Fair use!)
• rambambram 5y ago
  I'm a programmer and also studied law for some time. These stories make me - once more - realize the old adage: "Possession is nine tenths of the law." Don't host that code in the cloud (or a better term, someone else's dirty bucket). What happened to developers hosting stuff on their own website!?
  • ghoward 5y ago
    This is why I have now moved my code off of GitHub.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • tannhaeuser 5y ago
    > What happened to developers hosting stuff on their own website!? Devs were hoping for stars and network effects rather than listening to those of us feeling uncomfortable taking all traffic to gh. Something like Copilot or even a coding bot was predicted two years ago already.
  • ralph84 5y ago
    GitHub's argument isn't that you hosted your code on GitHub and therefore gave them a license to use it to train their model. GitHub's argument is they don't need a license to train their model because it's fair use. Hosting your code somewhere else doesn't prevent fair use. If you don't want your code used to train ML models, don't host it anywhere.
    • rambambram 5y ago
      I get it, but that's already a legal argument. I was trying to zoom out from the unavoidable legal argumentative deadlock: if GH does not have your code hosted on their servers, it becomes way harder for 'them' to grab it and rape it. Your own domain is - of course - also out in the open, but at least you can have more control.
  • jefftk 5y ago
• xgulfie 5y ago
  I'm really hoping some big corp whose codebase is source-available and on GitHub but still under copyright, takes the piss out of them for this
• rambambram 5y ago
  Besides, as a programmer you should not excuse yourself with "IANAL" or otherwise pass any judgment to lawyers. Lawyers are just that: lawyers. They don't hold the truth either. One lawyer says this, another lawyer says that. F*k 'm. If anything, say "IANAJ" (I Am Not A Judge). Trias politica, you gotta love it.
• hartator 5y ago
  GitHub CoPilot is clear fair use. Having a ruling that says it doesn't will be regression. Please don't.
• vel0city 5y ago
  I can't wait for machine learning models that given the right input nearly perfectly reproduce feature length movies or music. Its not copyright infringement, it was generated by a computer!
• SavageBeast 5y ago
  When I first read about the new copilot tool I immediately thought it would just be a matter of time before some group started poisoning the AI. Garbage in, garbage out right? So now we know its ALL public repos ... how long until all the opponents of this tool have a giant repo full of syntactically correct code that employs terrible design patterns and is thoroughly obfuscated? I'm not going to waste my time on this personally but there are certainly those who will. Someone will invent a tool that perverts perfectly good code in the process and probably have a good laugh. Personally, while I recognize some people might find it useful, I don't much care for it. No, I haven't tried it yet either. Ive never sampled escargot either and I know I don't care for it all the same. Maybe it's wonderful, I'll never know - but I do know that I simply don't like the idea of it. Call it an objection on General Principal if you like. So remember kids, If you're not PAYING then you are the product. Bottom line - private repos are cheap and you should use them rather than freebie public stuff.
• kazinator 5y ago
  If you learn a word or phrase from a copyrighted public broadcast, does that mean you cannot speak it to others?
• rgbrenner 5y ago
  There are a lot of posts here debating if licenses still apply when copilot generates verbatim code. The answer is yes. Copilot is currently a technical preview. Github has already said they intend to detect verbatim code and notify the user and present the correct license. That'll be in the final release. Don't use the technical preview for anything except demoing a cool concept. It's not ready for that yet because it will reproduce licensed code and not tell you.
  • Voloskaya 5y ago
    > If licensing still apply when copilot generates the code. The answer is yes. Please provide a source for this.
• fchu 5y ago
  If a company built a tool like Copilot to help students write essays, is that considered plagiarism? Probably yes, and the reason is that regurgitating blobs of text without actually thinking like a human and writing them anew doesn't feel like actual work, just direct re-use. Same thinking probably applies to GitHub Copilot and copyright
  • taywrobel 5y ago
    It’s already fairly commonplace for news agencies to generate articles using ML solutions such as https://ai-writer.com/ https://ai-writer.com/ So by your logic ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC have all been plagiarizing and violating copyright for doing so? I’m not sure if there’s been a legal challenge/precedent set in that case yet, but that seems like a more apples to apples comparison than the Google Books metaphor being used. Disclosure: I work at GitHub but am not involved in CoPilot
    • yccs27 5y ago
      The big question here is: On what data was the model trained? Presumably the news stations trained theirs on public-domain works and their own backlog of news articles, so even with manual copying there would be no infringement. In contrast, Copilot was trained on other people's code with active copyright.
      • taywrobel 5y ago
        That’s quite a big presumption IMO. Training sets need to be quite large in order to produce reasonable output. My understanding is that these companies provide the model themselves, which seems like it’d be trained on more than one company’s publications. But I get your point, and understand both sides of the argument here. I think this will end up with a large class action lawsuit for sure, tho I really think it’s a toss up as to who would win it. This conversation was bound to happen eventually and we’re in uncharted territory here. I think it’s going to hinge on whether machine learning is considered equivalent in abstraction to human learning, which will be quite an interesting legal, technological, and philosophical precedent to set if it goes that way.
• ralph84 5y ago
  > I've reached out to @fsf and @EFF's legal teams regarding this. Please also reach out if you would be interested in participating in a class action. I think she's barking up the wrong tree here. If she's looking for organizations interested in eliminating fair use, RIAA, MPA, and AAP are more likely allies.
• Luker88 5y ago
  So... Putting the (imho) big licensing problems aside, what about the software patents? Apache and GPL have patent protection clauses. Does this mean that anyone using copilot might somehow get code that implements something patented, but protected by license, except they did not get proper permission through the Apache/GPL license? ...I kind of hate myself for saying this, but... Patent trolls to the rescue?
• thinkingemote 5y ago
  The answer is simple: Github needs to make a tool which can scan all your code to see if it contains code from public code. Its what universities around the world do for students work. Of course, theres a huge irony in that Github is also making the tool that enables the widespread plagarism....
• rwmj 5y ago
  So would a way to do this be to train multiple models on each different code license (perhaps allowing compatible licenses to cohabit) and then have Copilot identify the license of the target project and use the appropriate model? It might have an interesting feedback effect that some licenses which are more popular would presumably have better Copilot recommendations, which would produce better and thus more popular code for those licenses. Although maybe this happens already.
• Luker88 5y ago
  Like it or not, it seems like: * most people here are unhappy * most laywers will say it's fine (it very probably passed MS ones) I can understand that. Copyright was not created with AI/ML in mind, even as a random stray thought. Those were not even words at the time. So the question is: If we change the law and require trained algorithms to only work on licenses that permit this, and to output the "minimum common license" somehow, what are the repercussion on other application of copyright? Because the consensus here seems to be that this looks a lot like a de-licensor with extra steps
  • mrh0057 5y ago
    There is nothing intelligent about this. What they did is a context aware search and trying to claim that not what this is. If it was just used as a search engine and people weren’t using the results or following the license of the original source, then it would fine. There has been so much of a hype of machine learning people likely have a false impression of what it is.
    • Ajedi32 5y ago
      I've seen this claim that Copilot is "just a search engine" repeated in multiple places now. It's wrong; as anyone familiar with any of the GPT variants or other similar autoregressive language models can attest. Copilot isn't a search engine any more than any other language model is. It can sometimes output data from the training set verbatim as most AI models do from time to time, but that is the exception not the rule. Whether modern autoregressive language models can be called "inteligent" is debatable, but they're certainly far beyond what you'd get from a simple search engine.
      • mrh0057 5y ago
        First off I said it was a context aware search which it is. It uses past training data to predict what you would type next based on the context ie the code around it. It’s no more intelligent than alpha go. Intelligent AI is considered to be a general ai which no one is even close to building yet. Since neural networks are pattern matching based on the training input it is a derivative work of the training set. It says it right in first thing that comes up in auto regressive language models use the training input plus context to predict what the next word would be. Now here where the fun begins if they try this in court. If you claim it’s generating new work then who owns the copyright? You may not realize how big of a deal this is but there was a court case you can lookup where a monkey took a selfy and the person who camera the monkey used tried to claim copyright and lost.
• Andrex 5y ago
  Hmm, no. I'll be (finally) moving to GitLab or similar.
• habitue 5y ago
  I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. It seems like before the twitter thread on it went viral, the only people who cared about programmers copying (verbatim!) short snippets of code like this would be lawyers and executives. Suddenly everyone is coming out of the woodworks as copyright maximalists? I know HN loves a good "well actually" and Microsoft is always suspect, but let's leave the idea of code laundering to the Oracle lawyers. Let hackers continue to play and solve interesting problems. Copilot should be inspiring people to figure out how to do better than it, not making hackers get up in arms trying to slap it down.
  • ageyfman 5y ago
    Try doing any type of deal (fundraising, M&A) where you can't point to the provenance of your application's code. This isn't good for programmers, programmers WANT clean and knowable copyrights. This is good for lawyers, who'll now have another way to extract thousands of $$ from companies to launder their code.
    • Houshalter 5y ago
      If you do get sued, the Copilot page is written in a way that would make Github legally responsible for it, not you. "Just like with a compiler, the output of your use of GitHub Copilot belongs to you."
      • BlueTemplar 5y ago
        Yeah, right... This isn't going to fly in court any more than if the Pirate Bay page was written in a way that says that it's solely responsible for what you do with the magnet links that they share.
        • Houshalter 5y ago
          The pirate bay is very clear to not claim any responsibility for what people post on their site. That's how they get away with it.
• nickvincent 5y ago
  Regardless of how the (potentially very impactful) debate about licensing and copyright plays out, I think many here would agree this constitutes an "exploitation" of labor, at least in a mild sense. Optimistically, Copilot could be a wake up call for thinking more deeply about how the winnings of data-dependent technologies (ultimately, dependent on the labor of people who do things like write open source code) are concentrated--or shared more broadly. This longer blog post goes into more of a labor framing on the topic: https://www.psagroup.org/blogposts/101 https://www.psagroup.org/blogposts/101 (For the record, I certainly think Copilot could be very good for programmers in general and am not arguing against its existence -- just arguing that this is a high profile case study, useful for thinking about data-dependent tech in general)
  • leventov 5y ago
    There will be just a short transition period. In 10 years, AI will be writing most of code, and in 20 years - nearly all code. People will do only architecture/business analysis. No more "exploitation" of labor.
    • c-cube 5y ago
      "in 10 years, AI will drive most cars". See how that one panned out? Programmers are safe for still quite a while.
• pizza 5y ago
  Please don't get mad at me but my question is genuinely: so what? Why does it matter? Can't you violate licenses in a tedious manner just by Googling + copy pasting blindly already? Genuinely looking to understand the consensus here
• codehawke 5y ago
  Most likely they are using the private stuff too.
• iseethroughbs 5y ago
  I treat Copilot as literally a programmer in pair programming. Which means that if it's trained, i.e. it has "seen" GPL code, then it's tainted, and we should treat resulting code as GPL code. Replace "GPL" with the most restrictive license that's on GitHub, but you get the point. They're kinda shooting themselves in the foot, because this reduces the commercial potential of the tool to almost nothing.
• turndown 5y ago
  It seems that now is finally the time I must apologize for some of the java code I put up on github.
• albertzeyer 5y ago
  So, when a human reads public code on the Internet (no matter the licence), and gains knowledge, learns (updates the synaptic weights of the brain), and then makes (indirectly) use of that gained knowledge for further work, how is this different to this case?
  • SXX 5y ago
    It's no different, but if human reads copyrighted proprietary code and then reproduces part of it exactly he have good chance to get into huge legal trouble. On other hand said AI have no idea of who the code belongs to and it's able to reproduce it perfectly.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • nowherebeen 5y ago
    The difference is intent. When Github reads public code, their only intent is to profit from it. Depending on the license, that's a violation.
    • albertzeyer 5y ago
      A human also often intends to make profit (by using the gained knowledge).
      • nowherebeen 5y ago
        No, they intent to learn from it or find a solution to their problem. It's much harder to argue human intent in court than GitHub blantantly doing so.
• gizmodo59 5y ago
  I hope they don't shutdown the project with all the legal nightmares.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  Open source is about love, sharing, helping out the fellow coder. Coderz of the past hated all this licensing and copyright BS. Your code, used to train this NN, is making the world a better place, I'd be content with that.
  • luffapi 5y ago
    Nothing about further enriching Microsoft and continuing the network effects behind a closed source “social network”, is making the world a better place. Quite the opposite really.
• timdaub 5y ago
  Built on Stolen Data: https://rugpullindex.com/blog#BuiltonStolenData https://rugpullindex.com/blog#BuiltonStolenData
• maxrev17 5y ago
  How do people think developers learn?! Many probably recite copyrighted code almost verbatim on the reg. Storm in a tea cup.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Does gtp-3 have to attribute mankind for reading all of the internet? What about deep learning-artwork trained on google searches? We enter a new era…
• 1970-01-01 5y ago
  What about the other half of the law: If your copilot code takes from public source but produces something that is patented, can you be sued by a patent troll? (Yes.)
• djoldman 5y ago
  One question I haven't really see talked about is: when you get a suggestion through copilot and save the document, who is the author of the document? I think this may be the crux of this whole kerfuffle. If you're the author isn't it on you if you infringe? If not then perhaps you and GitHub/Microsoft share authorship/culpability? Who has the copyright to a piece of text generated by a tool? Or art generated by a model?
• russdpale 5y ago
  Who cares? Seriously? Copilot has ripped off the absurd charade around licensing and code. It isn't any kind of copyright infringement. The AI is not copying and pasting code that is has found, it is rewriting the code from scratch on its own. We keep trying to take old ways and meld them to the internet, and its just not appropriate and it doesn't work.
  • nrb 5y ago
    Huh? There are already many examples of "copied and pasted" code that it has found. https://twitter.com/kylpeacock/status/1410749018183933952 https://twitter.com/kylpeacock/status/1410749018183933952 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/pkell7/status/1411058236321681414/photo/1 https://twitter.com/pkell7/status/1411058236321681414/photo/...
  • geoffhill 5y ago
    > not copying and pasting code https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
• ksec 5y ago
  All I know is this Copilot opens a whole can of worms. And doesn't or possibly never will have a right answer without court settling. Obviously most ( I think ) lawyers seems to be siding with Microsoft on fair use. But most owner of the code seems to think they are infringing on their work. Then there is the international issue because one court cant decide for everyone else. I think the issue is important enough I wonder if we could somehow crowdfund it for a court trial or something.
• neonihil 5y ago
  I think it’s pretty easy to defeat MS in court. We just need to bring the music industry into this! For example: Let’s train a network on Beatles music to generate new Beatles songs. I’m pretty sure music lawyers will find a way to prove that the trained network is violating the label’s copyright, as they always manage to do that. And then we just need to use the precedent and argue that music is the same thing as code.
  • bionhoward 5y ago
    Potentially dumb question from a guy who isn't a lawyer: Does Copilot infringe Google's patent(s) on the Transformer architecture? If so, then Google could potentially sue them for royalties, at least. Further, couldn't this Copilot thing backfire for Github because customer trust is more valuable than AI training data right now? If folks don't feel they can trust Github, seems like they could move their work to other version control systems like Gitlab or Bitbucket...
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • anonydsfsfs 5y ago
      Doesn't really matter, because if Google sued Microsoft, Microsoft would immediately hit back with a countersuit, since they would have little trouble finding something in their 90,000+ patent warchest that Google is infringing on. Software patents have become a matter of mutually-assured destruction for the big players. The only winning move is not to play.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  • Florin_Andrei 5y ago
    In ancient Rome they didn't have a police force. What they had was essentially muscle for hire, mercenary bands paid by rich and powerful folks to do their bidding. As a regular person, the only thing that could have protected you from one of these groups was another such group. Same today with the licensing system.
• xbar 5y ago
  Microsoft LicenseLaunderer.
• pjfin123 5y ago
  Of all the potential issues with training large AI models incidental copyright infringement seems pretty mild.
• sergiogjr 5y ago
  The way I see it is that MS has probably put as much financial investment in the development of this product as in the research of legalities regarding its release with its highly paid legal army. To expect a multi billion dollar company to not do its due diligence seems naive. Maybe this could spark a discussion to change the current rules that allow them to do this, but questioning the current legality to me is a waste of time.
  • tpmx 5y ago
    It's a gamble. Worst case they have to reduce the quality by removing GPL code from the training data. And/or pay off a few lawsuits, which is routine stuff for them. Cost of doing business.
• pjfin123 5y ago
  Of all the concerns over training large AI models incidental copyright infringement doesn't seem that important.
• kune 5y ago
  Guys please read the Terms of Use of Github section D.4. We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video. This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program.
  • bruce343434 5y ago
    Still depends on how they defined "the Service". Can't be bothered to read the full license myself because I don't use github - but I can't imagine "the Service" is defined as including an AI copy paster.
    • mumblemumble 5y ago
      > The “Service” refers to the applications, software, products, and services provided by GitHub, including any Beta Previews. So it wouldn't include just any AI copy pasters. Only the ones that are provided by GitHub.
  • remram 5y ago
    If I upload somebody else's GPL code to GitHub, I also can't grant to GitHub the (implicit) legal rights to use that code in Copilot, because they are not mine to give. I could previously mirror GPL code, because the GPL granted me the rights I need to grant GitHub as part of their ToS; but if they change their ToS, or if the meaning is changed by them adding vastly different features to their Service, this becomes a problem.
• fleddr 5y ago
  To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared to training a super AI on the entire web. My point here is that only companies the size of Google and Microsoft have the resources to do this type of planetary scale AI. They can afford the super expensive AI engineers, have the computing power and own the data or will forcefully get access to it. We will even freely give it to them. Any "lesser" AI produced from smaller companies trying to compete are obsolete, and the better one accelerates away. There is no second-best in AI, only winners. If we predict that ultimately AI will change virtually every aspect of society, these companies will become omnipresent, "everything companies". God companies. As per usual, it will be packaged as an extra convenience for you. And you will embrace it and actively help realize this scenario.
  • tvirosi 5y ago
    I largely agree. But there are still some fun opportunities around. One are things google would never touch because of PR reasons (e.g. state of the art scalable face identification). Another is just silly out-of-the-box creative uses of AI which wouldn't fit well with Google's brand.
  • jspaetzel 5y ago
    If Google makes an amazing model that no-one can beat it will only be dominate as long as others get access to it freely. But if there are restrictions on access or if it's too expensive, other options will appear and even if they're not as perfect, they'll still be very usable. Imagine a coalition of companies all feeding data, that could compete just as well.
    • est31 5y ago
      Google has all the data of all the users though. I'd wager that they won't just let AI companies scrape it.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  I've figured out why ML based fair use arguments for generative models feel dirty to me. Imagine a scenario where you'd love to have access to a large number of my digital widgets, but they're expensive to make or buy, and a large number of them is really expensive. So you train an ML model on my things you can't afford to buy. It's still expensive, but that's a one time cost. Spend $5M training GPT-3, it's fine. Now you can sample from the space of my digital widgets. You have gotten a large number of widgets, just by throwing money at AWS. With money, you have converted my widgets into your widgets, and I'll never see a cent of it. That's the issue. Content is expensive and it's still needed. Traditionally, I make content and if you want to benefit from my labor, you pay me. In the future, if you want to benefit from my labor, you pay AWS instead. tl;dr The most significant equation for generative models is "$$$ + my stuff = your stuff"
  • remram 5y ago
    In addition, the model is going to spit out widgets that are combinations of the existing ones, if it doesn't outright copy. This is different from a human who is going to put their own creativity into it (and will be accused of plagiarism if they don't): the model has no creativity to offer on top of the unlicensed input.
• tobyhinloopen 5y ago
  A lot of hate for a cool piece of tech. Can’t we just be happy this tool exists?
• cameldrv 5y ago
  My question is what GitHub is going to do when people start sending them DMCA takedown notices over their code being distributed through this system. Currently, if you claim to be a copyright owner GitHub can respond to a DMCA takedown by removing the repository. This might require them to retrain the entire model. One option for GitHub might be to maintain a blocklist of various code snippets, and if there is a substring match, just don't make the suggestion.
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  What is Microsoft's long-term goal here? Why did they release a hugely controversial feature that is not making them any money? (Or is it?)
• cannabis_sam 5y ago
  The paper clip maximizers have already taken over :(
• cannabis_sam 5y ago
  The somewhat frustrating solution is to simply realize that “copyright” is one of the worst abominations humanity has ever conceived… It’s literally being used to stifle research as we speak, but for some completely insane reason we are protecting a handful of publishers as a cartel… It really is so simple: “don’t be a bigoted fascist”, but just have a glance at the fascists decrying my stance as a degenerate liberal, in the answering comments
• systematical 5y ago
  The solution here seems simple. If you don't want your code used for AI/ML like co pilot, then place a license in your code that explicitly forbids it. Looking at the MIT License as-is, which is used by many maintainers on github, there is nothing that forbids co-pilot. It's easy to add a few sentences to that which explicitly forbid the code being used by AI, ML, code generation or other code automation and calling it something else like the Free For Human Use License. The sticky part may be: does GitHub T/C overrule these licenses?
  • curiousgal 5y ago
    This reminded me of those Facebook status updates that people used to post back in the day in which they forbid Facebook from using their data lmao
  • sjy 5y ago
    Using copyright works to train an AI may qualify as fair use, meaning the terms of any copyright licence can be ignored, as argued in this blog post by reference to the Google Books litigation: https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringing-your-copyright/ https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringin...
• toomanyducks 5y ago
  my code's in there? im so sorry everyone
• GuB-42 5y ago
  My guess is that is is fair use but... The model is said to spit out code verbatim 0.1% of the time, a low number, but if copilot is used a lot, it means you are going to find a lot of copied code in people's projects, and these project owners may be breaching copyright. I don't think "but, copilot..." will be an excuse. Here is a (probably unrealistic) scenario illustrating it. I am playing a copyright troll here: - Release plenty of generic code and put it on GitHub under a restrictive license - Have the copilot bot scan it - wait some time - scan public codebases and do an exact match for my code - sue project owner that contain my code I see the use of copilot more of a minefield for me than as a liability for Microsoft.
• icanhasjonas 5y ago
  I honestly don’t see that as a problem… A human learns by looking at all public code A robot learns by looking at all public code (Okay, I have some reservations to above comment, but for discussions sake, that’s what I’m going with)
• justshowpost 5y ago
  Ugh, the headline... Most interesting part got truncated > regardless of license
• SonnyTark 5y ago
  I just don't get this, it's ai not a search engine, unless we deliberately bait it, it won't spit out verbatim code snippets. I'd also use all public code in github if I wanted to train a similar tool. Furthermore, tabnine has been doing the same for years and not a single dramatic statement about it. This simply feels like anti-Microsot people flocking to what they see as some exposed Microsoft flesh for social media biting.