7 ms·

> No, see Authors Guild v. Google. That case required that the output be transformative, in that "words in books are being used in a way they have not been use

• tedunangst 5y ago
  It's not possible to get copilot to output a transformed version of the input?
  • shakna 5y ago
    Transformed output _may_ fall under fair use. However - Copilot directly recites code. That is _very unlikely_ to fall under fair use. Redistributing the exact same code, in the same form, for the same purpose, probably means that Copilot, and thus the people responsible for it, are infringing.
    • nonfamous 5y ago
      > However - Copilot directly recites code. You make that statement as an absolute, but in the interests of clarity, all evidence so far shows that it directly recites code very rarely indeed. Even the Quake example had to be prompted by the specific variable names used in the original code. In practice, the output code is heavily influenced by your own context — the comments you include, the variable names you use, even the name of the file you are editing — and with use it’s obvious that the code is almost certainly not a direct recitation of any existing code.
      • shakna 5y ago
        > all evidence so far shows that it directly recites code very rarely indeed. _Once_ is enough for it to be infringing. The law is not very forgiving when you try and handwave it away.
        • mthoms 5y ago
          You sound quite sure that the outlying instances of direct copying wouldn't be covered by the Fair Use copyright exemption. Any particular reason for that? I tend to think it would be covered (provided it there were relatively small snippets and not entire functions).
          • jkaplowitz 5y ago
            I'm not the person you're replying to, but one strong reason is that the global reach and standardization of copyright law is far broader than the global reach and standardization of the fair use exception. A single non-US country in which GitHub Copilot is used in a way that would be infringing without the US fair use exception, and outside the scope of any such exception in that law, would be enough to cause GitHub/MS a legal hassle. There could well be more than one such country.
            • mthoms 5y ago
              Oh, absolutely. I'm not American, but like others around here — I was just restricting the discussion to American law for simplicity's sake.
              • jkaplowitz 5y ago
                Fair, but GitHub/MS (same company now) can't afford to ignore other countries' law in their internal evaluations of whether globally* available products like Copilot are legal. * Minus a few countries/regions targeted by US sanctions, I assume, though they've gradually broadened their services in sanctioned countries with the necessary licenses from OFAC.
          • shakna 5y ago
            Precedent. Google v. Oracle found 9 lines, of an "obvious" implementation to be infringing.
            • mthoms 5y ago
      • svaha1728 5y ago
        So if a foreign company pilfers the source code to Windows, can they add it to a training set and then 'prompt' the machine learning algorithm to spit out a new 'copyright free' Windows, just by transforming the variable names?
        • rkeene2 5y ago
          I think that's my question regarding this whole thing: If it's so fair use, why not train it on all Microsoft code, regardless of license (in addition to GitHub.com) ? Would Microsoft employees be fine with Copilot re-creating "from memory" portions of Windows to use in WINE ?
        • nonfamous 5y ago
          Well no, because only GitHub has access to the training set. But more importantly this misunderstands how Copilot even works -- even if Windows was in the training set, you couldn't get Copilot to reproduce it. It only generates a few lines of code at a time, and even then it's almost certainly entirely novel code. Now, if you knew the code you wanted Copilot to generate you could certainly type it character by character and you might save yourself a few keystrokes with the TAB key, but it's going to be much MUCH easier to simply copy the whole codebase as files, and now you're right back where you started.
          • svaha1728 5y ago
            GPT-3 is still Microsoft licensed, but a similar model can be put together with the freely available GPT-2 and source code -- especially if your intent is copyright transfer. As Francois Chollet points out in this talk, ultimately deep neural network models are locally sensitive hash tables, so the examples of people pulling out source code is an inherent shortcoming of deep learning models in general. Give the right 'key' and you can 'recall' the value you are looking for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0p_thJJnoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0p_thJJnoo
    • ThrowawayR2 5y ago
      > "However - Copilot directly recites code." Sounds like that wouldn't be difficult to fix? Transform the code to an intermediate representation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_representation) as a pre-processing stage, which ditches any non-essential structure of the code and eliminates comments, variable names, etc., before running the learning algorithms on it. Et voila, much like a human learning something and reimplementing it, only essential code is generated without any possibility of accidentally regurgitating verbatim snippets of the source data.
      • salawat 5y ago
        At that point, can we all just agree IP is the stupidest concept to ever be layered on top of math (which programming is) and move on with non-copyrightable code?
        • jcheng 5y ago
          Only if you agree that copyleft licenses are also stupid; without copyright, there's no way to prevent companies from making closed-source forks of code you wrote and intended to stay open.
          • oefnak 5y ago
            Yes, sure. Without copyright there's no need for copyleft left, right?
            • jcheng 5y ago
              No...? Not unless that closed-source project's source code is leaked?
            • BlueTemplar 5y ago
              You don't care about attribution and other moral rights ? (I guess these are going to depend a LOT on the jurisdiction that you're in ?)
• AaronFriel 5y ago
  Is there any evidence of Copilot producing substantial (100s of lines) verbatim copies of copyrighted works? Absent this, I don't think there's a case. The courts have given extraordinarily wide latitude to fair use and ML algorithms are routinely trained on copyrighted works, photos, etc. without a license. I understand that this feels more personal because it involves our field, but artists and authors have expressed the same sentiment when neural nets began making pictures and sentences. The question here is no different than "Is GPT-3 an unlicensed, unlawfully created derivative work of millions, if not billions of people?" No, I'm quite confident it is not.
  • b3morales 5y ago
    The point of Copilot -- its entire value as a product -- is to produce code that matches the intent and semantics of code that was in the input. In other words, very deliberately not transformative in purpose.
  • shakna 5y ago
    > Is there any evidence of Copilot producing substantial (100s of lines) verbatim copies of copyrighted works? It doesn't need to be substantial. In Google v. Oracle a 9-line function was found to be infringing.
    • AaronFriel 5y ago
      If I recall correctly, the nine line question wasn't decided by the supreme court, but the API question was. The Supreme Court did hold that the 11,500 lines of API code copied verbatim constituted fair use. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
      • shakna 5y ago
        > The Supreme Court did hold that the 11,500 lines of API code copied verbatim constituted fair use. Yes, because it was _transformative_, in a clear way. Because an API is only an interface. Which makes that part of that decision largely irrelevant to the topic at hand. > Google’s limited copying of the API is a transformative use. Google copied only what was needed to allow programmers to work in a different compu-ting environment without discarding a portion of a familiar program-ming language. Google’s purpose was to create a different task-related system for a different computing environment (smartphones) and tocreate a platform—the Android platform—that would help achieve and popularize that objective. > If I recall correctly, the nine line question wasn't decided by the supreme court, but the API question was. It was already decided earlier, and Google did not contest it, choosing instead to negotiate a zero payment settlement with Oracle over the rangeCheck function. There was no need for the Supreme Court to hear it.
• deleted 5y ago
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• kmeisthax 5y ago
  I think you might be considering two different acts here: 1. The act of training Copilot on public code 2. The resulting use of Copilot to generate presumably new code #1 is arguably close to the Authors Guild v. Google case. You are literally transforming the input code into an entirely new thing: a series of statistical parameters determining what functioning code "looks like". You can use this information to generate a whole bunch of novel and useful code sequences, not just by feeding it parts of it's training data and acting shocked that it remembered what it saw. That smells like fair use to me. #2 is where things get more dicey - just because it's legal to train an ML system on copyrighted data wouldn't mean that it's resulting output is non-infringing. The network itself is fair use, but the code it generates would be used in an ordinary commercial context, so you wouldn't be able to make a fair use argument here. This is the difference between scanning a bunch of books into a search engine, versus copying a paragraph out of the search engine and into your own work. (More generally: Fair use is non-transitive. Each reuse triggers a new fair use analysis of every prior work in the chain, because each fair reuse creates a new copyright around what you added, but the original copyright also still remains.)