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Am I the only person who feels that it's copyright that's the issue rather than machine learning training sets? Consider a new additional feature added on to C

Am I the only person who feels that it's copyright that's the issue rather than machine learning training sets? Consider a new additional feature added on to Copilot - a language aware rewriting tool that transforms the initial generated code into a new form with equivalent functionality. It would be nearly impossible to trace the original code or make a copyright claim. However - you could use this same trick directly on copyrighted code. Now things are even murkier... But I would argue that this is essentially what our brains are doing. I've read code, got the gist of it and written my own version. Technically it's not a clean-room reimplementation but an average coder wouldn't realistically expect to get sued for copyright for doing this. Maybe they should but if you're an open source advocate and you've reached this position then there's something very weird going on. I always thought the idea of open source was to use copyright against itself because we believed in openness. Not embracing it and just throwing out one small aspect of it.

king_magic 5y ago
but an average coder wouldn't realistically expect to get sued for copyright for doing this Yeah, but they absolutely could if they copied code verbatim, which is what Copilot is often doing.
- the8472 5y ago
  For very small values of often. https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitation#results https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio...
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    Which means that if every one of us was using it, many of us would be using copyrighted code by the end of a single day.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    You're citing a study done by Github on their own product, on something that has generated lots of backlash over the last week. I would take it seriously if it was an independant study, but right now it's hard to believe it.
    - the8472 5y ago
      Github's study predates any negative press, so that would not have be the reason for them to manipulate the study. And the examples that are making the rounds combine two aspects a) prompt-engineering b) famous code samples. That's hardly representative of normal use. So while independent testing would be welcome I don't consider backlash observational evidence. What we're seeing is in line with prior experience with GPT.
      - Zababa 5y ago
        > Github's study predates any negative press, so that would not have be the reason for them to manipulate the study. I seriously doubt that no one raised the concerns that are raised today during the development of Copilot. > And the examples that are making the rounds combine two aspects a) prompt-engineering b) famous code samples. That's hardly representative of normal use. That's true, however the way they advertise Copilot is to prompt it with comments, which might push it to regurgitate code more often.
        Houshalter 5y ago
        >I seriously doubt that no one raised the concerns that are raised today during the development of Copilot. I would be shocked if they did. The common wisdom in the ML community is that training data is fair use. GPT has been operating for 2-3 years now with no legal issues, and this is just a different fine tune of GPT3.
- andybak 5y ago
  Yes. That part was implicit in my post. I'm trying to follow the logic a bit further to see where it goes.
NmAmDa 5y ago
There is equivalent thing in academia to what you describe which is "paraphrasing" which is you read the source, grasp it and then rephrase it in your own words. Still though you have to cite the ideas and this is actually essential because you can't keep quoting in your paper/thesis. But can this solve the problem with code license? I am not sure.
- basch 5y ago
  >Still though you have to cite the ideas That's not because of copyright though, that is due to academic standards. Legally you can paraphrase without citing a source. And from a legal perspective, an entire book of nothing but unsourced quotes from many works would probably end up being both transformative and using a minimal percent of each source. That said, an argument for citing: if copilot was using public code, and not keeping a record of its sources, it might put someone in a spot where they dont know what risk they are exposed to. A citation log would both let you know what your sources are, and as a defense if accused of using something. The question becomes, going back to copyright, what if copilot learns a language, and then produces identical code to someone else, because that line of code is the most efficient obvious way to do something.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
barkingcat 5y ago
isn't the issue that github's particular implementation of the idea is braindead - as in it copy-pastes directly verbatim.
- andybak 5y ago
  Slight exaggeration but even given that aspect, I'm uncomfortable with the community's reaction
  - onli 5y ago
    I am too. It's so weird to see free software proponents argue for what is in effect a big extension of what should be protected under copyright. Not only using it, not only distributing it, but even learning from it - and the line there between learning from it as an AI and learning as a human is fluid. This copyright maximization could have a similar effect as software patents - making it more difficult to write software, because there will be an increased danger of being sued for infringement ("you learnt how to do that if from my GPL code, but you used MIT!"). 1:1 copies are a different question (a "it depends" on how much gets copied and whether the code is protected, as in not obvious, in the first place), but those are not the main thing that gets focused on in that strange twittersphere (which the article is referencing).
    - louthy 5y ago
      > It's so weird to see free software proponents argue for what is in effect a big extension of what should be protected under copyright. I don't believe that's what they're arguing. They're arguing that they're putting themselves (or their employer's) products at risk by having unattributed copyright protected code in their products. It doesn't matter how much any of us would hope that copyright didn't exist, the fact is, it does. There are other issues with Copilot, but by far the biggest is the licensing risks for those using it in a professional software engineering environment. I'm a FOSS advocate and all my FOSS projects are MIT licensed. Anyone can use my code to do anything they like, but my day-to-day professional software engineering life needs to know where the code comes from and what its license is.
qayxc 5y ago
On top of that, I get the feeling that way too many programmers have a poor understanding of the actual value of their work. A single function, even if particularly clever, elegant, or performant, doesn't have much value on its own. Sure, you might have thought about it for hours and struggled hard to get it just right, but that doesn't imply it's particularly valuable on its own. A particular inverse square root function has no use outside a complete library or program. It's that added value (embedding it as part of something much bigger or complex) together with unrelated work (e.g. API calls, artwork, game design, etc.) that generates a product with actual value. There are people who unironically try to argue that choosing variable names and expressing trivial mathematical relations in a particular way holds intellectual value worth protecting; even if it's just a single line of code. Interestingly people cheered when Google won against Oracle and APIs remained "free". It'd be so interesting to take a peek into an alternate reality where CoPilot has been released by Google or Tesla(!) instead of Microsoft. My gut feeling is that the reaction would've been very different depending on the company that released the tool.
- thayne 5y ago
  > It'd be so interesting to take a peek into an alternate reality where CoPilot has been released by Google or Tesla(!) instead of Microsoft. My gut feeling is that the reaction would've been very different depending on the company that released the tool. I really doubt that. I do think the reaction would be more favorable if the project was itself open source.
  - qayxc 5y ago
    Well, GTP-3 isn't open source, yet the Twitter-sphere was ecstatic about its code generation features. It isn't even new at all [0], [1], [2] - it's just getting exposure because people start actually using it. GPT-3 still forms the basis of Codex, which is the basis of CoPilot. None of these are Open Source and even if they were - what exactly do you think that would change? The models are black boxes, they are too big to even run on consumer level hardware, let alone train or finetune and the code of CoPilot is most likely just API calls, glue code, some post-processing and integration into VS Code. In short, no I don't agree that an open source product would've helped with people's opinion and it would've been irrational even, because there'd still be no difference in the core functionality and what people are complaining about. [0] https://sourceai.dev https://sourceai.dev [1] https://gpt3demo.com/category/code-generation https://gpt3demo.com/category/code-generation [2] https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/gpt3 https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/gpt3
alok-g 5y ago
Copyrights protect expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. The ideas themselves could be a subject matter of patents. This addresses a few of your comments. >> It would be nearly impossible to trace the original code or make a copyright claim. The difficulty in proving infringement is a different aspect than an infringement happening. >> I always thought the idea of open source was to use copyright against itself because we believed in openness. That's exactly the point. The open concern being discussed with using Copilot is that one may incorporate parts of the code under the "openness" license into an application which is not under a compatible "openness" license.

king_magic 5y ago

but an average coder wouldn't realistically expect to get sued for copyright for doing this Yeah, but they absolutely could if they copied code verbatim, which is what Copilot is often doing.

the8472 5y ago
For very small values of often. https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitation#results https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio...
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  Which means that if every one of us was using it, many of us would be using copyrighted code by the end of a single day.
- Zababa 5y ago
  You're citing a study done by Github on their own product, on something that has generated lots of backlash over the last week. I would take it seriously if it was an independant study, but right now it's hard to believe it.
  - the8472 5y ago
    Github's study predates any negative press, so that would not have be the reason for them to manipulate the study. And the examples that are making the rounds combine two aspects a) prompt-engineering b) famous code samples. That's hardly representative of normal use. So while independent testing would be welcome I don't consider backlash observational evidence. What we're seeing is in line with prior experience with GPT.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      > Github's study predates any negative press, so that would not have be the reason for them to manipulate the study. I seriously doubt that no one raised the concerns that are raised today during the development of Copilot. > And the examples that are making the rounds combine two aspects a) prompt-engineering b) famous code samples. That's hardly representative of normal use. That's true, however the way they advertise Copilot is to prompt it with comments, which might push it to regurgitate code more often.
      - Houshalter 5y ago
        >I seriously doubt that no one raised the concerns that are raised today during the development of Copilot. I would be shocked if they did. The common wisdom in the ML community is that training data is fair use. GPT has been operating for 2-3 years now with no legal issues, and this is just a different fine tune of GPT3.
andybak 5y ago
Yes. That part was implicit in my post. I'm trying to follow the logic a bit further to see where it goes.

NmAmDa 5y ago

There is equivalent thing in academia to what you describe which is "paraphrasing" which is you read the source, grasp it and then rephrase it in your own words. Still though you have to cite the ideas and this is actually essential because you can't keep quoting in your paper/thesis. But can this solve the problem with code license? I am not sure.

basch 5y ago
>Still though you have to cite the ideas That's not because of copyright though, that is due to academic standards. Legally you can paraphrase without citing a source. And from a legal perspective, an entire book of nothing but unsourced quotes from many works would probably end up being both transformative and using a minimal percent of each source. That said, an argument for citing: if copilot was using public code, and not keeping a record of its sources, it might put someone in a spot where they dont know what risk they are exposed to. A citation log would both let you know what your sources are, and as a defense if accused of using something. The question becomes, going back to copyright, what if copilot learns a language, and then produces identical code to someone else, because that line of code is the most efficient obvious way to do something.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

barkingcat 5y ago

isn't the issue that github's particular implementation of the idea is braindead - as in it copy-pastes directly verbatim.

andybak 5y ago
Slight exaggeration but even given that aspect, I'm uncomfortable with the community's reaction
- onli 5y ago
  I am too. It's so weird to see free software proponents argue for what is in effect a big extension of what should be protected under copyright. Not only using it, not only distributing it, but even learning from it - and the line there between learning from it as an AI and learning as a human is fluid. This copyright maximization could have a similar effect as software patents - making it more difficult to write software, because there will be an increased danger of being sued for infringement ("you learnt how to do that if from my GPL code, but you used MIT!"). 1:1 copies are a different question (a "it depends" on how much gets copied and whether the code is protected, as in not obvious, in the first place), but those are not the main thing that gets focused on in that strange twittersphere (which the article is referencing).
  - louthy 5y ago
    > It's so weird to see free software proponents argue for what is in effect a big extension of what should be protected under copyright. I don't believe that's what they're arguing. They're arguing that they're putting themselves (or their employer's) products at risk by having unattributed copyright protected code in their products. It doesn't matter how much any of us would hope that copyright didn't exist, the fact is, it does. There are other issues with Copilot, but by far the biggest is the licensing risks for those using it in a professional software engineering environment. I'm a FOSS advocate and all my FOSS projects are MIT licensed. Anyone can use my code to do anything they like, but my day-to-day professional software engineering life needs to know where the code comes from and what its license is.

qayxc 5y ago

On top of that, I get the feeling that way too many programmers have a poor understanding of the actual value of their work. A single function, even if particularly clever, elegant, or performant, doesn't have much value on its own. Sure, you might have thought about it for hours and struggled hard to get it just right, but that doesn't imply it's particularly valuable on its own. A particular inverse square root function has no use outside a complete library or program. It's that added value (embedding it as part of something much bigger or complex) together with unrelated work (e.g. API calls, artwork, game design, etc.) that generates a product with actual value. There are people who unironically try to argue that choosing variable names and expressing trivial mathematical relations in a particular way holds intellectual value worth protecting; even if it's just a single line of code. Interestingly people cheered when Google won against Oracle and APIs remained "free". It'd be so interesting to take a peek into an alternate reality where CoPilot has been released by Google or Tesla(!) instead of Microsoft. My gut feeling is that the reaction would've been very different depending on the company that released the tool.

thayne 5y ago
> It'd be so interesting to take a peek into an alternate reality where CoPilot has been released by Google or Tesla(!) instead of Microsoft. My gut feeling is that the reaction would've been very different depending on the company that released the tool. I really doubt that. I do think the reaction would be more favorable if the project was itself open source.
- qayxc 5y ago
  Well, GTP-3 isn't open source, yet the Twitter-sphere was ecstatic about its code generation features. It isn't even new at all [0], [1], [2] - it's just getting exposure because people start actually using it. GPT-3 still forms the basis of Codex, which is the basis of CoPilot. None of these are Open Source and even if they were - what exactly do you think that would change? The models are black boxes, they are too big to even run on consumer level hardware, let alone train or finetune and the code of CoPilot is most likely just API calls, glue code, some post-processing and integration into VS Code. In short, no I don't agree that an open source product would've helped with people's opinion and it would've been irrational even, because there'd still be no difference in the core functionality and what people are complaining about. [0] https://sourceai.dev https://sourceai.dev [1] https://gpt3demo.com/category/code-generation https://gpt3demo.com/category/code-generation [2] https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/gpt3 https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/gpt3

alok-g 5y ago

Copyrights protect expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. The ideas themselves could be a subject matter of patents. This addresses a few of your comments. >> It would be nearly impossible to trace the original code or make a copyright claim. The difficulty in proving infringement is a different aspect than an infringement happening. >> I always thought the idea of open source was to use copyright against itself because we believed in openness. That's exactly the point. The open concern being discussed with using Copilot is that one may incorporate parts of the code under the "openness" license into an application which is not under a compatible "openness" license.