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Your arguments may be valid from a common sense standpoint. However, they may not exactly be valid from a legal standpoint as explained below: >> First of all

by alok-g 5y ago

Your arguments may be valid from a common sense standpoint. However, they may not exactly be valid from a legal standpoint as explained below: >> First of all, it's not as if CoPilot spits out verbatim replica of training data on every other prompt. Your comment is about how often it is happening. That it happens as the OP shows via examples itself makes this a concern. It's not necessarily a question of quantity but of existence. At least when I last checked [1], Github itself [2] notes: "Does GitHub Copilot recite code from the training set? GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before. We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set. ..." In other words, 0.1% of the time snippers are copied verbatim, a percentage of which may be copyright violations (not everything is). >> The author acts as if copypasta from StackOverflow, RosettaCode and similar sites is NOT a daily occurrence Those may be violations too. That it is a common practice does not turn it into a non-violation. >> Fake gurus like Siraj Raval [0] can manage to literally steal That someone escaped does not imply that the laws are now somehow invalid. >> I really have to wonder what the fuss is about when an ML model occasionally spits out a few lines of code snippets verbatim from its training set. I agree. AI here is posing a challenge which should lead to refinement of the law, as I have explained in another context too [3]. If this is indeed needed, don't expect this to happen some anytime soon. --- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27736089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27736089 [2] https://copilot.github.com/ https://copilot.github.com/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27635481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27635481

qayxc 5y ago
> Those may be violations too. That it is a common practice does not turn it into a non-violation. I'm not disputing that. What I'm asking is, why is this particular 0.1% small snippets case such a big deal all of a sudden, when it obviously IS common practice (within the bounds of small code snippets)?
- alok-g 5y ago
  You are right in asking that question. What just happens that when there are thousands of small violators, it's not easy for lawsuits to proceed. When there's a central entity involved, Github in this case, there is someone discrete to be challenged or talked about. What Github has done is that they have not claimed rights over the generated code, and have passed on the responsibility to the developer/entity using the generated code. In other words, they are supplying tool that can make copies, not necessarily violating the copyright themselves {Foonote 1}. So the Betamax ruling can come into play here, AFAIK. What's thereby needed is that the developers now need to be educated about it, which is what the articles like the OP will end up doing. The developers often aren't well-educated about this stuff themselves, and presume that using generated code is just fine. See how I was downvoted here, as an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27735484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27735484 {Footnote 1}: Whether the Github CoPilot model itself is violating copyrights is another matter. If the training data has included AGPL-licensed code, even that may be an violation. However, several other licenses would not be violated till the model is "distributed".
  - qayxc 5y ago
    Good and important point about educating developers. Maybe it goes even further and similarly to planned EU regulations, products based on black-box AI models need to have documented behaviour. So the documentation needs to include explicit hints about generated code being unsuitable for clean room engineering and has to be considered "tainted" one way or the other. I don't worry about verbatim reproductions at all, because results of that nature can easily be filtered out if need be (or be annotated with the proper reference). I'd expect a company that also runs the 2nd biggest web search engine to be able to pull that off with ease.

by alok-g 5y ago

qayxc 5y ago

> Those may be violations too. That it is a common practice does not turn it into a non-violation. I'm not disputing that. What I'm asking is, why is this particular 0.1% small snippets case such a big deal all of a sudden, when it obviously IS common practice (within the bounds of small code snippets)?

alok-g 5y ago
You are right in asking that question. What just happens that when there are thousands of small violators, it's not easy for lawsuits to proceed. When there's a central entity involved, Github in this case, there is someone discrete to be challenged or talked about. What Github has done is that they have not claimed rights over the generated code, and have passed on the responsibility to the developer/entity using the generated code. In other words, they are supplying tool that can make copies, not necessarily violating the copyright themselves {Foonote 1}. So the Betamax ruling can come into play here, AFAIK. What's thereby needed is that the developers now need to be educated about it, which is what the articles like the OP will end up doing. The developers often aren't well-educated about this stuff themselves, and presume that using generated code is just fine. See how I was downvoted here, as an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27735484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27735484 {Footnote 1}: Whether the Github CoPilot model itself is violating copyrights is another matter. If the training data has included AGPL-licensed code, even that may be an violation. However, several other licenses would not be violated till the model is "distributed".
- qayxc 5y ago
  Good and important point about educating developers. Maybe it goes even further and similarly to planned EU regulations, products based on black-box AI models need to have documented behaviour. So the documentation needs to include explicit hints about generated code being unsuitable for clean room engineering and has to be considered "tainted" one way or the other. I don't worry about verbatim reproductions at all, because results of that nature can easily be filtered out if need be (or be annotated with the proper reference). I'd expect a company that also runs the 2nd biggest web search engine to be able to pull that off with ease.