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A lot of the comments around Copilot seems to be under the impression that courts care about how you "write" your code. I think this naive at best, why would t

A lot of the comments around Copilot seems to be under the impression that courts care about how you "write" your code. I think this naive at best, why would they and why would the law? If you have a piece of code that would be infringing if you wrote it in Emacs. How can it not be infringing if it was written by VSCode and Copilot? I just don't see how any court would hand down such a judgment. What I do think that Github could get away with, is not being liable for copyright infringement in my code if I used Copilot and it gave me some code that infringed. But that would just move that liability to me. Good for Github, not so good for me.

darig 5y ago
> If you have a piece of code that would be infringing if you wrote it in Emacs. How can it not be infringing if it was written by VSCode and Copilot? I just don't see how any court would hand down such a judgment. If Emacs had Copilot, and Copilot could completely take over all decision making regarding the design and construction of the code, and could reproduce an entire copyrighted work by repetitively hitting the same key over and over, then would a stanley nickle be worth more or less than a leprechaun?
mjg59 5y ago
It can't be violating if it's not a derived work, and if courts conclude that the output of an ML model isn't derivative of its training material (which is, I understand, the current situation in the US) then it doesn't matter how similar it looks to some other code.
- einarfd 5y ago
  A blanket "the ML model's output is not at derivative of the input" from a legal perspective. Seems wrong to me, for some types of model sure that might right. For example if you train a model on recognition pictures of houses, then sure even if the pictures you used where copyrighted, the output of that model, wouldn't be. But that that generalize to one that created pictures of houses, and started outputing copies of the input pictures, that I would be surprised if was OK. So I'll agree that for some models the output isn't a legally derived from the input, but all, no I don't think that is true. If running the data through a ML model, removes the copyright. Then we could always train models with specific input to remove copyright on that data, and we follow through on that. We could easily remove copyright on anything, and that would, if the courts upheld that. Be the death kneel for copyright. Can't really see that happening. But maybe that is just my limited imagination.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    The supposed blanked "training ML is fair use, and the output of ML is not a derivative work" precedent is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.#Second_Circuit_appeal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,... Maybe I can't read, but it's just not there. This ruling giving precedent to train generative ML systems with any source material seems to be nothing more than a shared fiction entertained by the ML industry.
joe_the_user 5y ago
A lot of the comments around Copilot seems to be under the impression that courts care about how you "write" your code. This. Ianal but I feel pretty sure that the content of the work is what is in question, not how it was created with regards to copyright. I think wikipedia more or less says this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Limitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Limitat...

darig 5y ago

> If you have a piece of code that would be infringing if you wrote it in Emacs. How can it not be infringing if it was written by VSCode and Copilot? I just don't see how any court would hand down such a judgment. If Emacs had Copilot, and Copilot could completely take over all decision making regarding the design and construction of the code, and could reproduce an entire copyrighted work by repetitively hitting the same key over and over, then would a stanley nickle be worth more or less than a leprechaun?

mjg59 5y ago

It can't be violating if it's not a derived work, and if courts conclude that the output of an ML model isn't derivative of its training material (which is, I understand, the current situation in the US) then it doesn't matter how similar it looks to some other code.

einarfd 5y ago
A blanket "the ML model's output is not at derivative of the input" from a legal perspective. Seems wrong to me, for some types of model sure that might right. For example if you train a model on recognition pictures of houses, then sure even if the pictures you used where copyrighted, the output of that model, wouldn't be. But that that generalize to one that created pictures of houses, and started outputing copies of the input pictures, that I would be surprised if was OK. So I'll agree that for some models the output isn't a legally derived from the input, but all, no I don't think that is true. If running the data through a ML model, removes the copyright. Then we could always train models with specific input to remove copyright on that data, and we follow through on that. We could easily remove copyright on anything, and that would, if the courts upheld that. Be the death kneel for copyright. Can't really see that happening. But maybe that is just my limited imagination.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  The supposed blanked "training ML is fair use, and the output of ML is not a derivative work" precedent is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.#Second_Circuit_appeal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,... Maybe I can't read, but it's just not there. This ruling giving precedent to train generative ML systems with any source material seems to be nothing more than a shared fiction entertained by the ML industry.

joe_the_user 5y ago

A lot of the comments around Copilot seems to be under the impression that courts care about how you "write" your code. This. Ianal but I feel pretty sure that the content of the work is what is in question, not how it was created with regards to copyright. I think wikipedia more or less says this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Limitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Limitat...