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It would be nice if we moved from a copyright discussion to an ethical one, since it could be years until the law is even tested. Is it ethical to do this, whe

It would be nice if we moved from a copyright discussion to an ethical one, since it could be years until the law is even tested. Is it ethical to do this, when some licenses are clearly chosen because of e.g. attribution or sharing improvements? Did Microsoft/GitHub consider the ethical implications, for example a chilling effect on code being open sourced in future (i.e. people choosing not to open source stuff so it doesn't get gobbled up by Copilot et al.)?

lindenksv85 5y ago
I think it’s important to recognize that most ML models will not be built in top of copyleft material. It will mostly use data that we as users have voluntarily provided to someone at some point and to which that platform now claims ownership. So we need to think long and hard about whether or not we believe any of these models should receive any copyright protection at all and in a much broader context. I think if we insist on claiming that copilot is copyrightable itself and should be under GPL then we have totally capitulated with respect to all other use cases in a way that actually further protects incumbent advantage for large companies and which deprived everyone else of any benefit or remuneration for their own data. You’re basically saying it’s ok for companies to privatize the collective knowledge of all of humanity. I’m not on board with that.
- guitarbill 5y ago
  I don't know if by "You’re basically saying" you mean me specifically, but if you do, you're dead wrong. I'm not ok with this at all. However, I'm not so stupid to think me, as a non-IP lawyer can make sense of the current legal situation (which is what copyright is; law) or even propose new laws. However, as a dev I can think about it and say "to me, this is immoral and unethical", and refuse to use Copilot, not work for any company that uses Copilot, not use GitHub/Microsoft products, pull code from GitHub (if I had any), and decide not to open source stuff in future. Ethics has always been underemphasised in software compared to other engineering disciplines. Generally, non-technical people are (more) impacted by ML, but in this case it's us as developers and our open source communities. So I hope devs will give it some thought this time. And if this leads to devs thinking about ML more carefully in general, great. Things don't have to be illegal to be unethical.
  - lindenksv85 5y ago
    I didn’t mean you specifically. I think the ethical conversation is more interesting but I also think that people will feel different if, say, the Linux Foundation releases its own version of copilot and it’s not just one company reaping the rewards of all that code. And I’d like to make it easy for other competitors to do exactly that. It will be harder for them to do that if we think that the models themselves are copyrightable. I don’t think something like copilot is going to make anyone think twice 5 yrs from now any more than we think twice about something like google autocomplete or google search thumbnail images. I think stuff like copilot if properly tuned won’t be providing a substitute for whole GPL projects. I don’t think OSS communities will be damaged by this in any way. In fact those same oss communities are going to be some of the biggest users of these sorts of tools just like they use stackoverflow today.
  - erhk 5y ago
    Github is not required to open source your work
kube-system 5y ago
The ethical discussion certainly has its merits, but the legal discussion is very relevant for those of us who do not want to be part of the legal test case.
dmitrygr 5y ago
I wonder if one could enforce a license's "this code may not be used to train any ML model of any sort for any reason without prior permission".
- progbits 5y ago
  I've been wondering the same though found basically no discussion on this topic. Let's ignore whether GPL or whatever license allows GitHub to do this - let the lawyers sort this out. Instead we should focus on whether it is possible to legally prevent such behavior via license. In other words, where is my GPLv4 with anti-ml clause?
  - EamonnMR 5y ago
    FSF and SFC and OSI if you're listening, this would be very nice.
  - Zambyte 5y ago
    I personally hope that a new GPL would not be anti-ml. It's a very cool and interesting technology imo. I think a new GPL should be explicit and say that code produced my a machine learning algorithm is trained on GPLv4 code should remain under GPLv4 or a compatible license.
    - EamonnMR 5y ago
      That would have the same effect, but is slightly nicer.
- ghoward 5y ago
  I made a series of licenses that attempt to do that while still remaining within current legal bounds. https://yzena.com/licenses/ https://yzena.com/licenses/
- mr_toad 5y ago
  You can’t make a license that takes away fair use. The MPAA and RIAA would really love to be able to do that, but they can’t. To the extent that training a model is fair use, it will always trump your license.
erhk 5y ago
You can opensource with Git without using github. You can self host.
- xdennis 5y ago
  If it's publically available, there's no guaranty that Microsoft won't gobble up your code.

lindenksv85 5y ago

I think it’s important to recognize that most ML models will not be built in top of copyleft material. It will mostly use data that we as users have voluntarily provided to someone at some point and to which that platform now claims ownership. So we need to think long and hard about whether or not we believe any of these models should receive any copyright protection at all and in a much broader context. I think if we insist on claiming that copilot is copyrightable itself and should be under GPL then we have totally capitulated with respect to all other use cases in a way that actually further protects incumbent advantage for large companies and which deprived everyone else of any benefit or remuneration for their own data. You’re basically saying it’s ok for companies to privatize the collective knowledge of all of humanity. I’m not on board with that.

guitarbill 5y ago
I don't know if by "You’re basically saying" you mean me specifically, but if you do, you're dead wrong. I'm not ok with this at all. However, I'm not so stupid to think me, as a non-IP lawyer can make sense of the current legal situation (which is what copyright is; law) or even propose new laws. However, as a dev I can think about it and say "to me, this is immoral and unethical", and refuse to use Copilot, not work for any company that uses Copilot, not use GitHub/Microsoft products, pull code from GitHub (if I had any), and decide not to open source stuff in future. Ethics has always been underemphasised in software compared to other engineering disciplines. Generally, non-technical people are (more) impacted by ML, but in this case it's us as developers and our open source communities. So I hope devs will give it some thought this time. And if this leads to devs thinking about ML more carefully in general, great. Things don't have to be illegal to be unethical.
- lindenksv85 5y ago
  I didn’t mean you specifically. I think the ethical conversation is more interesting but I also think that people will feel different if, say, the Linux Foundation releases its own version of copilot and it’s not just one company reaping the rewards of all that code. And I’d like to make it easy for other competitors to do exactly that. It will be harder for them to do that if we think that the models themselves are copyrightable. I don’t think something like copilot is going to make anyone think twice 5 yrs from now any more than we think twice about something like google autocomplete or google search thumbnail images. I think stuff like copilot if properly tuned won’t be providing a substitute for whole GPL projects. I don’t think OSS communities will be damaged by this in any way. In fact those same oss communities are going to be some of the biggest users of these sorts of tools just like they use stackoverflow today.
- erhk 5y ago
  Github is not required to open source your work

kube-system 5y ago

The ethical discussion certainly has its merits, but the legal discussion is very relevant for those of us who do not want to be part of the legal test case.

dmitrygr 5y ago

I wonder if one could enforce a license's "this code may not be used to train any ML model of any sort for any reason without prior permission".

progbits 5y ago
I've been wondering the same though found basically no discussion on this topic. Let's ignore whether GPL or whatever license allows GitHub to do this - let the lawyers sort this out. Instead we should focus on whether it is possible to legally prevent such behavior via license. In other words, where is my GPLv4 with anti-ml clause?
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  FSF and SFC and OSI if you're listening, this would be very nice.
- Zambyte 5y ago
  I personally hope that a new GPL would not be anti-ml. It's a very cool and interesting technology imo. I think a new GPL should be explicit and say that code produced my a machine learning algorithm is trained on GPLv4 code should remain under GPLv4 or a compatible license.
  - EamonnMR 5y ago
    That would have the same effect, but is slightly nicer.
ghoward 5y ago
I made a series of licenses that attempt to do that while still remaining within current legal bounds. https://yzena.com/licenses/ https://yzena.com/licenses/
mr_toad 5y ago
You can’t make a license that takes away fair use. The MPAA and RIAA would really love to be able to do that, but they can’t. To the extent that training a model is fair use, it will always trump your license.

erhk 5y ago

You can opensource with Git without using github. You can self host.

xdennis 5y ago
If it's publically available, there's no guaranty that Microsoft won't gobble up your code.