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Copilot was made from stealing code on Github, ignoring the licenses set on repos such as e.g GPLv2, using AI as a trick to license-launder code. Copilot has a

Copilot was made from stealing code on Github, ignoring the licenses set on repos such as e.g GPLv2, using AI as a trick to license-launder code. Copilot has announced their plans to become a paid service. So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company.

grp000 5y ago
I think a lot of artists and content creators would also like a word.
elviswolcott 5y ago
While I agree with your concerns about licensing and copilot, this criticism doesn't seem particularly relevant to the article that was shared.
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  IMO any place where Copilot is mentioned is a relevant place to put this. I don't know how anyone working in software can just turn a blind eye to shit like this. Anyone who uses Copilot is implicitly endorsing this theft. We have a duty as practitioners in the industry to call it out when we see something wrong. If even devs aren't calling bullshit on Copilot, the media won't care, courts won't care, and it will be declared legal, and future theft will be normalized. Its ridiculous how we all see the big tech companies doing various kinds of terrible shit and then the next new shiny thing comes along and everyone forgets all about it? Are you goldfish? What will it take to get someone to actually give a shit and stop supporting this kind of product/behavior?
  - fraktl 5y ago
    > Anyone who uses Copilot is implicitly endorsing this theft. Just like you're endorsing being sponsored and effectively stealing GitHub's bandwith? :) > We have a duty as practitioners in the industry to call it out when we see something wrong. It's wrong both ways. You accepted the service from GitHub, the free one where you get to open your account, host your code, share it etc. What exactly did you expect? To be served for free for your entire lifetime? Please, get off the moral highground. You ate the devil fruit, now you're whining about it. You should be smart enough to know that this kind of whining will get you nowhere. Just quit.
    - zaptheimpaler 5y ago
      Basically you are saying any product thats free should be able to break the law arbitrarily? Google can decide to post your all email online, your location history for all time, your photos and you would be ok with that because its free? The undoubtedly free DNS server you use can leak all your requests too? You're ok with that? Yes its free, no they did not tell me or ask for my permission before using the code in this way. Free does not give them the right to break existing laws and licenses. Its pretty simple.
      - mariusor 5y ago
        However you did give them permission to use your code by the fact that you acceded to their terms and conditions[1] when you created an account. IANAL, I don't know if this section would hold to scrutiny in a court of law, but I'm pretty sure this is what their legal team considers to cover them when it comes to training Copilot on code hosted with them. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...
        steerablesafe 5y ago
        People routinely share code on Github that is not owned or at least not fully owned by them, so they can't really rely only on the ToS.
        mariusor 5y ago
        See one paragraph above what I initially linked. They cover that also.
        steerablesafe 5y ago
        IANAL, but that is not my reading. They cover "Your Content" with the license grant, but not "any Content". The user still has the right to post "any Content" if they have the appropriate license to do so, but obviously they can't grant additional licenses to content the user doesn't own. In my understanding your reading is that users uploading code that they don't own the copyright to, but otherwise have the right to copy through a license, are in violation with the ToS in general. My reading is that the license grant only applies to "Your Content" as defined in the ToS, and otherwise users are free to upload code with permissive license and it _does not grant_ additional licenses to Github.
kangalioo 5y ago
While I see how Copilot's data gathering can be considered unethical, in the end I ask myself, does it matter? Would it have been of any concrete advantage to open-source programmers if Copilot hadn't used their source code? I can't think of any
- tluyben2 5y ago
  Well, if you chose a viral license like the GPL, you do not do that to have your code and knowledge being reused in a non viral (possibly closed source) licensed solution. So this is a fundamental issue at least GPL minded authors will definitely mind and fight against.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    If you want to control knowledge you need a patent, not a copyright license. (And the design of copilot is an attempt to extract only knowledge.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
fraktl 5y ago
So what you're saying is that you have the right to host your code for free, to download it from GitHub for free (no bandwith paid) and to behave like new-age Robin Hood when it comes to being offended because the very same company use that code - not to run it, but analyze it. Stop being entitled, it's seriously hard to participate in any kind of progress with offendable cauliflowers like you.
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  No I am happy to pay for it, and have paid for github in the past in fact. That doesn’t mean they can change the deal on what free hosting means with out any notice or method to opt out. Paid user’s public repos were not spared from Copilot either.
- RandomBK 5y ago
  Conversely, the generous olive branch of free hosting is not a blank check that allows GitHub to use the hosted code for any purpose, especially when that purpose wasn't made clear as part of the terms of the original free hosting offer. When I uploaded my code to GitHub, it was done so with the understanding that in exchange for the hosting and bandwidth, GitHub was permitted to use the code in a set of limited ways, as spelled out in their terms of service. I understood that I was contributing to building and establishing GitHub's brand as the go-to place for open source collaboration, a brand which they have undoubtedly benefited from. With Copilot, GitHub has extended that use in a way that was not made clear during that initial contract. Regardless of the legality of this change, it's normal and expected for some users to be "offended". This isn't "being entitled", but a legitimate response to what many perceive as a violation of the norms of this industry. That doesn't even get to the ambiguous legal questions involved, particularly with licenses that go beyond the typical MIT/GPL licenses. Based on GitHub's statements, it sounds like any public repo was fair game. What does this mean in the context of AGPL and other more restrictive licenses?
- lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
  The hosting of open source code on GitHub is not some completely selfless act on their part. GitHub's value proposition to commercial users is in part contributed to by the fact it is used by a lot of open source projects and for solo or hobby projects, thus breeding familiarity with the platform.
onion2k 5y ago
So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company. This is just business as usual for tech companies though. How many Silicon Valley businesses built their products on top of open source projects without contributing much back? Heck.. how many YC companies do that? When you see vital open source projects like OpenSSL struggling to raise more than a few tens of thousands in donations (it only continues through OSF contracting work), and libraries like Svelte barely clearing $30k, when you know they're used by Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc you can't be that surprised when companies do the same thing on a larger scale. The entire tech industry and all the multi-trillion and multi-billion dollar unicorn businesses that have billionaire founders and millionaire developers working at them fall under the description of "would not be possible without public, open-source code" and "will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data." We can't reasonably claim there's anything wrong with a company building a product on the back of open source work when literally all of us do that as well. The only difference with Copilot is scale.
- yreg 5y ago
  Shaming companies for using OpenSSL for free without any strings attached seems to go against the idea of free software.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    No part of any open source license says I have to like companies that extract billions in value from open source projects without contributing back to the project. My opinion is simply that once you get to a few million in revenue putting a few thousand back in to the code that got you there is a decent thing to do, and if you don't then you're not very nice. The fact that the license allows you to do this is great; the fact that people actually do is not.
    - drran 5y ago
      GPL asks to release back changes to code made by a company, for which the company paid already, i.e. it's almost zero price for the company, and just look how much companies are afraid to donate zero ($0) worth of code back to the opensource project and prefer to pirate it instead, including such mega-rich companies as M$.
FeepingCreature 5y ago
Copilot generally (excepting rare cases where it produces snippets verbatim) does not steal code. The GPL restricts distribution, not usage. And (to my knowledge) no open-source license restricts learning from code. I cannot see anyone who doesn't want others to learn from their code ever release code as open-source.
- toxik 5y ago
  I as an open source author absolutely do not want Microsoft to get richer from using my code, code that I contributed or published for the benefits of other developers. They took my work, removed my name and trained an advanced pattern matching technique to try to make code like mine and then sell it. It’s so obviously ethically questionable it’s insane. Developers are absolutely pissed about this, and rightfully so.
  - nojito 5y ago
    Then you should have never released it. Fairly straight forward solution to your very unique problem.
    - toxik 5y ago
      The license for my software was written in a world where AI was not being used to replace me with my own code. Whatever license was chosen, was chosen to deal with the questions and issues known at the time. It’s such a BS argument to say “your license didn’t anticipate the future, it’s your fault.” No, that’s not how law works. Furthermore, law is not ethics. I said it’s ethically questionable because that’s what matters. Not if a court will find Microsoft guilty of some kind of overreach. Anybody with even passing knowledge of law knows this, so please, stuff it somewhere.
      - FeepingCreature 5y ago
        > It’s such a BS argument to say “your license didn’t anticipate the future, it’s your fault.” No, that’s not how law works. It literally is though. You don't get to change your mind on an agreement because something happened that you didn't expect.
icebraining 5y ago
Which repo marked as GPLv2 has been used on Copilot? I think the trouble is that some repos marked as MIT/BSD actually contain GPL code. Not that this excuses GitHub/Microsoft in any way, this was an obvious outcome and they're morally and legally responsible.
- xomateix 5y ago
  According to GitHub support, they didn't exclude any repo based on the license: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769440
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Honestly, I think all this talk about GPL vs MIT/BSD is a red herring. It doesn't matter whether the code is GPL or MIT or BSD. If Copilot reproduces it in your codebase, you're violating the license anyway - almost all FLOSS licenses carry an attribution requirement, which Copilot does not and can not reproduce[0]. The difference between GPL and MIT is whether you have to release your source code, or just add a blurb in README. It's a big one, but it's downstream from the core problem: with Copilot, you won't even know when you're violating some license - much less what to do about it. -- [0] - The whole point of a DNN model is to pre-mix the inputs in training, so that responses to queries are cheap and fast. This comes at the cost of making it impossible to reverse-query the model, so the only way for Copilot to give correct attribution would be to take its output and run a search on the training data, which would kill all the costs savings they won by using a neural network.
- ivanbakel 5y ago
  As the other commenter pointed out, Copilot has ingested all the public code on GitHub, including GPL code. And as this famous example[0] shows, the GAN is able to reproduce what is unquestionably copyrighted material from those repos. [0]: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
qiqitori 5y ago
The following is just my opinion, and I'm not that hard-set in case anyone has any nice arguments. Generally, when you (for example) use GANs to learn from (copyrighted) images and generate new images, I see no reason why those new images should inherit any copyrights from the original image if the resulting images look sufficiently different. (Obviously, if you just train on 1000 images of Mickey Mouse, you'll get mostly Mickey Mouse, and you wouldn't get the copyright.) Humans work the same way -- artists train on existing images or subjects/etc., and unless they produce something that looks similar to an existing image, they get the copyright. In other words, I don't think training on copyrighted code violates copyright (UNLESS the license explicitly disallows that; maybe there will be licenses for that soon). However, if generated code is too similar to existing code, then that could be a copyright violation. In other words, the user is responsible to make sure they aren't violating any copyrights from their usage of Copilot. It may be useful to build plagiarism checkers for this purpose. (Or maybe they already exist.) If you use Copilot, I recommend keeping track of things that were generated automatically, just so you can go back to change those components if necessary.
- drran 5y ago
  "AI training" is not a "training" in human sense. It's algorithm. > In other words, I don't think using of an algorithm on copyrighted code violates copyright It does.
  - sweetheart 5y ago
    Do you have a link discussing how it does? Ive only seen an article from a lawyer explaining how it doesn’t, in their professional opinion.
    - sombremesa 5y ago
      Regardless of the nuances of that point, GitHub copilot violates copyright because the content it was trained on still lives in it, and you can get it to spit it out verbatim. If I were a master artist, my existence wouldn’t violate copyright, but I would certainly be violating it every time I chose to reproduce a copyrighted work for a client.
arvindamirtaa 5y ago
I'm open to new perspectives. But here's where I stand so far. If I learn programming from a book that is copyrighted and use a small snippet (for example, how to do a particular kind of sort) from it in my own program, am I violating a copyright?
- ekster 5y ago
  Does the license of the book say that if you copy that snippet you can, but should provide attribution, and you don’t?
- drran 5y ago
  Read the book copyright statement and license. Some books have separate license for examples. However, if you copy an example from a book into a code, then very often it's fair use, but if you copy the same example from a book into your own book, then very often it's a copyright infringement, unless explicitly allowed by the book license.
tffgg 5y ago
Well, sue them if you think they stole it, and see if you are right
sweetheart 5y ago
Using the word “extract” seems misleading to me. It has connotations of removing something, or exploiting scarcity. When we extract water from the Earth, there is less there for others to use. But in this case nothing is being removed from the code they trained on. I don’t mean to have the argument devolve into mere semantics, but I really think the use of that word demonstrates an assumption about the issue: people are perceiving a loss to the folks whose code was trained upon.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Turning the free contributions of an enthusiastic community and turning it into private, closed source wealth is a bit of a Microsoft tradition. Arguably Bill Gates did exactly the same thing with Microsoft; it was picked by IBM specifically because the community recommended it, a community despised by Gates who thought they were “stealing” from him.

grp000 5y ago

I think a lot of artists and content creators would also like a word.

elviswolcott 5y ago

While I agree with your concerns about licensing and copilot, this criticism doesn't seem particularly relevant to the article that was shared.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago
IMO any place where Copilot is mentioned is a relevant place to put this. I don't know how anyone working in software can just turn a blind eye to shit like this. Anyone who uses Copilot is implicitly endorsing this theft. We have a duty as practitioners in the industry to call it out when we see something wrong. If even devs aren't calling bullshit on Copilot, the media won't care, courts won't care, and it will be declared legal, and future theft will be normalized. Its ridiculous how we all see the big tech companies doing various kinds of terrible shit and then the next new shiny thing comes along and everyone forgets all about it? Are you goldfish? What will it take to get someone to actually give a shit and stop supporting this kind of product/behavior?
- fraktl 5y ago
  > Anyone who uses Copilot is implicitly endorsing this theft. Just like you're endorsing being sponsored and effectively stealing GitHub's bandwith? :) > We have a duty as practitioners in the industry to call it out when we see something wrong. It's wrong both ways. You accepted the service from GitHub, the free one where you get to open your account, host your code, share it etc. What exactly did you expect? To be served for free for your entire lifetime? Please, get off the moral highground. You ate the devil fruit, now you're whining about it. You should be smart enough to know that this kind of whining will get you nowhere. Just quit.
  - zaptheimpaler 5y ago
    Basically you are saying any product thats free should be able to break the law arbitrarily? Google can decide to post your all email online, your location history for all time, your photos and you would be ok with that because its free? The undoubtedly free DNS server you use can leak all your requests too? You're ok with that? Yes its free, no they did not tell me or ask for my permission before using the code in this way. Free does not give them the right to break existing laws and licenses. Its pretty simple.
    - mariusor 5y ago
      However you did give them permission to use your code by the fact that you acceded to their terms and conditions[1] when you created an account. IANAL, I don't know if this section would hold to scrutiny in a court of law, but I'm pretty sure this is what their legal team considers to cover them when it comes to training Copilot on code hosted with them. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...
      - steerablesafe 5y ago
        People routinely share code on Github that is not owned or at least not fully owned by them, so they can't really rely only on the ToS.
        mariusor 5y ago
        See one paragraph above what I initially linked. They cover that also.
        steerablesafe 5y ago
        IANAL, but that is not my reading. They cover "Your Content" with the license grant, but not "any Content". The user still has the right to post "any Content" if they have the appropriate license to do so, but obviously they can't grant additional licenses to content the user doesn't own. In my understanding your reading is that users uploading code that they don't own the copyright to, but otherwise have the right to copy through a license, are in violation with the ToS in general. My reading is that the license grant only applies to "Your Content" as defined in the ToS, and otherwise users are free to upload code with permissive license and it _does not grant_ additional licenses to Github.

kangalioo 5y ago

While I see how Copilot's data gathering can be considered unethical, in the end I ask myself, does it matter? Would it have been of any concrete advantage to open-source programmers if Copilot hadn't used their source code? I can't think of any

tluyben2 5y ago
Well, if you chose a viral license like the GPL, you do not do that to have your code and knowledge being reused in a non viral (possibly closed source) licensed solution. So this is a fundamental issue at least GPL minded authors will definitely mind and fight against.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  If you want to control knowledge you need a patent, not a copyright license. (And the design of copilot is an attempt to extract only knowledge.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

fraktl 5y ago

So what you're saying is that you have the right to host your code for free, to download it from GitHub for free (no bandwith paid) and to behave like new-age Robin Hood when it comes to being offended because the very same company use that code - not to run it, but analyze it. Stop being entitled, it's seriously hard to participate in any kind of progress with offendable cauliflowers like you.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago
No I am happy to pay for it, and have paid for github in the past in fact. That doesn’t mean they can change the deal on what free hosting means with out any notice or method to opt out. Paid user’s public repos were not spared from Copilot either.
RandomBK 5y ago
Conversely, the generous olive branch of free hosting is not a blank check that allows GitHub to use the hosted code for any purpose, especially when that purpose wasn't made clear as part of the terms of the original free hosting offer. When I uploaded my code to GitHub, it was done so with the understanding that in exchange for the hosting and bandwidth, GitHub was permitted to use the code in a set of limited ways, as spelled out in their terms of service. I understood that I was contributing to building and establishing GitHub's brand as the go-to place for open source collaboration, a brand which they have undoubtedly benefited from. With Copilot, GitHub has extended that use in a way that was not made clear during that initial contract. Regardless of the legality of this change, it's normal and expected for some users to be "offended". This isn't "being entitled", but a legitimate response to what many perceive as a violation of the norms of this industry. That doesn't even get to the ambiguous legal questions involved, particularly with licenses that go beyond the typical MIT/GPL licenses. Based on GitHub's statements, it sounds like any public repo was fair game. What does this mean in the context of AGPL and other more restrictive licenses?
lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
The hosting of open source code on GitHub is not some completely selfless act on their part. GitHub's value proposition to commercial users is in part contributed to by the fact it is used by a lot of open source projects and for solo or hobby projects, thus breeding familiarity with the platform.

onion2k 5y ago

So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company. This is just business as usual for tech companies though. How many Silicon Valley businesses built their products on top of open source projects without contributing much back? Heck.. how many YC companies do that? When you see vital open source projects like OpenSSL struggling to raise more than a few tens of thousands in donations (it only continues through OSF contracting work), and libraries like Svelte barely clearing $30k, when you know they're used by Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc you can't be that surprised when companies do the same thing on a larger scale. The entire tech industry and all the multi-trillion and multi-billion dollar unicorn businesses that have billionaire founders and millionaire developers working at them fall under the description of "would not be possible without public, open-source code" and "will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data." We can't reasonably claim there's anything wrong with a company building a product on the back of open source work when literally all of us do that as well. The only difference with Copilot is scale.

yreg 5y ago
Shaming companies for using OpenSSL for free without any strings attached seems to go against the idea of free software.
- onion2k 5y ago
  No part of any open source license says I have to like companies that extract billions in value from open source projects without contributing back to the project. My opinion is simply that once you get to a few million in revenue putting a few thousand back in to the code that got you there is a decent thing to do, and if you don't then you're not very nice. The fact that the license allows you to do this is great; the fact that people actually do is not.
  - drran 5y ago
    GPL asks to release back changes to code made by a company, for which the company paid already, i.e. it's almost zero price for the company, and just look how much companies are afraid to donate zero ($0) worth of code back to the opensource project and prefer to pirate it instead, including such mega-rich companies as M$.

FeepingCreature 5y ago

Copilot generally (excepting rare cases where it produces snippets verbatim) does not steal code. The GPL restricts distribution, not usage. And (to my knowledge) no open-source license restricts learning from code. I cannot see anyone who doesn't want others to learn from their code ever release code as open-source.

toxik 5y ago
I as an open source author absolutely do not want Microsoft to get richer from using my code, code that I contributed or published for the benefits of other developers. They took my work, removed my name and trained an advanced pattern matching technique to try to make code like mine and then sell it. It’s so obviously ethically questionable it’s insane. Developers are absolutely pissed about this, and rightfully so.
- nojito 5y ago
  Then you should have never released it. Fairly straight forward solution to your very unique problem.
  - toxik 5y ago
    The license for my software was written in a world where AI was not being used to replace me with my own code. Whatever license was chosen, was chosen to deal with the questions and issues known at the time. It’s such a BS argument to say “your license didn’t anticipate the future, it’s your fault.” No, that’s not how law works. Furthermore, law is not ethics. I said it’s ethically questionable because that’s what matters. Not if a court will find Microsoft guilty of some kind of overreach. Anybody with even passing knowledge of law knows this, so please, stuff it somewhere.
    - FeepingCreature 5y ago
      > It’s such a BS argument to say “your license didn’t anticipate the future, it’s your fault.” No, that’s not how law works. It literally is though. You don't get to change your mind on an agreement because something happened that you didn't expect.

icebraining 5y ago

Which repo marked as GPLv2 has been used on Copilot? I think the trouble is that some repos marked as MIT/BSD actually contain GPL code. Not that this excuses GitHub/Microsoft in any way, this was an obvious outcome and they're morally and legally responsible.

xomateix 5y ago
According to GitHub support, they didn't exclude any repo based on the license: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769440
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Honestly, I think all this talk about GPL vs MIT/BSD is a red herring. It doesn't matter whether the code is GPL or MIT or BSD. If Copilot reproduces it in your codebase, you're violating the license anyway - almost all FLOSS licenses carry an attribution requirement, which Copilot does not and can not reproduce[0]. The difference between GPL and MIT is whether you have to release your source code, or just add a blurb in README. It's a big one, but it's downstream from the core problem: with Copilot, you won't even know when you're violating some license - much less what to do about it. -- [0] - The whole point of a DNN model is to pre-mix the inputs in training, so that responses to queries are cheap and fast. This comes at the cost of making it impossible to reverse-query the model, so the only way for Copilot to give correct attribution would be to take its output and run a search on the training data, which would kill all the costs savings they won by using a neural network.
ivanbakel 5y ago
As the other commenter pointed out, Copilot has ingested all the public code on GitHub, including GPL code. And as this famous example[0] shows, the GAN is able to reproduce what is unquestionably copyrighted material from those repos. [0]: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

qiqitori 5y ago

The following is just my opinion, and I'm not that hard-set in case anyone has any nice arguments. Generally, when you (for example) use GANs to learn from (copyrighted) images and generate new images, I see no reason why those new images should inherit any copyrights from the original image if the resulting images look sufficiently different. (Obviously, if you just train on 1000 images of Mickey Mouse, you'll get mostly Mickey Mouse, and you wouldn't get the copyright.) Humans work the same way -- artists train on existing images or subjects/etc., and unless they produce something that looks similar to an existing image, they get the copyright. In other words, I don't think training on copyrighted code violates copyright (UNLESS the license explicitly disallows that; maybe there will be licenses for that soon). However, if generated code is too similar to existing code, then that could be a copyright violation. In other words, the user is responsible to make sure they aren't violating any copyrights from their usage of Copilot. It may be useful to build plagiarism checkers for this purpose. (Or maybe they already exist.) If you use Copilot, I recommend keeping track of things that were generated automatically, just so you can go back to change those components if necessary.

drran 5y ago
"AI training" is not a "training" in human sense. It's algorithm. > In other words, I don't think using of an algorithm on copyrighted code violates copyright It does.
- sweetheart 5y ago
  Do you have a link discussing how it does? Ive only seen an article from a lawyer explaining how it doesn’t, in their professional opinion.
  - sombremesa 5y ago
    Regardless of the nuances of that point, GitHub copilot violates copyright because the content it was trained on still lives in it, and you can get it to spit it out verbatim. If I were a master artist, my existence wouldn’t violate copyright, but I would certainly be violating it every time I chose to reproduce a copyrighted work for a client.

arvindamirtaa 5y ago

I'm open to new perspectives. But here's where I stand so far. If I learn programming from a book that is copyrighted and use a small snippet (for example, how to do a particular kind of sort) from it in my own program, am I violating a copyright?

ekster 5y ago
Does the license of the book say that if you copy that snippet you can, but should provide attribution, and you don’t?
drran 5y ago
Read the book copyright statement and license. Some books have separate license for examples. However, if you copy an example from a book into a code, then very often it's fair use, but if you copy the same example from a book into your own book, then very often it's a copyright infringement, unless explicitly allowed by the book license.

tffgg 5y ago

Well, sue them if you think they stole it, and see if you are right

sweetheart 5y ago

Using the word “extract” seems misleading to me. It has connotations of removing something, or exploiting scarcity. When we extract water from the Earth, there is less there for others to use. But in this case nothing is being removed from the code they trained on. I don’t mean to have the argument devolve into mere semantics, but I really think the use of that word demonstrates an assumption about the issue: people are perceiving a loss to the folks whose code was trained upon.

ashtonkem 5y ago

Turning the free contributions of an enthusiastic community and turning it into private, closed source wealth is a bit of a Microsoft tradition. Arguably Bill Gates did exactly the same thing with Microsoft; it was picked by IBM specifically because the community recommended it, a community despised by Gates who thought they were “stealing” from him.