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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 (co

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.
    - sweetheart 5y ago
      Okay but do any lawyers agree with you?
      - drran 5y ago
        Why not to ask them directly?
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Welcome to software engineering, where engineers have extremely strong and fixed opinions about all sorts of fields that are completely disconnected from software engineering.
  - drran 5y ago
    «A derivative work is based on a work that has already been copyrighted. The new work arises—or derives—from the previous work. If you own the copyright to a work, you need to be aware that you also have rights to derivative works. If you're considering incorporating someone else's work into your new work, you need to be aware that you may be violating the copyright to the original work.» https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-are-derivative-works-under-copyright-law https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-are-derivative-works...
xdennis 5y ago
> Humans work the same way This is the fundamental issue. They don't. You can't sneak a camera into a cinema saying "don't worry, it works just like human eyes". Neural nets aren't neurons.
- mikewhy 5y ago
  For a while, recording a movie was absolutely legal in Canada.
bluesign 5y ago
What about I train millions of tagged images, then when I write ‘mickey mouse’ it spits something very similar to ‘mickey mouse’? This is the what copilot does as far as I understand
- qiqitori 5y ago
  Out of the replies I got so far, I liked this one best. Unfortunately the story is off the front page already, so I doubt there will be much more discussion. In my view, artists work the same way. If you ask them to draw Mickey Mouse, they (maybe) will. It wouldn't be fair to say that they are infringing on Disney's copyright by storing images of Mickey Mouse in their brain. But their version of Mickey Mouse won't be copyrightable (unless they add parody/significant creativity etc.). If we perform an _exact_ simulation of a human brain such that it believes it is a human, how will copyright law work? (Maybe it will own the copyright and turning the simulation off would be robocide. Okay, enough sci-fi.) If we remove consciousness and all that from the simulation, will the copyright go to its creator? I saw in a couple other comments saying that machine learning is "just an algorithm"... But is machine learning sufficiently different from the way some parts of the human brain work to warrant being held to different standards? My opinion is that it's reasonably similar and should have the same privileges that humans enjoy -- learning from whatever's in sight that is not explicitly marked as "for authorized personnel only".
  - bluesign 5y ago
    Thanks for the answer, but here is a bit difference though in our understanding of law, I think if I draw Mickey Mouse now, it is derivative work. Disney can sue me. I think there should be some reasonable difference like trademark cases, people will not see it as Mickey Mouse. But I think eventually we are at level of what is the minimum required duplicate to define something as duplicate. (I think this is more of a problem of music, similar songs etc) I think main problem is we are not yet there (exact simulation of human brain), we are more like 'convince people to you are exact simulation of brain' stage. Also another problem here is 'self trained/directed' vs 'trained/directed by someone'. Imagine I have a human artist (never seen Mickey Mouse), and in front of me some Mickey Mouse art, if I am giving directions to draw a mouse, then saying make in cartoon style, then saying make ears bigger, etc. Till I get the Mickey Mouse reasonably similar, even maybe exactly to the pixel in front of me, is it copyright violation, I wouldn't maybe 100% yes, but I am very closer to that.
enumjorge 5y ago
> I don't think training on copyrighted code violates copyright It might not be illegal, but for a lot of us it feels unethical. IMO licenses should list what they allow versus what they forbid. In other words, if something isn’t explicitly allowed it should be assumed to be forbidden. We need similar protections for personal data too. Tech companies have gotten too used to ingesting data and profiting from it without asking for consent. I’m willing to bet that had GitHub asked repo owners whether GH could use their work to train a new product, most would have said no, much like what happened when Apple asked iOS users if they were ok with Facebook tracking them.
thereddaikon 5y ago
Looks like its just copy pasting in code from ingested repos to me https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
_ph_ 5y ago
I think the catch is, a human is considered a creative being, as in it can create new content which consequently is copyrighted to that human. An AI cannot - at least so far - not create create genuinely new content and also cannot assume copyright. If the copilot would have been trained on open source software e.g. to discover bugs, bad code style, or other things "learned" by analyzing existing code and using the results of this analysis as a metric for judging code, it wouldn't be a copyright problem. But creating new code based on what it "learned" is a much more difficult field, especially, if it is "quoting" so literally.
b3morales 5y ago
> 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). This was discussed on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740001 A new license saying "this license does not permit use in training an AI" won't have any effect, because the claim by the trainers is that they don't need to license the work in the first place. Unfortunately this is likely to be something that's only settled ad hoc in court.

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.
  - sweetheart 5y ago
    Okay but do any lawyers agree with you?
    - drran 5y ago
      Why not to ask them directly?
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Welcome to software engineering, where engineers have extremely strong and fixed opinions about all sorts of fields that are completely disconnected from software engineering.
- drran 5y ago
  «A derivative work is based on a work that has already been copyrighted. The new work arises—or derives—from the previous work. If you own the copyright to a work, you need to be aware that you also have rights to derivative works. If you're considering incorporating someone else's work into your new work, you need to be aware that you may be violating the copyright to the original work.» https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-are-derivative-works-under-copyright-law https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-are-derivative-works...

xdennis 5y ago

> Humans work the same way This is the fundamental issue. They don't. You can't sneak a camera into a cinema saying "don't worry, it works just like human eyes". Neural nets aren't neurons.

mikewhy 5y ago
For a while, recording a movie was absolutely legal in Canada.

bluesign 5y ago

What about I train millions of tagged images, then when I write ‘mickey mouse’ it spits something very similar to ‘mickey mouse’? This is the what copilot does as far as I understand

qiqitori 5y ago
Out of the replies I got so far, I liked this one best. Unfortunately the story is off the front page already, so I doubt there will be much more discussion. In my view, artists work the same way. If you ask them to draw Mickey Mouse, they (maybe) will. It wouldn't be fair to say that they are infringing on Disney's copyright by storing images of Mickey Mouse in their brain. But their version of Mickey Mouse won't be copyrightable (unless they add parody/significant creativity etc.). If we perform an _exact_ simulation of a human brain such that it believes it is a human, how will copyright law work? (Maybe it will own the copyright and turning the simulation off would be robocide. Okay, enough sci-fi.) If we remove consciousness and all that from the simulation, will the copyright go to its creator? I saw in a couple other comments saying that machine learning is "just an algorithm"... But is machine learning sufficiently different from the way some parts of the human brain work to warrant being held to different standards? My opinion is that it's reasonably similar and should have the same privileges that humans enjoy -- learning from whatever's in sight that is not explicitly marked as "for authorized personnel only".
- bluesign 5y ago
  Thanks for the answer, but here is a bit difference though in our understanding of law, I think if I draw Mickey Mouse now, it is derivative work. Disney can sue me. I think there should be some reasonable difference like trademark cases, people will not see it as Mickey Mouse. But I think eventually we are at level of what is the minimum required duplicate to define something as duplicate. (I think this is more of a problem of music, similar songs etc) I think main problem is we are not yet there (exact simulation of human brain), we are more like 'convince people to you are exact simulation of brain' stage. Also another problem here is 'self trained/directed' vs 'trained/directed by someone'. Imagine I have a human artist (never seen Mickey Mouse), and in front of me some Mickey Mouse art, if I am giving directions to draw a mouse, then saying make in cartoon style, then saying make ears bigger, etc. Till I get the Mickey Mouse reasonably similar, even maybe exactly to the pixel in front of me, is it copyright violation, I wouldn't maybe 100% yes, but I am very closer to that.

enumjorge 5y ago

> I don't think training on copyrighted code violates copyright It might not be illegal, but for a lot of us it feels unethical. IMO licenses should list what they allow versus what they forbid. In other words, if something isn’t explicitly allowed it should be assumed to be forbidden. We need similar protections for personal data too. Tech companies have gotten too used to ingesting data and profiting from it without asking for consent. I’m willing to bet that had GitHub asked repo owners whether GH could use their work to train a new product, most would have said no, much like what happened when Apple asked iOS users if they were ok with Facebook tracking them.

thereddaikon 5y ago

Looks like its just copy pasting in code from ingested repos to me https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

_ph_ 5y ago

I think the catch is, a human is considered a creative being, as in it can create new content which consequently is copyrighted to that human. An AI cannot - at least so far - not create create genuinely new content and also cannot assume copyright. If the copilot would have been trained on open source software e.g. to discover bugs, bad code style, or other things "learned" by analyzing existing code and using the results of this analysis as a metric for judging code, it wouldn't be a copyright problem. But creating new code based on what it "learned" is a much more difficult field, especially, if it is "quoting" so literally.

b3morales 5y ago

> 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). This was discussed on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740001 A new license saying "this license does not permit use in training an AI" won't have any effect, because the claim by the trainers is that they don't need to license the work in the first place. Unfortunately this is likely to be something that's only settled ad hoc in court.