4 ms·

I don't understand why these models are not "derived works" under the GPL family of licences.

glandium 5y ago
Especially when you consider that on one end some companies forbid their employees to even read GPL source to alleviate the legal risks of accidental copy, and on the other hand, there's the common practice of clean room implementations for more or less the same reason. If brains can be tainted by reading code, how does that not apply to Copilot?
- pc86 5y ago
  > some companies forbid their employees to even read GPL source Is this really common enough it's even worth mentioning?
PeterisP 5y ago
Licenses don't get to define what is a derived work which needs a license from the author, that's defined solely by copyright law - and it's a tricky issue because the definitions used in copyright law aren't intended for a scenario like this and are rather ambiguous (at least in US) and IMHO does not have any reasonable case law to inform which plausible interpretations would be valid and which would not. It's not clear whether the model trained on some data is copyrightable at all (and if it isn't, it can't be a derived work and gets no protection nor restrictions from copyright law) as in general facts about a work - including things like word frequency statistics, which was a popular type of trained language models not that long ago (e.g. n-gram models used in statistical MT systems) - are not copyrightable and in that case making/distributing those is not an exclusive right of the author and needs no license or permission, that was settled long ago between publishers and e.g. dictionary makers. There is also the notion that mechanistic transformations or difficult labor can't result in copyrightable work, there needs to be human creativity involved; in US copyright law (as in Fiest Publications Inc. v. Rural phone service Co, also see https://www.gutenberg.org/help/no_sweat_copyright.html https://www.gutenberg.org/help/no_sweat_copyright.html) the fact that making some work required lots of work and cost you lots of money does not imply that it deserves copyright protection, no matter how much work was required; so it's irrelevant that someone spent millions of dollars worth of GPU time, and it could certainly be argued (case law would be useful here!) that the software used to train the model is copyrightable, but the model output by that software is not. Perhaps case law or some new explicit law will settle otherwise, but currently all the research and industry is proceeding with the assumption that a trained model is not a derived work (in the copyright law sense) from the training data, and as far as I see this assumption is not being challenged in courts.

Especially when you consider that on one end some companies forbid their employees to even read GPL source to alleviate the legal risks of accidental copy, and on the other hand, there's the common practice of clean room implementations for more or less the same reason. If brains can be tainted by reading code, how does that not apply to Copilot?

pc86 5y ago
> some companies forbid their employees to even read GPL source Is this really common enough it's even worth mentioning?

PeterisP 5y ago

Licenses don't get to define what is a derived work which needs a license from the author, that's defined solely by copyright law - and it's a tricky issue because the definitions used in copyright law aren't intended for a scenario like this and are rather ambiguous (at least in US) and IMHO does not have any reasonable case law to inform which plausible interpretations would be valid and which would not. It's not clear whether the model trained on some data is copyrightable at all (and if it isn't, it can't be a derived work and gets no protection nor restrictions from copyright law) as in general facts about a work - including things like word frequency statistics, which was a popular type of trained language models not that long ago (e.g. n-gram models used in statistical MT systems) - are not copyrightable and in that case making/distributing those is not an exclusive right of the author and needs no license or permission, that was settled long ago between publishers and e.g. dictionary makers. There is also the notion that mechanistic transformations or difficult labor can't result in copyrightable work, there needs to be human creativity involved; in US copyright law (as in Fiest Publications Inc. v. Rural phone service Co, also see https://www.gutenberg.org/help/no_sweat_copyright.html https://www.gutenberg.org/help/no_sweat_copyright.html) the fact that making some work required lots of work and cost you lots of money does not imply that it deserves copyright protection, no matter how much work was required; so it's irrelevant that someone spent millions of dollars worth of GPU time, and it could certainly be argued (case law would be useful here!) that the software used to train the model is copyrightable, but the model output by that software is not. Perhaps case law or some new explicit law will settle otherwise, but currently all the research and industry is proceeding with the assumption that a trained model is not a derived work (in the copyright law sense) from the training data, and as far as I see this assumption is not being challenged in courts.