5 ms·

copilot also got its training sets for free and not really with any kind of consent from the owners of that code, and it's really quite ambiguous as to if what

copilot also got its training sets for free and not really with any kind of consent from the owners of that code, and it's really quite ambiguous as to if what it's doing violates many different open source licenses of its training data Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data they don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing the licenses of the code it's using had the opportunity to address this kind of code use without license, attribution, or consent. (and the training data is a huge part of the value of an AI product)

mccorrinall 4y ago
You need to require rights for scraping publicly available resources? Damn, rip Google.
- wyager 4y ago
  You need to acquire rights for copy/pasting my code and selling it in a book, for example.
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    but what if I publish an algorithm in my book that just happens to be the same as code you've written, say, because we both had the same professor in school, or that it's the obvious solution to the problem. once you've written a few lines of code as part of a larger project, is the rest of the world prohibited from writing the same code unless they agree to the terms of your license?
    - Taywee 4y ago
      Copyright doesn't punish incidentally matching content. It's specifically right to copy or transform content. To make a case for copyright violation, you have to make the case that it was actually copied. If you want to make a point about things that incidentally match making people who independently reinvent the same thing, you're criticizing the function of software patents, not copyright.
- wtetzner 4y ago
  "Publicly available" isn't the same as "public domain" or "no copyright".
- colechristensen 4y ago
  No, it was published to be read. It was not published to be freely reproduced without adhering to licenses, etc. You don't need to acquire rights to read a newspaper (other than say, paying a dollar), you do need rights to copy articles and sell them.
qayxc 4y ago
> Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data they don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing the licenses of the code it's using [...] I agree, but it still uses resources and those don't come for free (hardware, electricity, cooling, maintenance staff, housing, etc.) It's really difficult to assign monetary value to all these aspects and weighing them against each other in a fair manner. The consent issue is a difficult legal aspect as well. Github's ToS Section D.4 clearly states they retain the rights to process your content and parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers It can be argued that using the content to train an AI model falls under "analysing it on our servers". Also It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service If CoPilot is part of their service, it's in their right to distribute the content, e.g. by means of CoPilot as a processed part of the model. GPL and other licences don't place restriction on the usage as training data. It's currently a very murky legal grey area. Licences need to adapt to this new form of usage pattern.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  I think copilot is pretty clearly copyright violation and in violation of licenses of "public" code. People uploading code to github are bound to the licenses just the same as anyone, unless you're the legitimate owner of all of the copyright in a codebase, you can't give change the license provisions by accepting a ToS. I don't think it's really that murky, these models contain and have been shown to reproduce copyrighted code with the right prompting, it's not a grey area it's just obfuscated theft.
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    what's the difference between allowing you to search github and find a code snippet, and having a fancy autocomplete system search github and find a code snippet for you? seems to me anyone agreeing to the ToS should expect their code to show up on other peoples screens as search results really the question is a matter of degree, is copying your nested for-loop iterating through a row oriented matrix really a unique piece of code protected by copyright? Or does the copyright apply to the file you've written as a whole, leaving room for me to accidentally use words in the same order? clearly there is a tipping point between writing code that looks like yours and using the code you've written outside the terms of your license, we will have to wait for courts to decide where that line is for all ML, not just co-pilot also copying is not theft

mccorrinall 4y ago

You need to require rights for scraping publicly available resources? Damn, rip Google.

wyager 4y ago
You need to acquire rights for copy/pasting my code and selling it in a book, for example.
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  but what if I publish an algorithm in my book that just happens to be the same as code you've written, say, because we both had the same professor in school, or that it's the obvious solution to the problem. once you've written a few lines of code as part of a larger project, is the rest of the world prohibited from writing the same code unless they agree to the terms of your license?
  - Taywee 4y ago
    Copyright doesn't punish incidentally matching content. It's specifically right to copy or transform content. To make a case for copyright violation, you have to make the case that it was actually copied. If you want to make a point about things that incidentally match making people who independently reinvent the same thing, you're criticizing the function of software patents, not copyright.
wtetzner 4y ago
"Publicly available" isn't the same as "public domain" or "no copyright".
colechristensen 4y ago
No, it was published to be read. It was not published to be freely reproduced without adhering to licenses, etc. You don't need to acquire rights to read a newspaper (other than say, paying a dollar), you do need rights to copy articles and sell them.

qayxc 4y ago

> Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data they don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing the licenses of the code it's using [...] I agree, but it still uses resources and those don't come for free (hardware, electricity, cooling, maintenance staff, housing, etc.) It's really difficult to assign monetary value to all these aspects and weighing them against each other in a fair manner. The consent issue is a difficult legal aspect as well. Github's ToS Section D.4 clearly states they retain the rights to process your content and parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers It can be argued that using the content to train an AI model falls under "analysing it on our servers". Also It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service If CoPilot is part of their service, it's in their right to distribute the content, e.g. by means of CoPilot as a processed part of the model. GPL and other licences don't place restriction on the usage as training data. It's currently a very murky legal grey area. Licences need to adapt to this new form of usage pattern.

colechristensen 4y ago
I think copilot is pretty clearly copyright violation and in violation of licenses of "public" code. People uploading code to github are bound to the licenses just the same as anyone, unless you're the legitimate owner of all of the copyright in a codebase, you can't give change the license provisions by accepting a ToS. I don't think it's really that murky, these models contain and have been shown to reproduce copyrighted code with the right prompting, it's not a grey area it's just obfuscated theft.
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  what's the difference between allowing you to search github and find a code snippet, and having a fancy autocomplete system search github and find a code snippet for you? seems to me anyone agreeing to the ToS should expect their code to show up on other peoples screens as search results really the question is a matter of degree, is copying your nested for-loop iterating through a row oriented matrix really a unique piece of code protected by copyright? Or does the copyright apply to the file you've written as a whole, leaving room for me to accidentally use words in the same order? clearly there is a tipping point between writing code that looks like yours and using the code you've written outside the terms of your license, we will have to wait for courts to decide where that line is for all ML, not just co-pilot also copying is not theft