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I mean, if it's autocompleting a fairly simple line, and can do that because it's analysed a lot of lines, I don't really see that as "stealing anything". If y
by antihero 4y ago
I mean, if it's autocompleting a fairly simple line, and can do that because it's analysed a lot of lines, I don't really see that as "stealing anything".
If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying.
But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway.
I think the first use case is far more common, and creating boilerplate that is so generic you could never really attribute it anyway.
- alpaca128 4y agoThe first can be automated without ML though. And once you use ML you cannot guarantee it won't copy-paste existing code. This whole thing would be fine if GitHub hadn't just used all public code on their platform, ignoring all involved licenses.
- rob74 4y agoThe problem is, if they had used only code with a license that allows copying without attribution, there wouldn't have been a lot of code left...
- alpaca128 4y agoDifficulty doing something legally doesn't justify breaking the law.
- xupybd 4y agoIt changes the code for use. I'm not sure it can be considered a copy. It much like reading someone else's code and drawing ideas and patterns from that code.
- rob74 4y ago> But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. If you do that on your own, it's your (legal) responsibility. If Copilot does it for you, it's GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility.
- __warlord__ 4y agoWhy should be GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility? No one is forcing you to use copilot. If I use grammarly, are they responsible for what am I aiming to write?
- purerandomness 4y agoDoes Grammarly gerate pages of content for you?
- 32bitkid 4y agoIf I pay for grammarly, and it plagiarizes an existing work but represents it as an entirely new, independent work and I am unaware of the existing work that is being stolen, who is doing the stealing?
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoThis makes more sense for text message auto complete: you just take the suggested next word after a one word start deed, it might reproduce a Wikipedia entry. But what did tub expect? The same would be true with grammarly if you somehow got it to produce a bunch of new text. You expected garbage, but somehow infringed on copyright instead. But I guess think the user deserves some responsibility in realizing their expected garbage output isn’t for some reason.
- scotty79 4y agoIf you pay a shady character to get you a modern laptop for $100 you can't claim that you were unaware that it was most likely stolen and the fact that you paid for it something doesn't absolve you morally.
- wodenokoto 4y ago> If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying. > But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. How would I know that the boiler plate I ask copilot to write for me is copied verbertim from a codebase, that neither I nor Microsoft has licensed to use?
- afiori 4y agoThe when Oracle won its copyright lawsuit against google it was because of a 8 line bound checking utility function.
- redox99 4y agoSource?
- dekhn 4y agoNot only was that not the only code in question, you left out the conclusion! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_.... It went to the supreme court, they concluded fair use, FU oracle.
- antihero 4y agoI was talking more about ethics than the law. I try to live adjacent to the law (to an extent that is reasonable and sane) in all fairness, as it will never be in-line with my ethics.
- dobin 4y agoI neither see it "stealing". The neuronal network was trained with code as input. It's creating code as output. The output has nothing to do with the input once it is trained. Do people dont know how neuronal network work? It's like saying GPT-3 created text is copyright infringement, because some author used the same sentence in a book before.
- ImprobableTruth 4y agoOverfitting: One weird trick that copyright lawyers don't want you to know!
- eloisius 4y agoSo if I fit a network to output entire chapters of a book when given the chapter number as input, I can print and sell copies of it that way?
- dobin 4y ago1) Copilot is not designed to output the source code for a project source file 2) It does not re-create the whole source code, just parts of it (sentences, not chapters) 3) The source code license, e.g. BSD, works on "the code" - copying a line like "void main(void) {" will not trigger it, obviously
- f1refly 4y ago1. Create a neural network that produces an x264+dts stream of a movie 2. distribute it 3. checkmate copyright lawyers
- imtringued 4y ago>Do people dont know how neuronal network work? I could ask you the same thing.
- carom 4y agoMy problem is with the weights not being released. They are a derivative work of open source code in the most literal sense. The weights would not exist without those lines. Gradient descent is using literal derivatives.