8 ms·
They own their code and it either has a license for use or is implicitly rights retained if not. If Copilot regurgitates their code, from a project that is publ
by meheleventyone 4y ago
They own their code and it either has a license for use or is implicitly rights retained if not. If Copilot regurgitates their code, from a project that is public but with a non-permissive license they are having their IP rights violated so are totally correct in being unhappy about that.
Just because you’ve made something cool doesn’t give you the right to harm others in the process.
If MS or OpenAI don’t think this is the case then they should have also included their private repositories.
- Zambyte 4y ago> from a project that is public but with a non-permissive license Permissive or not doesn't matter. Public Domain or not is what matters. Permissive licenses still require you to propagate the copyright notice, which Copilot strips.
- core-utility 4y agoDo we have any evidence that copilot doesn't check/filter by license?
- meheleventyone 4y agoOne of the (ex?) programmers from Valve managed to get it to spit out parts of the Source engine verbatim. He posted a Twitter thread yesterday I believe.
- leakbang 4y agoCan you post the link to that?
- meheleventyone 4y agoSure: https://twitter.com/ChrisGr93091552/status/1539731632931803137 https://twitter.com/ChrisGr93091552/status/15397316329318031...
- dekhn 4y ago3 lines of fairly generic code? That's not what copyright is protecting.
- meheleventyone 4y agoJust for the record I was providing some evidence to support this question: "Do we have any evidence that copilot doesn't check/filter by license?"
- dekhn 4y agoI mean, even if the license was placed on the code, that doesn't mean, if it's not protected by copyright, then it's fair game for copilot to scrape, learn from, and emit variations of, the code. I believe github's lawyers would have had hundreds of hours of dicussion about this and at this point, they believe they are in the right, and anybody who disagrees should use the legal system to resolve the matter. In the meantime, what it is and isn't doing wrt licenses seems to be poorly understood externally.
- mustyoshi 4y agoDoes that prove it ignores licenses or does that imply the source engine exists verbatim (minus licenses) multiple times on Github?
- meheleventyone 4y agoIf it's minus a license then it should be assumed that rights are retained (in the same way you can't just take ownership of an image you find on the internet) so if it were filtering it shouldn't take code from repo's without explicit and favorable licenses. If it is taking code only from repo's with permissive licenses (e.g. MIT) then why aren't they following the attribution requirements? I don't think you can have your cake and eat it on this one.
- moffkalast 4y agoIf I steal some code and put it on Github under MIT that doesn't really make it MIT, I'm just lying that it is. If Copilot then uses that it's still in violation of the law I'd assume (ignorance doesn't exonerate you etc.). So they'd have to verify on a case by case basis, which they obviously haven't given the volume of data they had to feed the thing. It's kinda shocking that they think they can sell this, even providing it for free is extremely sketchy but at least complies with BSD/GNU/CC licensed stuff I guess.
- Hamuko 4y agoAnd especially with such blanket statements as "the code you write with GitHub Copilot’s help belongs to you".
- lupire 4y agoWhy do you think that the recipient is responsible for verifying that no one else has copyright of code they recieved under license? Is every product user liable when a vendor ships some stolen code?
- ryukafalz 4y ago
- samatman 4y agoThis is in fact impossible. All they could do is filter by the LICENSE file in the repo. Unfortunately for them, by law copyright and license are determined by the authors and merely represented by a LICENSE file, which could be lying about both. The court isn't going to accept that excuse when this goes to trial.
- mnd999 4y agoAnd that is why this project should never have made it past the brainstorming session.
- gjadi 4y agoAnd you can have multiple licenses in the same repository, folders with copyright exceptions, etc. It's hard enough for us human to find our way in this mess, I've little hope for an AI. But maybe it's just the first step. The final step being able to sell an AI that understands Copyright management. I'm sure there is a big market for that.
- mroche 4y agoI feel like a few guidelines and standards could help simplify a baseline process: 1) Require each repository to opt-in to be learned from. 2) Require any source file used for learning to have an SPDX license heading. 3) Have a list of approved permissive licenses to avoid any proprietary or copyleft arguments. Using SPDX headings as the explicit guide would solve the problem of different code content using a different license within a project. An example being QtWayland: the client pieces are Proprietary/LGPL/GPL, whereas the compositor parts are Proprietary/GPL. That's not something you'd know from the license files at the root of the project (and post-6.3 they use SPDX instead of the prior license template heading). Granted, this doesn't solve the problem of the chain of trust (is the individual publishing the code truly the copyright owner), but I think it would be a basic start for a program like this. The opt-in nature would make things... difficult, but I think that's a fair trade-off for something like this.
- gjadi 4y ago
- bayindirh 4y agoThere was a tweet by Nora Tindall (which is deleted) having a screenshot of a mail direct from GitHub stating that GPL code is included in the training of the Copilot and will indeed use it.
- zarzavat 4y agoThe entire point of a fair use right is that you don’t need the copyright owner’s permission to be able to exercise it. Fair use allows you to do things that the copyright owner doesn’t like. Is fair use on a massive scale still fair use? Courts generally think so, otherwise Google would have been out of business a long time ago.
- meheleventyone 4y agoIs this fair use? I don't think that's been established yet. And if it is why didn't MS and OpenAI train it on their private code repositories? Fair use for thee not for me isn't very in keeping with the spirit of that claim.
- jimnotgym 4y agoJust because there has not been a test case yet does not make it illegal! If MS think it is fair use then they are free to go ahead. Business is all about recognising and assesing risks like this.
- tremon 4y agoAnd even if there had been a legal test case, that does not make it moral! If people think this is socially wrong then they're free to argue their case. Business is all about ignoring ethical quandaries if it gives them an edge. "Microsoft does it, therefore it must be right" does not a sound argument make.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago> Business is all about ignoring ethical quandaries No, businesses are — not business. Not necessarily...
- jtdev 4y ago
- jimnotgym 4y ago
- causi 4y agoUnfortunately the way IP law works, at least in the US, is that you can use essentially whatever you want as training data and it's up to the user to make sure none of the generated code violates licensing agreements.
- SahAssar 4y agoIf that's the case then GH/MS should at least disclose that for the code generated to actually be legal you have to hunt down the actual source (will be hard in a lot of cases) and check the license against your own license.
- lupire 4y agoDid you just make that up? Github is distributing the copied code to users.
- monocasa 4y agoCan you point to case law backing that up?
- causi 4y agoSure. https://jtip.law.northwestern.edu/2021/05/28/copyright-issues-for-ai-and-deep-learning-services-a-comparison-of-u-s-south-korean-and-japanese-law/ https://jtip.law.northwestern.edu/2021/05/28/copyright-issue... However, even if infringement occurs during machine learning, training AI with copyrighted works would likely be excused by the ‘fair use’ doctrine.[ii] For example, in Authors Guild v. Google, Inc.[iii], Google had scanned digital copies of books and established a publicly available search function. The plaintiffs alleged that this constituted infringement of copyrights. The Second Circuit held that Google’s works were non-infringing fair uses because the purpose of the copying was highly transformative, the public display of text was limited, and the revelations did not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals.
- nojs 4y agoIt doesn’t really “regurgitate code” all that much in practice though. It’s a super impressive product and these arguments seem more like people looking for an excuse to hate new, scary technology.
- jstummbillig 4y agoIn light of this potential new paradigm it's bewildering how people still manage to focus on the license of training material as if it even moved the needle in this context, even a little bit. OSS knights: THE LICENSE. MS: Aight, I guess we have a few lines of hq src to help out with… Github: Same. Other OSS people: We really don't care one way or the other. As long as the word of the lincense was upheld for another 2 weeks before it ceased to matter for the rest of all time. Jesus fucking christ. People. I get that oss licensing is dear to the collective hn heart – but, at best, it's completely irrelevant in regards to where this will inevitably lead, regardless of current questions/issues with license violations. You can (if all the repos of MS and Github are not enough to train this thing on, which is a laughable idea) even fucking buy additional source code if that's what it takes to strengthen Copilots legal foundation. The cost is insignificant. People will be happy to sell for super cheap. It's a non issue. Why do you wilfully choose to be distracted instead of facing and thinking about the future together?
- jillesvangurp 4y agoI'm sure the MS lawyers thought long and hard about this and are patiently awaiting any actual lawsuits with confidence in their position. It would be very hard to prove ownership of any snippets. To the point where you can argue that it is just fair use and to the point where companies would think long and hard before committing any resources to fighting MS on this in court at great expense. I don't think that will happen but it might be interesting if it did.
- vlovich123 4y agoMS is unlikely to be sued here because the infringement claim wold be against their users and my guess is the license indemnifies them against you suing them for defects in the tool you use (ie use at your own risk and if you get sued you agree you won’t sue us).
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago> companies would think long and hard before committing any resources to fighting MS...at great expense This is the end of Microsoft's actual calculation.
- kop316 4y ago> It would be very hard to prove ownership of any snippets. To the point where you can argue that it is just fair use and to the point where companies would think long and hard before committing any resources to fighting MS on this in court at great expense. I would like to point you to this: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 HN Comments at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
- amelius 4y agoIt will stop being fair use when someone makes an AI that creates cartoon characters based on the figures in Disney movies.
- drexlspivey 4y agoOwning code snippets sounds ridiculous to me, like can I own this snippet? def average(*numbers): return sum(numbers)/len(numbers) if not is it because it is too small? what’s the minimum line number that ownership kicks into? what if I change the function name and the variable names?
- bayindirh 4y agoIf that's under a copyleft license, I can't just copy & paste it under my non-copyleft licensed code and call it mine. That's as simple as that.
- sidlls 4y agoIt can’t be that simple. The function in the GP is not an original idea and is far too simple to merit protection just by slapping a license on it.
- bayindirh 4y agoI don't expect, or support, licensing that small amount of code, and suing everyone to oblivion. The point I'm trying to make is if something is under a copyleft license, you can't copy and paste it verbatim to something non-copyleft. It's what the license says. Also, to be pedantic, the function I'm commenting on is pure maths, and you can't license/patent mathematics. On the other hand, if there's some magic sauce of doing something, let it be 25 lines, what will you say? It's just 25 lines, so you can't license it? To be more pedantic, I actually have an algorithm, which is around 25 lines and does something novel. I've published a paper on it. If I license the reference implementation with AGPLv3+, and you use it and close it, and if I can't go after you, what's the purpose of the license? You can read the paper and try to implement it. It's free in that regard.
- williamcotton 4y agoIt seems rather silly to me that such small innovations would be worthy of legal protections under either a copyright or copyleft license. Isn’t there already precedent in other forms of IP, such as chord progressions in music, sentence length in literature, etc?
- wowokay 4y agoI think you might be missing the point of their frustration. Lots of companies do not put their code in public repositories, granted I understand the perspective of violating a license, but the point is if you don’t want your code used by someone else (even with the risk of not getting credit, don’t know why that matters) then don’t make your repo public period. To that point, what’s to stop GitHub from making a policy that states: “All public repositories will be utilized in AI training”?
- ryukafalz 4y ago> even with the risk of not getting credit, don’t know why that matters The point is that it’s not respecting the license, not just that it’s not giving “credit”. If I release code under a GPL license, I damn well don’t want someone using that code under a license that’s not GPL-compatible, no matter how it got there.