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Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code?

200 points by deadbunny 4y ago

Beltiras 4y ago
The fact copilot is trained on GPL data makes it unusable for many developers.
thesiniot 4y ago
Absolutely! But this article may focus too much on ethics. In practice, you usually need to demonstrate that you were harmed by an action to bring it to court. So we would need the author of a GPL'd repository to sue, with proof that copilot copied and pasted their code. The moment that happens, MS would simply omit that single repository from the copilot dataset, tell the judge that they fixed a bug in their "content filtering algorithm", and have the case dismissed. They might also ban the developer's account for good measure.
- guitarbill 4y ago
  > In practice, you usually need to demonstrate that you were harmed by an action to bring it to court. I think this is true for copyright infringement damages. But is a GPL violation a copyright or a contract issue? And unlike copyright, the fix isn't damages to compensate the rightsholder, but to uphold the license. > So we would need the author of a GPL'd repository to sue, with proof that copilot copied and pasted their code. What happens if multiple authors wait and see, and then jointly sue? At that point, removing a single repo isn't enough.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    > And unlike copyright, the fix isn't damages to compensate the rightsholder, but to uphold the license. That's not true. Courts won't consistently mandate that people relicense their code that includes GPLed stuff. They'll make you pay a fine and remove the code.
Akronymus 4y ago
Personally, I err on the side of suing them for breaking the license terms and demanding the GPL code being removed from the training data. Altough, I realize that it isn't feasible.
- antupis 4y ago
  Then watch Disney sue some random ML practitioner for using star wars images to train model or Google sue Huggingface for using some youtube videos.
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    Thats... actually a pretty good counterpoint. Altough google suing for youtube videos is somewhat different to disney with SW as google doesnt have an exclusive license on those. But yeah, you changed my kind on that one.
  - orra 4y ago
    Yeah, people forget there are 'transformative use' exceptions to copyright law. Without such an exception, search engines would be illegal. Don't get me wrong, it's problematic when the model spits out moderately sized, copyrightable, chunks, verbatim. But I think the bigger issue for the free and open source communities is that Copilot is proprietary, not that it exists. We should create a FOSS alternative. Presumably we can even train it on (source available) proprietary code.
    - BeefWellington 4y ago
      So the key questions here I think are: Can an ML model "create"? Can it "own copyright"? Can it "transform"? If it can't do those things then I think the entire idea falls apart. Separate from this, the violations are per instance, not the model itself. If I'm an author and write hundreds of non-infringing books over two decades and then suddenly write and sell a copy of an existing work, I'm not going to be sued for my other books or the reading I did to create any of it. I will be sued for the actual infringing book.
- 4y ago
throwaway71271 4y ago
no
jodrellblank 4y ago
> "Moreover, open source developers are already suffering burnouts because of gigantic multi-billion dollar corporations taking their free code and re-bundling it as a SaaS, hence, introducing this new feature takes even more from them than there was before." The popular open source licenses explicitly give permission for people to resell your work, it's not even buried in the small print or anything. e.g. GPL: "Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish)". MIT License: "including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software". Apache License: "each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work". This should no more cause burnout than someone buying your old car and using it for an endurance race makes you tired. Where there's burnout involved it's more likely the demands for support and fixes that head back upstream without any associated money. More concerning is Copilot trained on code which isn't GPL licensed or similar. Sharing code doesn't automatically grant anyone any license to use it for anything at all.
- blueflow 4y ago
  From MIT License; > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. I'm not confident Copilot will comply with this part of my code's license.
  - simonw 4y ago
    It depends on the interpretation of "substantial portions". Classic challenge with legal documents. Here's a discussion about that usage in the MIT license: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2188 https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2188
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
    Me either, but that has little to do with burnout from other people making money from GPL licensed code. (That a tool exists doesn't free one from responsibility for using it; CoPilot not citing original code and its license terms seems like it rules it out for anything beyond experimentation; that part is very arguable)
spupe 4y ago
No. Why would we want to go that route? Such a lawsuit would slow down a ton of work in AI, certainly big language models and DALL-E for example.
- amelius 4y ago
  What will happen when someone writes a website called "This Disney character does not exist"?
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    That they may have to take the "Disney" trademark out of the name.
    - monkeybutton 4y ago
      Just need to reword it a bit, "This Disney character doesn't exist" can also be "This is not a Disney character (because it doesn't exist)". Sums up the assertion being made well too. Not a Disney character. Except their lawyers may disagree.
- HelloNurse 4y ago
  Making an example of Copilot (or, better, Copilot users) would slow down a ton of work in AI-automated copyright infringement: a good thing.
  - jacknews 4y ago
    copyright, such a good thing
midislack 4y ago
I support any lawsuit against Microsoft. They deserve it.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I suspect Microsoft supports that lawsuit too. Looking at the fact pattern in front of me, I can't imagine Copilot has gotten this far without Microsoft's lawyers being fairly confident that they have a compelling legal argument in their back pocket that not only protects their substantial investment in this project, but perhaps puts up a barrier on the limits of what can be claimed via a copyleft license. This whole exercise screams "designed for win-win" to me. What that argument might be, I cannot guess.
monkeybutton 4y ago
An interesting exercise would be recreating an entire program/tool that is GPL using copilot and releasing under a less restrictive license. Could one could argue that the effort put into cobbling together a knock-off is enough to constitute an original work? Running a copyrighted movie through a neural network compression algorithm and uploading it on bittorrent isn't going to stop you from being sued. Even if the output is produced by an AI.
- redox99 4y ago
  That's probably the right distinction. If copilot allows you to type // source code of linux kernel And you get the whole code, then I would consider it unoriginal The same way your movie example, if you told it Avengers Endgame And it gave you the whole movie, it would also be. But what if you type (like with DallE) Spiderman fighting Thanos and you get something different, but that resembles some Endgame scene. Would that infringe copyright, be fair use, or what?
  - Adrox 4y ago
    Try to publish anything with a character looking like Spiderman, Thanos, IronMan, Captain America and see what Marvel does to you…
    - redox99 4y ago
      There are many videos like that on youtube and they seem to be doing fine For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8LvcJoAnms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8LvcJoAnms
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  The law isn't stupid. This is one of the advantages of having humans in the loop. People can and will say "I know what you are doing, knock it off."
prepend 4y ago
Should Steven King be sued because he trained himself by reading other authors’ copyrighted works?
- onpensionsterm 4y ago
  If you accidentally recite someone else's work, it's still plagiarism.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    I am absolutely certain that I have written sentences that are word-for-word identical to sentences other people have written. Should I be sued?
    - onpensionsterm 4y ago
      You're describing something that happens regularly. Especially in music.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        That's the point. Accidentally including the same material in something new is not immediately infringement.
- lbriner 4y ago
  This is not the same at all. An equivalent would be if Steven King read a lot of other authors and then copied parts of their works into his own books for profit, even if they were changed slightly.
  - WithinReason 4y ago
    How large does the section has to be? A single sentence? Or two? You can currently set Copilot to not include suggestions where more than 150 characters appear in the training set.
jasonlfunk 4y ago
Imagine a situation where a chat bot AI is trained on a bunch of copywritted novels. And then you ask it to start reciting portions of it. Should that be illegal? It doesn’t seem like it to me. If I were to turn around and resell it, then you could sue me; but that wouldn’t be a chat bot’s fault. Just like it’s not the clipboard’s responsibility to ensure I’m not violating licenses, I don’t think it’s copilot’s responsibility either. Use it at your own risk.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Hm, you're suggesting that it ought to definitely be illegal if you sell the output of the chatbot trained on copyrighted material, but not if you give it away for free? That is definitely not how US copyright law works (although you are welcome to argue that it should), that there is such a bright line around selling. It's possible for something to be a copyright violation even if you give it away for free (see torrent sites!), and it's possible for to qualify as fair use and not be a violation even if you sell it. Under USA copyright law (others are similar but not quite the same), the first step would be deciding if the output of this chatbot counts as a "copy" or "derivative work" at all. If it does not, then there is no copyright violation whether you sell it or not. If it does, then it is a copyright violation (whether you sell it or not) unless it's use can count as "fair use". Whether the use is "commercial" is just part of one of four factors that are balanced to determine if it's fair use. For instance, if you are only using a tiny portion of the copyrighted work and it doesn't have much effect on the profits of the original copyright holder and the use is considered highly "transformative" too (sound like copilot?) -- it could well be fair use even if you are selling your output. (Also... Github Copilot is literally selling it, right? You have to pay them to use Copilot! It would accordingly be considered a commercial use. If I make a copy of a hollywood movie and sell it to you, I'm probably violating copyright (unless I can convince a court it's fair use), regardless of what you do with it, it doesn't matter if you re-sell it or not. If you re-sell it or make another copy, you may be additionally violating copyright another time yourself.) I do think there's a reasonable argument that copilot is fair use. It wouldn't mainly hinge on whether the output is sold or not. This is presumably the argument MS/Github would make if brought into court. Since Oracle v. Google, I've stopped trying to predict what courts will do on software-related copyright cases, the law seems to be pretty chaotic and the actions of courts unpredictable. (also i'm not a lawyer this is not legal advice). In general, I am in favor of an expansive bounds of fair use, and think it serves "the people" to have such.
Datenstrom 4y ago
GitHub should not be sued for training on the data, but anyone using it should be liable for any copyright infringements it generates. That would effectively make it useless for business use cases, but it should be until the models understand copyright and plagiarism, which they do not yet.
- mewse 4y ago
  If Microsoft asserts and represents that their tool doesn’t generate copyright-infringing code, then surely Microsoft is the party which should be liable, rather than the poor unlucky programmer who was lied to by the billion-dollar corporation’s marketing agency?
  - chii 4y ago
    > surely Microsoft is the party which should be liable unless microsoft is doing work-for-hire for you via copilot, i highly doubt they are liable. You, as the person who is claiming to have produced the work (even though you were using a smart tool to help), must be the person who also is liable. Otherwise, could you not claim that the auto-correct on your word-processor is liable for copyright infringement?
Longlius 4y ago
The question is ultimately going to come down to - "Is Copilot the same as a human programmer reading a lot of GPL code and rehashing, in a non-infringing way, the algorithms, functions, and designs used in a lot of FOSS? Or is Copilot performing more of a copy and paste pastiche of code that is protected by intellectual property law?" On a tangential note, I always find the discussions surrounding FOSS licenses and copyright rather amusing in a sad way. There's a certain kind of entitlement a lot of people feel towards FOSS that they certainly do not express towards proprietary software and I imagine this a great source of the resentment and burn-out FOSS maintainers feel.
- TuringNYC 4y ago
  >> "Is Copilot the same as a human programmer reading a lot of GPL code and rehashing, in a non-infringing way, the algorithms, functions, and designs used in a lot of FOSS? Or is Copilot performing more of a copy and paste pastiche of code that is protected by intellectual property law?" IANAL, but isnt the concept of "derived data" pretty standard? You dont need to copy data for it to be infringing. I've tackled derived data clauses regularly when negotiating data contracts at work and there is always verbiage and discussion around it (e.g., are we allowed to publish an average of the purchased data)
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    An average is not related to artistic aspects of the data and so can't be a derivative in the copyright sense (based on international law - one of the principle Conventions is fully titled "the Berne convention for the protection of literary and artistic laws", that's because copyright protects literary and artistic works). Provided you have rights to access a body of statistics, then copyright has nothing to say -- save overreaching national caselaw (!) -- on your derivation of mathematical, technical, or scientific data from that work. But a contractual clause, in general, doesn't care about copyright; of you've contracted not to derive data from a work then that's orthogonal to copyright. IANA(IP)L, this is my opinion and unrelated to my employment.
- jhugo 4y ago
  > The question is ultimately going to come down to - "Is Copilot the same as a human programmer reading a lot of GPL code and rehashing, in a non-infringing way, the algorithms, functions, and designs used in a lot of FOSS? Or is Copilot performing more of a copy and paste pastiche of code that is protected by intellectual property law?" Of course it isn't the same as a human programmer doing anything. It's a complex piece of software, which we happen to misuse the term "AI" to describe, but it is not intelligent.
thdxr 4y ago
Whenever it comes to things like legal issues or regulations, people take such pride in being someone who understands their intricacies that the larger picture is missed. We should think about what outcome we actually want. While technically any snippet of code can claim a copyright, it's sort of ridiculous to suggest the snippets that Copilot generates has any protectable value. Practically Copilot is saving you the labor of writing fairly trivial but tedious code. I work on open source full time, there's no random snippet of code that I've written I'd feel upset about if someone copied. Licenses on software are mostly performative.
- natly 4y ago
  The 'inverse square root' carmack trick is hardly trivial.
  - chii 4y ago
    so luckily no one owns the idea that you can use both newtons method, and floating point bit-hacking, to produce a good estimate of a square root.
    - SahAssar 4y ago
      So if a similarly non-trivial piece of code was in a non-public-domain codebase and copilot copied that wholesale, then you'd have a problem with it?
- NoraCodes 4y ago
  > Licenses on software are mostly performative. I seriously doubt you actually believe this, at least in an equal way. The code to Windows XP is available on the 'net, but I can't just go and compile that and start giving out copies without serious legal repercussions. Copilot is "copyright for me but not for thee" and it's bullshit.
  - deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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toss1 4y ago
>>a form of laundering open source code into commercial works If it is nothing but a glorified autocomplete that inserts SHORT snippets of code, as in a quote from a book in a book review, or the above quote, that's fine. But when it is inserting whole pages, that's beyond Fair Use, and basically a nicely scaled and laundered version of plagiarism. Another key is now much it is modifying the code to suit the situation. Is it generating entirely new synthesized output like DALL-E 2 or GPT-3 such that the output is closer to generative creativity, or is it merely pasting in code blocks found in similar situations? It comes down to the question of how transformative is the output, which is a key concept in copyright law. >>“What is the difference between this and someone doing it manually? " Another key question here. If it is merely cut/paste beyond a line or two, it's plagiarism, but if it is synthesizing new works, it's good. Same as manually: am I using your GPL work for inspiration to generate new works, or am I copy-pasting pages of code? Does anyone have any extensive experience with Copilot to be able to highlight these differences? EDIT: fmt, clarity
- cdrini 4y ago
  In my experience it's more generative. It responds to variable names in my code, formatting, patterns in how I'm writing (am I using ES6 features? async/await or raw promises? Etc). Granted it could still be copying, but when it's generating usually less than 5 lines at a time... I wonder if you could argue that all possible 5 line code snippets have already been written--wrt to like abstract logic/variable relationships/patterns. Also I think it's important to note that Copilot isn't an independent AI; it's a human in the loop system. In my experience I always make adjustments to the code it generates to better fit my needs. So on top of the transformation that copilot does, I'm also stacking transformation on top of that. So the final, potentially copyrightable product is very far removed from the training data. Copilot's training algorithm, OpenAI Codex, "is a descendant of GPT-3" under the hood. I think code is unique in that unlike text and images, there's much less variance in code. It's not as expressive as English, or visual art. So I think there might be a higher chance it'll generate something similar to its training data--but only because all code is inherently more similar.
  - toss1 4y ago
mlatu 4y ago
for me the matter is simple: if the resulting code is licensed under a GPL incompatible license: yes if the resulting code is licensed under the GPL: no
- NoraCodes 4y ago
  Their contention is that this is fair use, so copyright based licensing doesn't apply at all. Under their legal theory, the GPL is irrelevant.
  - mlatu 4y ago
    what about countries that don't allow for "fair use" in their copyright laws like germany?
jhugo 4y ago
(2021)
ThereIsNoWorry 4y ago
I worry for the productivity of the field if Copilot would be successfully sued. Destroy innovation and gridlock progress.
- NoraCodes 4y ago
  How so? What would be prevented, other than systems exactly like copilot that copyright-launder random source code on the internet?
rockbruno 4y ago
EDIT: It took me a while, but I found proof of Copilot suggesting a full copyrighted algorithm. I then take back these arguments as I was under the assumption the tool couldn't do this: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 Old comment for documentation's sake: Are licenses even enforceable by law? The idea of writing some mundane basic code and then wanting to sue someone for "stealing it" just sounds ludicrous to me. True copyright has barriers to make sure you actually invented what you're trying to patent. That's not to say that there isn't a problem here -- there's definitely an ethical component to how this product works, but this whole code licensing thing never clicked for me. Does it hold any actual power?
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  Licenses are indeed enforceable by law. Most popular ones (GPL, MIT, Apache) have been enforced in court. Also Copyright isn't patent.
WhompingWindows 4y ago
We store confidential code on Github. How do I know it hasn't been used in CoPilot?
- pabs3 4y ago
  You can't know (although they claim it was trained only on public code, presumably including proprietary public or leaked code). GPL folks are wondering if it is possible to convert proprietary code to GPL through CoPilot.
  - cdrini 4y ago
    I think you can pretty safely know. People store sensitive information, passwords, keys, etc in private repos aaaall the time. It would be an entirely unnecessary complexity for copilot to try to filter out that sensitive information. It's not like there's a deficiency of public code on GitHub. It wouldn't make any sense to train on private repos.
    - pabs3 4y ago
      All that stuff is in public repos too, so really they should filter out those things from public repos too. The only difference I can see is that private repos are usually proprietary and GitHub didn't want to anger their paying customers, who usually have proprietary code on GitHub.
- cdrini 4y ago
  Assuming your confidential code is in private repos, you're fine. From their FAQ: > [GitHub Copilot] has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub.
salicideblock 4y ago
Should be tagged (2021)
paulgb 4y ago
An interesting (though not conclusive) test of whether Microsoft is confident that Copilot is not copyright-infringing is whether they’d be willing to release a mode trained only on proprietary Microsoft code.
- jarbus 4y ago
  I really like this idea
- remram 4y ago
  I was wondering about something similar. Can we get Copilot to come up with some non-free algorithm under copyright from another big company (with lawyers), e.g. Oracle, Microsoft, Google, etc? This is a little difficult because it would need to be non-free but public, be specific enough that we can recognize it, and I think Copilot has protections against outputting code verbatim (but it could be made to output code with variable names changed or similar). That is probably the way to kickstart a legal discussion about Copilot.
z3c0 4y ago
A lot of comments here keep drawing parallels to writing as for why this is right or wrong, but I think a more apt comparison would be music, where components like riffs or rhythms can be reused to make something wholly different. Many a musician has claimed IP infringement over another musician using similar melodies, but just like programming, if you look closely enough, you'll see that everyone is copying each other and there's not much that can be done to stop it. Personally, I'm a bit bothered by this myself, but I'd be lying if I said I never once got any ideas by looking at the source code of a GPL project.
- omnicognate 4y ago
  Ideas aren't copyrightable.
  - z3c0 4y ago
    only ideas are copyrightable
    - omnicognate 4y ago
      Google "are ideas copyrightable". Copyright protects the specific, tangible expression, not the idea or concept itself. So in your case, having "got ... ideas by looking at the source code of a GPL project" doesn't necessarily mean there is any violation of copyright. Employers will often require that employees haven't seen sensitive code at all (clean room) as it avoids any possibility of copying the code itself and provides powerful evidence if they're ever sued, but that's not a legal requirement, just a cautious practice. To read code, learn a concept from it and then apply that concept in your own code is fine (as far as copyright is concerned) as long as you're not copying the code itself. I am not a lawyer and the above is not legal advice, ofc :-)
fartcannon 4y ago
If they were good, they would release it for free.
jacknews 4y ago
Betteridge's law says no, and so do I. If code is GPL, it's free to read, and learn from. That's kind of the point.
Hamuko 4y ago
Microsoft claims that training Copilot is "fair use" but couldn't they still be sued in like Germany or somewhere else where fair use does not apply?
dools 4y ago
Imagine this: I am a human programmer. I work a lot with FOSS. I learn a lot from FOSS. I go on StackOverflow and answer a bunch of questions. The answers I give are based on all the shit I learned working with FOSS. Is SO infringing copyright by publishing my answers? I would think that "NO" would be the obvious answer. Copilot is no different. There is no way this would hold up in court.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  That's not what Copilot does. It isn't parsing the code, learning what it does, then applying the concept to generate new structurally/functionally similar code. We like to imagine that's what it's doing, because the utility of what it actually does can have a similar end result. What Copilot actually does is read every line of code from a project, and keep a dataset built around what code tends to have been written adjacent to what other code. Copilot's output is literally a translation of the code it was "trained on", using data about that code to do its translations.
  - dools 4y ago
    > What Copilot actually does is read every line of code from a project, and keep a dataset built around what code tends to have been written adjacent to what other code. No it reads every line of code from EVERY project. It is not reproducing code from individual coders, it is reproducing patterns deduced from the work of millions of coders. It's like Smart Compose in Gmail. Copyright on anything I write is mine by default, but Gmail can of course take all things written by everybody and then use it to train a thing that detects what I probably mean and offer sentence auto completion in Gmails.
    - breakingcups 4y ago
      Here it is reproducing a function from the source code of Quake verbatim. https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
marcodiego 4y ago
No. The generated code should be GPL'ed as the license requires.
ghoward 4y ago
I wrote a whitepaper refuting GitHub's arguments that Copilot is fair use: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/10/my-whitepaper-about-github-copilot/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/10/my-whitepaper-about-github-c... .
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  I feel like the term "whitepaper" has lost all meaning. Does it just mean "thing typeset with latex" now?
  - ghoward 4y ago
    It's just the term that the FSF used when I wrote it for them. For me, it means "academic paper."
    - WhompingWindows 4y ago
      I thought the distinction was: "white papers" are not necessarily peer-reviewed by an academic journal's editors; white papers tend to be internally-made documents within an organization, edited by that organization's members, for the purpose of knowledge/information. Academic papers as a whole can include both "white papers" and "peer-reviewed journal articles" aka the "papers" that many think of. I would surely put a "white paper" onto my resume if I thought it was a great piece of work.
      - ghoward 4y ago
        TIL, thank you. I think my paper is a whitepaper in that sense because it's not peer-reviewed, but it was meant as an academic-like paper.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      "Whitepaper", for a long time, meant sort of the opposite of "academic paper." They weren't published in refereed conferences and journals and were usually published by corporations or governments but they resembled academic work in their contributions. Something like the original BTC paper is a good example. It wasn't published in a conference or journal, but the level of rigor and the scale of the contribution is similar to what would be published in a conference or journal. I think the crypto community was the end of it. Now "we are launching $CoolCoin" gets called "whitepaper."
JohnHaugeland 4y ago
1. No. Why? 2. It's in the user agreement 3. You weren't harmed in any practical way 4. It's not a real tool and nobody's using it in the long run 5. If GPL fans want to waste money on lawyers, focus on making the GPL have teeth 6. No, of course you don't get to impose a new license on your work retroactively
- Longlius 4y ago
  The GPL has teeth. Vendors are routinely sued over infringement. This is why a lot of things like routers and IoT gizmos you buy nowadays come with a notice about your rights under the GPL along with a link to a form to request source code.
  - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    > The GPL has teeth. TiVo says it doesn't. . > Vendors are routinely sued over infringement. The GPL has never one time been successfully prosecuted. Never. Show me a single specific case.
- pxeger1 4y ago
  Where is it in the user agreement? https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... > This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. Charging $10/month seems like selling it. The only questions is whether it counts as your copyrighted content, if it's been chewed up by an AI.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
chrismorgan 4y ago
People keep on talking about the GPL in these cases, but there’s absolutely nothing whatsoever special about the GPL: any code that is not public domain (or under a public-domain-equivalent license) is equally affected. Any mention of the GPL is a red herring. Copilot is completely depending on the legal theory of being effectively exempt from copyright, under fair use doctrine; if that legal theory falls apart, the entire space (and a lot of other machine learning stuff) is utterly doomed. Will it, won’t it, should it, shouldn’t it? Dunno. (And when people say that it should just say what license the code it generates is under and what attribution or similar is required: Copilot can’t tell whether it’s reproducing copyrightable chunks of code, or indeed where what it produces came from, by the very nature of machine learning techniques. The whole verbatim reproduction issue demonstrates this—they’re trying to avoid such reproductions, which a cynic might say is because it weakens their fair use claim, but it’s not easy to do.)
- chii 4y ago
  i'm not buying the argument that copilot is infringing copyright. If someone learnt how to program via reading open source projects, you don't get to claim that their future work is derivative.
  - nucleardog 4y ago
    Except, y'know, when it regurgitates copyrighted code verbatim[0] which is not even derivative but just straight up copyright infringement. [0] https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
    - LeSaucy 4y ago
      Even down to whitespace?
    - dzhiurgis 4y ago
      As a society IMO we should be fine with this
    - 4y ago
kryptiskt 4y ago
And if they win, create a precedence that extends the copyright regime into entirely new domains? That would be a massive self-own. That would be one way to get me to vote for the Pirate Party, I guess.
anothernewdude 4y ago
Of course not, just the code that is produced is all GPL, and under all the other licenses as well.
ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
YES
pabs3 4y ago
I wonder if the code CoPilot outputs is even protected by copyright at all. Would be pretty funny if it weren't, lots of proprietary codebases written using it would actually be public domain.
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  I suspect that upon "publishing" or the equivalent the company employing the developer would assume the copyright any liability attached to it that Copilot represents, rather than the idea it would all become public domain.
  - pabs3 4y ago
    I'm talking about lack of ownership of the code, not about liability for generating the code.
    - BeefWellington 4y ago
      Effectively, copyright is ownership here though. Edit: I see the possible confusion point here: > would assume the copyright any liability attached Should read: > would assume the copyright and liability attached
duxup 4y ago
How much code is covered under a license? When I use GitHub I get some handy functions and sort of the style it is written in… but that’s it. It’s not a lot of code. Does someone own? formatDateISOXXX() { a handful lines of code here }
indymike 4y ago
There are so many interesting legal questions that Copilot raises. The tiny snippets that copilot recommends probably fall in the fair use bucket, but the use of entire application code for training, without making unmodified source available with instructions on how to get that source, will probably be an issue for Codepilot. It will take years to sort it out.
im3w1l 4y ago
A lot of people asking "is this legal?", but to me the more interesting question is should this be legal?". And I would like to debate the advantages and disadvantages of this. If we go back to the very basics, the purpose of copyright is to reward and incentivize content creators. The purpose of fair use is to allow certain uses of a work that are beneficial to society, and don't substantially interfere with rewarding content creators. Consider for instance a parody. The parody does not substitute for the original work, so it will not interfere with the reward. Looking at copilot through this framing, we can ask whether it will interfere with rewarding creators. If Alice writes a program, will copilot trained on that product allow Bob to create a competing product more easy, essentially freeload on Alice's creativity? Yes, to some extent it will. On the other hand there are also advantages of allowing copilot. It promises to make software creation easier, for Bob, but also for Alice. Now, as this is trained on code that is posted publicly but not private code it will advantage private code over publicly posted code. This has the potential to harm the free and open source software movement. This movement is a positive in the world, so harming it should be considered a bad thing. But really, the big question is how big these effects are, and no one seems to have a good answer to that.
RealStickman_ 4y ago
This article was posted in 2021. Can the title be changed to reflect that, please?
kouteiheika 4y ago
If training Copilot was copyright infringement then essentially it'd make the majority of useful/interesting machine learning models illegal as they currently exist, and make it impossible for anyone except huge multi-billion corporations to train such models in the future, since only they'd be able to legally license enough data to do so. Models like GPT-J or DALL-E mini could not legally exist anymore. So sure, please, make this illegal, regress the whole field of machine learning 20 years back, and make it something that only billion dollar corporations can do. We should be striving to make copyright less draconian, not more.
- maximusdrex 4y ago
  Not necessarily, the issue here isn't that training on public code should be illegal, it's merely that the models trained on such data should be considered derivative works under the licenses which the code is released under. GPL code must also be released under GPL, so Copilot must not charge users to use a model that is trained on and regurgitates GPL code. > We should be striving to make copyright less draconian, not more. Agreed, and I'm not sure why you think forcing GPT and Copilot to respect open licenses will make them illegal instead of more open.
  - kouteiheika 4y ago
    > Agreed, and I'm not sure why you think forcing GPT and Copilot to respect open licenses will make them illegal instead of more open. I wasn't talking about Copilot. I was talking about the vast majority of other interesting models. It wouldn't make Copilot itself illegal because it was trained on explicitly licensed data (so it'd make it GPL-licensed), but it would make those other models illegal. Take for example the GPT-J, which was trained on 825GB of data scraped off the Internet. If we assume the view that a machine learning model is a derivative work of its training data then that makes GPT-J illegal, because it was trained on a bunch of "all rights reserved" data, and there's no legal license under which it could be released. Most interesting models are like that. > so Copilot must not charge users That's not what the GPL says.
  - deadbunny 4y ago
mullikine 4y ago
Large language models including Codex are a transformative technology. So long as Microsoft and OpenAI are not selling back usage of the model to the open-source community, I think it's OK, though it's the bare minimum obligation. Bi-directional fair-use is probably the best result we can hope for. The model does 'steal' the 'essence' of the software though, to use inference instead of computation to generate code, documentation, even evaluate and explain it. The models are license blind and there's very little that could be done to prevent it. Like what the invention of the camera has done for art. So long as MS/OpenAI is giving back to open source/free software. The most important thing, however, is that free (libre) software developers are able to work with the language models directly, so that libre software is allowed to continue progressing into what I call Imaginary Programming. That's because with a generative internet all you really need is blockchain + prompting. Traditional 'real' programming is like writing in assembly code -- it's completley outmoded. https://huggingface.co/spaces/mullikine/ilambda https://huggingface.co/spaces/mullikine/ilambda
nnvvhh 4y ago
I wrote a law school paper discussing the potential liability stemming from Copilot: https://nickvh.com/blog/archive/2022/02/copilot/copilot.html https://nickvh.com/blog/archive/2022/02/copilot/copilot.html
- ghoward 4y ago
  IANAL or a law student. Good paper, though I disagree with many points. However, two things: you claim that Copilot might have infringed during training because of the GPL, but the GPL's clause only kicks in on distribution. If GitHub had trained Copilot and then did nothing else, that clause would not kick in. Second, your Stack Overflow example of copying is not good because SO has an explicit license for all material given. You must agree to let SO and others have the material under that license, which is CC-BY-SA 4.0. Don't get me wrong; I hate Copilot. But those two things you said were wrong.
  - nnvvhh 4y ago
    Thanks for engaging with the paper. I'm too lazy to check the GPL comment (I'll assume I made a mistake). But as far as I can tell my only reference to Stack Overflow was not about liability based on copying from SO. I was making a comment about a common industry practice.
einarfd 4y ago
This article is from June last year. Has anything happened since then on this? Is anyone bringing legal actions against Copilot and Github? If not why not? I would think that if there was a case against it, that there are open source affiliated entities out there that would have a both the legal and monetary resources to go to court over this. When I look at the discussion here, it looks like most of the arguments are based on common sense or morality. While that is nice, I would have loved to hear a perspective on this based on law instead. Is there someone here with a more legal perspective/background that could comment?
mindaslab 4y ago
Yes it must be. Even though Micro$soft will get away because it has huge pockets.
jtode 4y ago
My level of engagement with this: I was accepted into the technical preview of CoPilot, and while I did generate a few functions and messed around a bit, I don't do enough actual programming these days (because reasons) to have made good use of it. I won't be using it as a commercial product, I'm pretty sure, and I seem to have until August to use it for free, if I'm gonna. Anyways... Remember Bill Gates' open letter to hobbyists in 1976, in which he blamed pirates for ruining everything? This discussion is much more interesting and subtle than the old debate about piracy's place (and it definitely has a place) in user communities, but I find it humorous that Gates's behemoth, all these years later, seems to have circled around to doing the same thing. As one who started out by going to swap meets with my Commie 64 and completely disregarding the hand-wringing, moustache-twirling frets of the people RMS (and I) would later refer to as Hoarders, I am pretty sure that I land in the Don't Care category of this debate. Specifically, I think the most compelling point made in the article is when it points out that the tools which were used to create CoPilot are available for free to all, so anyone who is willing to put in the effort of learning how to train models is free to recreate CoPilot for themselves, and share it with anyone. We all have copypasted code from github or SO at some point without thinking about the license, I am pretty sure, in many cases while at work or otherwise engaged in commercial software activities. CoPilot cannot write entire programs (yet), all it can really do at this point is automate the searching and CTRL-C+V part for snippets and functions, and that is a net good for anyone who writes software. If there is going to be a lawsuit, I would hope that it hinges strictly on whether github has the right to charge money for it, because essentially, what they are doing by increasing the speed at which people can work is lowering the number of coders required to finish a project on a given timeline. This is both a boon to anyone who is working on something they intend to release FOSS, and simultaneously a device by which greedy Hoarders who want to pay as few people as possible while profiting from the work of those they do pay can increase their profits immensely while creating fewer good jobs for humans. To put it more simply, when Hoarders use this tech, it is a transfer of wealth out of the pockets of working programmers, into the pockets of shareholders in whatever corporation is reselling this technology. There is good reason, in other words, for working programmers to dislike this, and for FOSS volunteers to like it. The lawsuit I would like to see happen, if they must, is one which simply seeks to prevent anyone from charging for this, as that would at least keep the investor class from further draining the economy of people who actually work. Given that the tools for training models are freely available, what I would prefer is if someone with the time implements some form of free version of the same thing. The data they trained the model on for Copilot is freely available to anyone with an internet connection, as are the ML tools. It's extremely clear to everyone that the code copypasta'd by the model does not belong to Microsoft/Github, so if they can sell it, nobody can argue that a free program can't automatically search and copy it for you for free. There are some that this solution, which I am pretty sure will come about, would not satisfy, and those are the people who can rightly be said to be against innovation and new technologies. It hinges on whether money is changing hands, and whose hands the money is passing into. Back in those Commie 64 days, we all pirated freely with zero consequence, with one exception that I can recall: one dude in my city started selling pirated software at $5 per floppy. As it happens, he was a friend of my uncle's and I knew him personally. He was a poor man with very little going for him in life, suffice to say, but nonetheless, it only took a couple of months until the police were at his door, and they seized his 64 and all his software. I disagreed with his actions but I never hated the guy, he was too sad and pathetic to hate if you saw the life he actually lived, but many, many people did, including all the local pirates, because we were firmly of the mindset that software was meant to be shared freely. We may have been wrong about that, but everyone, pirates and non-pirates alike, agreed that the dude taking money was 100% wrong. I think the same dynamic is taking place here. You will never convince me that copying code from github or SO is wrong, but I agree that CoPilot should not be a commercial thing.
henvic 4y ago
No. IP sucks. Copyleft is just copyright in disguise. Don't want people writing code similar to yours? Don't publish anything. Force people to sign contracts before having contact with your source code.
999900000999 4y ago
This feels legal, but icky. Like technically it's legal for multi billion dollar companies to turn MIT projects into hosted services. They can do this without compensating the original devs, they can close source their additions, etc. Just feels icky. Co Pilot also feels icky, back when it was free, it looked like a neat project. For 10$ a month, one would hope the Microsoft overlords would offer some compensation. Let's say you write a code snippet that Copilot copies a few million times. Maybe Microsoft can give you a bit of cash. Then again, it's probably buried in GitHub's TOS that they can use tools like CoPilot to extract from anything you upload.
Zedmor 4y ago
I don't get it. If I spend some time reading through source code in github and now produce code, how come I can be liable for that? Why we hold humans and machines to the different standards? My brain runs on neural networks too and I can learn things from reading/observing. What is the difference?
abrax3141 4y ago
The Luddites: Lets add large unreachable lines of trash code to our open repos. (And on random days, dress up as road road signs and walk around near roads.)
zasdffaa 4y ago
Microsoft bought github and then did its copilot thing without asking. Asking about copilot is to miss the microsoft elephant in the room. This is MS doing its thing all over again.
jhoelzel 4y ago
Muhahahah. If this has any legal grounds, Machine learning as a hole, is in a lot of danger. It also shows in global competition. Here in germany I have seen scientists trying to train a gdpr conforming data set.... Lets just say that you obviously get much better resuls, the bigger your training set.
jarbus 4y ago
This is an entirely new type of product developed with a completely new type of technology that our existing laws were not designed to handle. A lot of folks seem to want Copilot to exist under one existing legal concept or another, but I think we really just need to define a new concept altogether for models and their output trained on publicly available data.
vharuck 4y ago
Doesn't GitHub's own Terms of Service prevent them from doing something like Copilot? https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#d-user-generated-content https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... >This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program. Copilot is not part of GitHub's services or archival efforts. At least, it was not when they were training the model. And the TOS don't mention Copilot at all (or the terms "train" or "model").
fargle 4y ago
I think a lot of people are focusing too much on whether an AI could ever be creative or transformative or not (FWIW I'm convinced they can't). But it's not relevant - a lazy human programmer could easily infringe by copying snippets of copyrighted code too. If anyone shows an example of co-pilot automatically producing something too closely resembling copyrighted code that's too significant to be fair use, you got a problem regardless of what technology got you there. If that lazy programmer "toils" away behind a corporate wall (sadly too likely), you might never know what he's up to. But you've put his "work" on display and let anyone on the internet record his behavior with this thing. At some point, co-pilot is going to be able to "suggest" something that's traceable and someone's going to sue. I think it will come down to whether what gets produced is copyrightable or fair use, not whether it was an AI or not that scraped and copied it.

200 points by deadbunny 4y ago

The fact copilot is trained on GPL data makes it unusable for many developers.

Absolutely! But this article may focus too much on ethics. In practice, you usually need to demonstrate that you were harmed by an action to bring it to court. So we would need the author of a GPL'd repository to sue, with proof that copilot copied and pasted their code. The moment that happens, MS would simply omit that single repository from the copilot dataset, tell the judge that they fixed a bug in their "content filtering algorithm", and have the case dismissed. They might also ban the developer's account for good measure.

guitarbill 4y ago
> In practice, you usually need to demonstrate that you were harmed by an action to bring it to court. I think this is true for copyright infringement damages. But is a GPL violation a copyright or a contract issue? And unlike copyright, the fix isn't damages to compensate the rightsholder, but to uphold the license. > So we would need the author of a GPL'd repository to sue, with proof that copilot copied and pasted their code. What happens if multiple authors wait and see, and then jointly sue? At that point, removing a single repo isn't enough.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  > And unlike copyright, the fix isn't damages to compensate the rightsholder, but to uphold the license. That's not true. Courts won't consistently mandate that people relicense their code that includes GPLed stuff. They'll make you pay a fine and remove the code.

Akronymus 4y ago

Personally, I err on the side of suing them for breaking the license terms and demanding the GPL code being removed from the training data. Altough, I realize that it isn't feasible.

antupis 4y ago
Then watch Disney sue some random ML practitioner for using star wars images to train model or Google sue Huggingface for using some youtube videos.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  Thats... actually a pretty good counterpoint. Altough google suing for youtube videos is somewhat different to disney with SW as google doesnt have an exclusive license on those. But yeah, you changed my kind on that one.
- orra 4y ago
  Yeah, people forget there are 'transformative use' exceptions to copyright law. Without such an exception, search engines would be illegal. Don't get me wrong, it's problematic when the model spits out moderately sized, copyrightable, chunks, verbatim. But I think the bigger issue for the free and open source communities is that Copilot is proprietary, not that it exists. We should create a FOSS alternative. Presumably we can even train it on (source available) proprietary code.
  - BeefWellington 4y ago
    So the key questions here I think are: Can an ML model "create"? Can it "own copyright"? Can it "transform"? If it can't do those things then I think the entire idea falls apart. Separate from this, the violations are per instance, not the model itself. If I'm an author and write hundreds of non-infringing books over two decades and then suddenly write and sell a copy of an existing work, I'm not going to be sued for my other books or the reading I did to create any of it. I will be sued for the actual infringing book.
4y ago

throwaway71271 4y ago

jodrellblank 4y ago

> "Moreover, open source developers are already suffering burnouts because of gigantic multi-billion dollar corporations taking their free code and re-bundling it as a SaaS, hence, introducing this new feature takes even more from them than there was before." The popular open source licenses explicitly give permission for people to resell your work, it's not even buried in the small print or anything. e.g. GPL: "Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish)". MIT License: "including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software". Apache License: "each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work". This should no more cause burnout than someone buying your old car and using it for an endurance race makes you tired. Where there's burnout involved it's more likely the demands for support and fixes that head back upstream without any associated money. More concerning is Copilot trained on code which isn't GPL licensed or similar. Sharing code doesn't automatically grant anyone any license to use it for anything at all.

blueflow 4y ago
From MIT License; > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. I'm not confident Copilot will comply with this part of my code's license.
- simonw 4y ago
  It depends on the interpretation of "substantial portions". Classic challenge with legal documents. Here's a discussion about that usage in the MIT license: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2188 https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2188
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  Me either, but that has little to do with burnout from other people making money from GPL licensed code. (That a tool exists doesn't free one from responsibility for using it; CoPilot not citing original code and its license terms seems like it rules it out for anything beyond experimentation; that part is very arguable)

spupe 4y ago

No. Why would we want to go that route? Such a lawsuit would slow down a ton of work in AI, certainly big language models and DALL-E for example.

amelius 4y ago
What will happen when someone writes a website called "This Disney character does not exist"?
- kgwgk 4y ago
  That they may have to take the "Disney" trademark out of the name.
  - monkeybutton 4y ago
    Just need to reword it a bit, "This Disney character doesn't exist" can also be "This is not a Disney character (because it doesn't exist)". Sums up the assertion being made well too. Not a Disney character. Except their lawyers may disagree.
HelloNurse 4y ago
Making an example of Copilot (or, better, Copilot users) would slow down a ton of work in AI-automated copyright infringement: a good thing.
- jacknews 4y ago
  copyright, such a good thing

midislack 4y ago

I support any lawsuit against Microsoft. They deserve it.

shadowgovt 4y ago
I suspect Microsoft supports that lawsuit too. Looking at the fact pattern in front of me, I can't imagine Copilot has gotten this far without Microsoft's lawyers being fairly confident that they have a compelling legal argument in their back pocket that not only protects their substantial investment in this project, but perhaps puts up a barrier on the limits of what can be claimed via a copyleft license. This whole exercise screams "designed for win-win" to me. What that argument might be, I cannot guess.

monkeybutton 4y ago

An interesting exercise would be recreating an entire program/tool that is GPL using copilot and releasing under a less restrictive license. Could one could argue that the effort put into cobbling together a knock-off is enough to constitute an original work? Running a copyrighted movie through a neural network compression algorithm and uploading it on bittorrent isn't going to stop you from being sued. Even if the output is produced by an AI.

redox99 4y ago
That's probably the right distinction. If copilot allows you to type // source code of linux kernel And you get the whole code, then I would consider it unoriginal The same way your movie example, if you told it Avengers Endgame And it gave you the whole movie, it would also be. But what if you type (like with DallE) Spiderman fighting Thanos and you get something different, but that resembles some Endgame scene. Would that infringe copyright, be fair use, or what?
- Adrox 4y ago
  Try to publish anything with a character looking like Spiderman, Thanos, IronMan, Captain America and see what Marvel does to you…
  - redox99 4y ago
    There are many videos like that on youtube and they seem to be doing fine For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8LvcJoAnms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8LvcJoAnms
UncleMeat 4y ago
The law isn't stupid. This is one of the advantages of having humans in the loop. People can and will say "I know what you are doing, knock it off."

prepend 4y ago

Should Steven King be sued because he trained himself by reading other authors’ copyrighted works?

onpensionsterm 4y ago
If you accidentally recite someone else's work, it's still plagiarism.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  I am absolutely certain that I have written sentences that are word-for-word identical to sentences other people have written. Should I be sued?
  - onpensionsterm 4y ago
    You're describing something that happens regularly. Especially in music.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      That's the point. Accidentally including the same material in something new is not immediately infringement.
lbriner 4y ago
This is not the same at all. An equivalent would be if Steven King read a lot of other authors and then copied parts of their works into his own books for profit, even if they were changed slightly.
- WithinReason 4y ago
  How large does the section has to be? A single sentence? Or two? You can currently set Copilot to not include suggestions where more than 150 characters appear in the training set.

jasonlfunk 4y ago

Imagine a situation where a chat bot AI is trained on a bunch of copywritted novels. And then you ask it to start reciting portions of it. Should that be illegal? It doesn’t seem like it to me. If I were to turn around and resell it, then you could sue me; but that wouldn’t be a chat bot’s fault. Just like it’s not the clipboard’s responsibility to ensure I’m not violating licenses, I don’t think it’s copilot’s responsibility either. Use it at your own risk.

jrochkind1 4y ago
Hm, you're suggesting that it ought to definitely be illegal if you sell the output of the chatbot trained on copyrighted material, but not if you give it away for free? That is definitely not how US copyright law works (although you are welcome to argue that it should), that there is such a bright line around selling. It's possible for something to be a copyright violation even if you give it away for free (see torrent sites!), and it's possible for to qualify as fair use and not be a violation even if you sell it. Under USA copyright law (others are similar but not quite the same), the first step would be deciding if the output of this chatbot counts as a "copy" or "derivative work" at all. If it does not, then there is no copyright violation whether you sell it or not. If it does, then it is a copyright violation (whether you sell it or not) unless it's use can count as "fair use". Whether the use is "commercial" is just part of one of four factors that are balanced to determine if it's fair use. For instance, if you are only using a tiny portion of the copyrighted work and it doesn't have much effect on the profits of the original copyright holder and the use is considered highly "transformative" too (sound like copilot?) -- it could well be fair use even if you are selling your output. (Also... Github Copilot is literally selling it, right? You have to pay them to use Copilot! It would accordingly be considered a commercial use. If I make a copy of a hollywood movie and sell it to you, I'm probably violating copyright (unless I can convince a court it's fair use), regardless of what you do with it, it doesn't matter if you re-sell it or not. If you re-sell it or make another copy, you may be additionally violating copyright another time yourself.) I do think there's a reasonable argument that copilot is fair use. It wouldn't mainly hinge on whether the output is sold or not. This is presumably the argument MS/Github would make if brought into court. Since Oracle v. Google, I've stopped trying to predict what courts will do on software-related copyright cases, the law seems to be pretty chaotic and the actions of courts unpredictable. (also i'm not a lawyer this is not legal advice). In general, I am in favor of an expansive bounds of fair use, and think it serves "the people" to have such.

Datenstrom 4y ago

GitHub should not be sued for training on the data, but anyone using it should be liable for any copyright infringements it generates. That would effectively make it useless for business use cases, but it should be until the models understand copyright and plagiarism, which they do not yet.

mewse 4y ago
If Microsoft asserts and represents that their tool doesn’t generate copyright-infringing code, then surely Microsoft is the party which should be liable, rather than the poor unlucky programmer who was lied to by the billion-dollar corporation’s marketing agency?
- chii 4y ago
  > surely Microsoft is the party which should be liable unless microsoft is doing work-for-hire for you via copilot, i highly doubt they are liable. You, as the person who is claiming to have produced the work (even though you were using a smart tool to help), must be the person who also is liable. Otherwise, could you not claim that the auto-correct on your word-processor is liable for copyright infringement?

Longlius 4y ago

The question is ultimately going to come down to - "Is Copilot the same as a human programmer reading a lot of GPL code and rehashing, in a non-infringing way, the algorithms, functions, and designs used in a lot of FOSS? Or is Copilot performing more of a copy and paste pastiche of code that is protected by intellectual property law?" On a tangential note, I always find the discussions surrounding FOSS licenses and copyright rather amusing in a sad way. There's a certain kind of entitlement a lot of people feel towards FOSS that they certainly do not express towards proprietary software and I imagine this a great source of the resentment and burn-out FOSS maintainers feel.

TuringNYC 4y ago
>> "Is Copilot the same as a human programmer reading a lot of GPL code and rehashing, in a non-infringing way, the algorithms, functions, and designs used in a lot of FOSS? Or is Copilot performing more of a copy and paste pastiche of code that is protected by intellectual property law?" IANAL, but isnt the concept of "derived data" pretty standard? You dont need to copy data for it to be infringing. I've tackled derived data clauses regularly when negotiating data contracts at work and there is always verbiage and discussion around it (e.g., are we allowed to publish an average of the purchased data)
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  An average is not related to artistic aspects of the data and so can't be a derivative in the copyright sense (based on international law - one of the principle Conventions is fully titled "the Berne convention for the protection of literary and artistic laws", that's because copyright protects literary and artistic works). Provided you have rights to access a body of statistics, then copyright has nothing to say -- save overreaching national caselaw (!) -- on your derivation of mathematical, technical, or scientific data from that work. But a contractual clause, in general, doesn't care about copyright; of you've contracted not to derive data from a work then that's orthogonal to copyright. IANA(IP)L, this is my opinion and unrelated to my employment.
jhugo 4y ago
> The question is ultimately going to come down to - "Is Copilot the same as a human programmer reading a lot of GPL code and rehashing, in a non-infringing way, the algorithms, functions, and designs used in a lot of FOSS? Or is Copilot performing more of a copy and paste pastiche of code that is protected by intellectual property law?" Of course it isn't the same as a human programmer doing anything. It's a complex piece of software, which we happen to misuse the term "AI" to describe, but it is not intelligent.

thdxr 4y ago

Whenever it comes to things like legal issues or regulations, people take such pride in being someone who understands their intricacies that the larger picture is missed. We should think about what outcome we actually want. While technically any snippet of code can claim a copyright, it's sort of ridiculous to suggest the snippets that Copilot generates has any protectable value. Practically Copilot is saving you the labor of writing fairly trivial but tedious code. I work on open source full time, there's no random snippet of code that I've written I'd feel upset about if someone copied. Licenses on software are mostly performative.

natly 4y ago
The 'inverse square root' carmack trick is hardly trivial.
- chii 4y ago
  so luckily no one owns the idea that you can use both newtons method, and floating point bit-hacking, to produce a good estimate of a square root.
  - SahAssar 4y ago
    So if a similarly non-trivial piece of code was in a non-public-domain codebase and copilot copied that wholesale, then you'd have a problem with it?
NoraCodes 4y ago
> Licenses on software are mostly performative. I seriously doubt you actually believe this, at least in an equal way. The code to Windows XP is available on the 'net, but I can't just go and compile that and start giving out copies without serious legal repercussions. Copilot is "copyright for me but not for thee" and it's bullshit.
- deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago

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toss1 4y ago

>>a form of laundering open source code into commercial works If it is nothing but a glorified autocomplete that inserts SHORT snippets of code, as in a quote from a book in a book review, or the above quote, that's fine. But when it is inserting whole pages, that's beyond Fair Use, and basically a nicely scaled and laundered version of plagiarism. Another key is now much it is modifying the code to suit the situation. Is it generating entirely new synthesized output like DALL-E 2 or GPT-3 such that the output is closer to generative creativity, or is it merely pasting in code blocks found in similar situations? It comes down to the question of how transformative is the output, which is a key concept in copyright law. >>“What is the difference between this and someone doing it manually? " Another key question here. If it is merely cut/paste beyond a line or two, it's plagiarism, but if it is synthesizing new works, it's good. Same as manually: am I using your GPL work for inspiration to generate new works, or am I copy-pasting pages of code? Does anyone have any extensive experience with Copilot to be able to highlight these differences? EDIT: fmt, clarity

cdrini 4y ago
In my experience it's more generative. It responds to variable names in my code, formatting, patterns in how I'm writing (am I using ES6 features? async/await or raw promises? Etc). Granted it could still be copying, but when it's generating usually less than 5 lines at a time... I wonder if you could argue that all possible 5 line code snippets have already been written--wrt to like abstract logic/variable relationships/patterns. Also I think it's important to note that Copilot isn't an independent AI; it's a human in the loop system. In my experience I always make adjustments to the code it generates to better fit my needs. So on top of the transformation that copilot does, I'm also stacking transformation on top of that. So the final, potentially copyrightable product is very far removed from the training data. Copilot's training algorithm, OpenAI Codex, "is a descendant of GPT-3" under the hood. I think code is unique in that unlike text and images, there's much less variance in code. It's not as expressive as English, or visual art. So I think there might be a higher chance it'll generate something similar to its training data--but only because all code is inherently more similar.
- toss1 4y ago

mlatu 4y ago

for me the matter is simple: if the resulting code is licensed under a GPL incompatible license: yes if the resulting code is licensed under the GPL: no

NoraCodes 4y ago
Their contention is that this is fair use, so copyright based licensing doesn't apply at all. Under their legal theory, the GPL is irrelevant.
- mlatu 4y ago
  what about countries that don't allow for "fair use" in their copyright laws like germany?

jhugo 4y ago

(2021)

ThereIsNoWorry 4y ago

I worry for the productivity of the field if Copilot would be successfully sued. Destroy innovation and gridlock progress.

NoraCodes 4y ago
How so? What would be prevented, other than systems exactly like copilot that copyright-launder random source code on the internet?

rockbruno 4y ago

EDIT: It took me a while, but I found proof of Copilot suggesting a full copyrighted algorithm. I then take back these arguments as I was under the assumption the tool couldn't do this: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 Old comment for documentation's sake: Are licenses even enforceable by law? The idea of writing some mundane basic code and then wanting to sue someone for "stealing it" just sounds ludicrous to me. True copyright has barriers to make sure you actually invented what you're trying to patent. That's not to say that there isn't a problem here -- there's definitely an ethical component to how this product works, but this whole code licensing thing never clicked for me. Does it hold any actual power?

thomastjeffery 4y ago
Licenses are indeed enforceable by law. Most popular ones (GPL, MIT, Apache) have been enforced in court. Also Copyright isn't patent.

WhompingWindows 4y ago

We store confidential code on Github. How do I know it hasn't been used in CoPilot?

pabs3 4y ago
You can't know (although they claim it was trained only on public code, presumably including proprietary public or leaked code). GPL folks are wondering if it is possible to convert proprietary code to GPL through CoPilot.
- cdrini 4y ago
  I think you can pretty safely know. People store sensitive information, passwords, keys, etc in private repos aaaall the time. It would be an entirely unnecessary complexity for copilot to try to filter out that sensitive information. It's not like there's a deficiency of public code on GitHub. It wouldn't make any sense to train on private repos.
  - pabs3 4y ago
    All that stuff is in public repos too, so really they should filter out those things from public repos too. The only difference I can see is that private repos are usually proprietary and GitHub didn't want to anger their paying customers, who usually have proprietary code on GitHub.
cdrini 4y ago
Assuming your confidential code is in private repos, you're fine. From their FAQ: > [GitHub Copilot] has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub.

salicideblock 4y ago

Should be tagged (2021)

paulgb 4y ago

An interesting (though not conclusive) test of whether Microsoft is confident that Copilot is not copyright-infringing is whether they’d be willing to release a mode trained only on proprietary Microsoft code.

jarbus 4y ago
I really like this idea
remram 4y ago
I was wondering about something similar. Can we get Copilot to come up with some non-free algorithm under copyright from another big company (with lawyers), e.g. Oracle, Microsoft, Google, etc? This is a little difficult because it would need to be non-free but public, be specific enough that we can recognize it, and I think Copilot has protections against outputting code verbatim (but it could be made to output code with variable names changed or similar). That is probably the way to kickstart a legal discussion about Copilot.

z3c0 4y ago

A lot of comments here keep drawing parallels to writing as for why this is right or wrong, but I think a more apt comparison would be music, where components like riffs or rhythms can be reused to make something wholly different. Many a musician has claimed IP infringement over another musician using similar melodies, but just like programming, if you look closely enough, you'll see that everyone is copying each other and there's not much that can be done to stop it. Personally, I'm a bit bothered by this myself, but I'd be lying if I said I never once got any ideas by looking at the source code of a GPL project.

omnicognate 4y ago
Ideas aren't copyrightable.
- z3c0 4y ago
  only ideas are copyrightable
  - omnicognate 4y ago
    Google "are ideas copyrightable". Copyright protects the specific, tangible expression, not the idea or concept itself. So in your case, having "got ... ideas by looking at the source code of a GPL project" doesn't necessarily mean there is any violation of copyright. Employers will often require that employees haven't seen sensitive code at all (clean room) as it avoids any possibility of copying the code itself and provides powerful evidence if they're ever sued, but that's not a legal requirement, just a cautious practice. To read code, learn a concept from it and then apply that concept in your own code is fine (as far as copyright is concerned) as long as you're not copying the code itself. I am not a lawyer and the above is not legal advice, ofc :-)

fartcannon 4y ago

If they were good, they would release it for free.

jacknews 4y ago

Betteridge's law says no, and so do I. If code is GPL, it's free to read, and learn from. That's kind of the point.

Hamuko 4y ago

Microsoft claims that training Copilot is "fair use" but couldn't they still be sued in like Germany or somewhere else where fair use does not apply?

dools 4y ago

Imagine this: I am a human programmer. I work a lot with FOSS. I learn a lot from FOSS. I go on StackOverflow and answer a bunch of questions. The answers I give are based on all the shit I learned working with FOSS. Is SO infringing copyright by publishing my answers? I would think that "NO" would be the obvious answer. Copilot is no different. There is no way this would hold up in court.

thomastjeffery 4y ago
That's not what Copilot does. It isn't parsing the code, learning what it does, then applying the concept to generate new structurally/functionally similar code. We like to imagine that's what it's doing, because the utility of what it actually does can have a similar end result. What Copilot actually does is read every line of code from a project, and keep a dataset built around what code tends to have been written adjacent to what other code. Copilot's output is literally a translation of the code it was "trained on", using data about that code to do its translations.
- dools 4y ago
  > What Copilot actually does is read every line of code from a project, and keep a dataset built around what code tends to have been written adjacent to what other code. No it reads every line of code from EVERY project. It is not reproducing code from individual coders, it is reproducing patterns deduced from the work of millions of coders. It's like Smart Compose in Gmail. Copyright on anything I write is mine by default, but Gmail can of course take all things written by everybody and then use it to train a thing that detects what I probably mean and offer sentence auto completion in Gmails.
  - breakingcups 4y ago
    Here it is reproducing a function from the source code of Quake verbatim. https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

marcodiego 4y ago

No. The generated code should be GPL'ed as the license requires.

ghoward 4y ago

I wrote a whitepaper refuting GitHub's arguments that Copilot is fair use: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/10/my-whitepaper-about-github-copilot/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/10/my-whitepaper-about-github-c... .

UncleMeat 4y ago
I feel like the term "whitepaper" has lost all meaning. Does it just mean "thing typeset with latex" now?
- ghoward 4y ago
  It's just the term that the FSF used when I wrote it for them. For me, it means "academic paper."
  - WhompingWindows 4y ago
    I thought the distinction was: "white papers" are not necessarily peer-reviewed by an academic journal's editors; white papers tend to be internally-made documents within an organization, edited by that organization's members, for the purpose of knowledge/information. Academic papers as a whole can include both "white papers" and "peer-reviewed journal articles" aka the "papers" that many think of. I would surely put a "white paper" onto my resume if I thought it was a great piece of work.
    - ghoward 4y ago
      TIL, thank you. I think my paper is a whitepaper in that sense because it's not peer-reviewed, but it was meant as an academic-like paper.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    "Whitepaper", for a long time, meant sort of the opposite of "academic paper." They weren't published in refereed conferences and journals and were usually published by corporations or governments but they resembled academic work in their contributions. Something like the original BTC paper is a good example. It wasn't published in a conference or journal, but the level of rigor and the scale of the contribution is similar to what would be published in a conference or journal. I think the crypto community was the end of it. Now "we are launching $CoolCoin" gets called "whitepaper."

JohnHaugeland 4y ago

1. No. Why? 2. It's in the user agreement 3. You weren't harmed in any practical way 4. It's not a real tool and nobody's using it in the long run 5. If GPL fans want to waste money on lawyers, focus on making the GPL have teeth 6. No, of course you don't get to impose a new license on your work retroactively

Longlius 4y ago
The GPL has teeth. Vendors are routinely sued over infringement. This is why a lot of things like routers and IoT gizmos you buy nowadays come with a notice about your rights under the GPL along with a link to a form to request source code.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  > The GPL has teeth. TiVo says it doesn't. . > Vendors are routinely sued over infringement. The GPL has never one time been successfully prosecuted. Never. Show me a single specific case.
pxeger1 4y ago
Where is it in the user agreement? https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... > This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. Charging $10/month seems like selling it. The only questions is whether it counts as your copyrighted content, if it's been chewed up by an AI.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

chrismorgan 4y ago

People keep on talking about the GPL in these cases, but there’s absolutely nothing whatsoever special about the GPL: any code that is not public domain (or under a public-domain-equivalent license) is equally affected. Any mention of the GPL is a red herring. Copilot is completely depending on the legal theory of being effectively exempt from copyright, under fair use doctrine; if that legal theory falls apart, the entire space (and a lot of other machine learning stuff) is utterly doomed. Will it, won’t it, should it, shouldn’t it? Dunno. (And when people say that it should just say what license the code it generates is under and what attribution or similar is required: Copilot can’t tell whether it’s reproducing copyrightable chunks of code, or indeed where what it produces came from, by the very nature of machine learning techniques. The whole verbatim reproduction issue demonstrates this—they’re trying to avoid such reproductions, which a cynic might say is because it weakens their fair use claim, but it’s not easy to do.)

chii 4y ago
i'm not buying the argument that copilot is infringing copyright. If someone learnt how to program via reading open source projects, you don't get to claim that their future work is derivative.
- nucleardog 4y ago
  Except, y'know, when it regurgitates copyrighted code verbatim[0] which is not even derivative but just straight up copyright infringement. [0] https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
  - LeSaucy 4y ago
    Even down to whitespace?
  - dzhiurgis 4y ago
    As a society IMO we should be fine with this
  - 4y ago

kryptiskt 4y ago

And if they win, create a precedence that extends the copyright regime into entirely new domains? That would be a massive self-own. That would be one way to get me to vote for the Pirate Party, I guess.

anothernewdude 4y ago

Of course not, just the code that is produced is all GPL, and under all the other licenses as well.

ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago

YES

pabs3 4y ago

I wonder if the code CoPilot outputs is even protected by copyright at all. Would be pretty funny if it weren't, lots of proprietary codebases written using it would actually be public domain.

BeefWellington 4y ago
I suspect that upon "publishing" or the equivalent the company employing the developer would assume the copyright any liability attached to it that Copilot represents, rather than the idea it would all become public domain.
- pabs3 4y ago
  I'm talking about lack of ownership of the code, not about liability for generating the code.
  - BeefWellington 4y ago
    Effectively, copyright is ownership here though. Edit: I see the possible confusion point here: > would assume the copyright any liability attached Should read: > would assume the copyright and liability attached

duxup 4y ago

How much code is covered under a license? When I use GitHub I get some handy functions and sort of the style it is written in… but that’s it. It’s not a lot of code. Does someone own? formatDateISOXXX() { a handful lines of code here }

indymike 4y ago

There are so many interesting legal questions that Copilot raises. The tiny snippets that copilot recommends probably fall in the fair use bucket, but the use of entire application code for training, without making unmodified source available with instructions on how to get that source, will probably be an issue for Codepilot. It will take years to sort it out.

im3w1l 4y ago

A lot of people asking "is this legal?", but to me the more interesting question is should this be legal?". And I would like to debate the advantages and disadvantages of this. If we go back to the very basics, the purpose of copyright is to reward and incentivize content creators. The purpose of fair use is to allow certain uses of a work that are beneficial to society, and don't substantially interfere with rewarding content creators. Consider for instance a parody. The parody does not substitute for the original work, so it will not interfere with the reward. Looking at copilot through this framing, we can ask whether it will interfere with rewarding creators. If Alice writes a program, will copilot trained on that product allow Bob to create a competing product more easy, essentially freeload on Alice's creativity? Yes, to some extent it will. On the other hand there are also advantages of allowing copilot. It promises to make software creation easier, for Bob, but also for Alice. Now, as this is trained on code that is posted publicly but not private code it will advantage private code over publicly posted code. This has the potential to harm the free and open source software movement. This movement is a positive in the world, so harming it should be considered a bad thing. But really, the big question is how big these effects are, and no one seems to have a good answer to that.

RealStickman_ 4y ago

This article was posted in 2021. Can the title be changed to reflect that, please?

kouteiheika 4y ago

If training Copilot was copyright infringement then essentially it'd make the majority of useful/interesting machine learning models illegal as they currently exist, and make it impossible for anyone except huge multi-billion corporations to train such models in the future, since only they'd be able to legally license enough data to do so. Models like GPT-J or DALL-E mini could not legally exist anymore. So sure, please, make this illegal, regress the whole field of machine learning 20 years back, and make it something that only billion dollar corporations can do. We should be striving to make copyright less draconian, not more.

maximusdrex 4y ago
Not necessarily, the issue here isn't that training on public code should be illegal, it's merely that the models trained on such data should be considered derivative works under the licenses which the code is released under. GPL code must also be released under GPL, so Copilot must not charge users to use a model that is trained on and regurgitates GPL code. > We should be striving to make copyright less draconian, not more. Agreed, and I'm not sure why you think forcing GPT and Copilot to respect open licenses will make them illegal instead of more open.
- kouteiheika 4y ago
  > Agreed, and I'm not sure why you think forcing GPT and Copilot to respect open licenses will make them illegal instead of more open. I wasn't talking about Copilot. I was talking about the vast majority of other interesting models. It wouldn't make Copilot itself illegal because it was trained on explicitly licensed data (so it'd make it GPL-licensed), but it would make those other models illegal. Take for example the GPT-J, which was trained on 825GB of data scraped off the Internet. If we assume the view that a machine learning model is a derivative work of its training data then that makes GPT-J illegal, because it was trained on a bunch of "all rights reserved" data, and there's no legal license under which it could be released. Most interesting models are like that. > so Copilot must not charge users That's not what the GPL says.
- deadbunny 4y ago

mullikine 4y ago

Large language models including Codex are a transformative technology. So long as Microsoft and OpenAI are not selling back usage of the model to the open-source community, I think it's OK, though it's the bare minimum obligation. Bi-directional fair-use is probably the best result we can hope for. The model does 'steal' the 'essence' of the software though, to use inference instead of computation to generate code, documentation, even evaluate and explain it. The models are license blind and there's very little that could be done to prevent it. Like what the invention of the camera has done for art. So long as MS/OpenAI is giving back to open source/free software. The most important thing, however, is that free (libre) software developers are able to work with the language models directly, so that libre software is allowed to continue progressing into what I call Imaginary Programming. That's because with a generative internet all you really need is blockchain + prompting. Traditional 'real' programming is like writing in assembly code -- it's completley outmoded. https://huggingface.co/spaces/mullikine/ilambda https://huggingface.co/spaces/mullikine/ilambda

nnvvhh 4y ago

I wrote a law school paper discussing the potential liability stemming from Copilot: https://nickvh.com/blog/archive/2022/02/copilot/copilot.html https://nickvh.com/blog/archive/2022/02/copilot/copilot.html

ghoward 4y ago
IANAL or a law student. Good paper, though I disagree with many points. However, two things: you claim that Copilot might have infringed during training because of the GPL, but the GPL's clause only kicks in on distribution. If GitHub had trained Copilot and then did nothing else, that clause would not kick in. Second, your Stack Overflow example of copying is not good because SO has an explicit license for all material given. You must agree to let SO and others have the material under that license, which is CC-BY-SA 4.0. Don't get me wrong; I hate Copilot. But those two things you said were wrong.
- nnvvhh 4y ago
  Thanks for engaging with the paper. I'm too lazy to check the GPL comment (I'll assume I made a mistake). But as far as I can tell my only reference to Stack Overflow was not about liability based on copying from SO. I was making a comment about a common industry practice.

einarfd 4y ago

This article is from June last year. Has anything happened since then on this? Is anyone bringing legal actions against Copilot and Github? If not why not? I would think that if there was a case against it, that there are open source affiliated entities out there that would have a both the legal and monetary resources to go to court over this. When I look at the discussion here, it looks like most of the arguments are based on common sense or morality. While that is nice, I would have loved to hear a perspective on this based on law instead. Is there someone here with a more legal perspective/background that could comment?

mindaslab 4y ago

Yes it must be. Even though Micro$soft will get away because it has huge pockets.

jtode 4y ago

My level of engagement with this: I was accepted into the technical preview of CoPilot, and while I did generate a few functions and messed around a bit, I don't do enough actual programming these days (because reasons) to have made good use of it. I won't be using it as a commercial product, I'm pretty sure, and I seem to have until August to use it for free, if I'm gonna. Anyways... Remember Bill Gates' open letter to hobbyists in 1976, in which he blamed pirates for ruining everything? This discussion is much more interesting and subtle than the old debate about piracy's place (and it definitely has a place) in user communities, but I find it humorous that Gates's behemoth, all these years later, seems to have circled around to doing the same thing. As one who started out by going to swap meets with my Commie 64 and completely disregarding the hand-wringing, moustache-twirling frets of the people RMS (and I) would later refer to as Hoarders, I am pretty sure that I land in the Don't Care category of this debate. Specifically, I think the most compelling point made in the article is when it points out that the tools which were used to create CoPilot are available for free to all, so anyone who is willing to put in the effort of learning how to train models is free to recreate CoPilot for themselves, and share it with anyone. We all have copypasted code from github or SO at some point without thinking about the license, I am pretty sure, in many cases while at work or otherwise engaged in commercial software activities. CoPilot cannot write entire programs (yet), all it can really do at this point is automate the searching and CTRL-C+V part for snippets and functions, and that is a net good for anyone who writes software. If there is going to be a lawsuit, I would hope that it hinges strictly on whether github has the right to charge money for it, because essentially, what they are doing by increasing the speed at which people can work is lowering the number of coders required to finish a project on a given timeline. This is both a boon to anyone who is working on something they intend to release FOSS, and simultaneously a device by which greedy Hoarders who want to pay as few people as possible while profiting from the work of those they do pay can increase their profits immensely while creating fewer good jobs for humans. To put it more simply, when Hoarders use this tech, it is a transfer of wealth out of the pockets of working programmers, into the pockets of shareholders in whatever corporation is reselling this technology. There is good reason, in other words, for working programmers to dislike this, and for FOSS volunteers to like it. The lawsuit I would like to see happen, if they must, is one which simply seeks to prevent anyone from charging for this, as that would at least keep the investor class from further draining the economy of people who actually work. Given that the tools for training models are freely available, what I would prefer is if someone with the time implements some form of free version of the same thing. The data they trained the model on for Copilot is freely available to anyone with an internet connection, as are the ML tools. It's extremely clear to everyone that the code copypasta'd by the model does not belong to Microsoft/Github, so if they can sell it, nobody can argue that a free program can't automatically search and copy it for you for free. There are some that this solution, which I am pretty sure will come about, would not satisfy, and those are the people who can rightly be said to be against innovation and new technologies. It hinges on whether money is changing hands, and whose hands the money is passing into. Back in those Commie 64 days, we all pirated freely with zero consequence, with one exception that I can recall: one dude in my city started selling pirated software at $5 per floppy. As it happens, he was a friend of my uncle's and I knew him personally. He was a poor man with very little going for him in life, suffice to say, but nonetheless, it only took a couple of months until the police were at his door, and they seized his 64 and all his software. I disagreed with his actions but I never hated the guy, he was too sad and pathetic to hate if you saw the life he actually lived, but many, many people did, including all the local pirates, because we were firmly of the mindset that software was meant to be shared freely. We may have been wrong about that, but everyone, pirates and non-pirates alike, agreed that the dude taking money was 100% wrong. I think the same dynamic is taking place here. You will never convince me that copying code from github or SO is wrong, but I agree that CoPilot should not be a commercial thing.

henvic 4y ago

No. IP sucks. Copyleft is just copyright in disguise. Don't want people writing code similar to yours? Don't publish anything. Force people to sign contracts before having contact with your source code.

999900000999 4y ago

This feels legal, but icky. Like technically it's legal for multi billion dollar companies to turn MIT projects into hosted services. They can do this without compensating the original devs, they can close source their additions, etc. Just feels icky. Co Pilot also feels icky, back when it was free, it looked like a neat project. For 10$ a month, one would hope the Microsoft overlords would offer some compensation. Let's say you write a code snippet that Copilot copies a few million times. Maybe Microsoft can give you a bit of cash. Then again, it's probably buried in GitHub's TOS that they can use tools like CoPilot to extract from anything you upload.

Zedmor 4y ago

I don't get it. If I spend some time reading through source code in github and now produce code, how come I can be liable for that? Why we hold humans and machines to the different standards? My brain runs on neural networks too and I can learn things from reading/observing. What is the difference?

abrax3141 4y ago

The Luddites: Lets add large unreachable lines of trash code to our open repos. (And on random days, dress up as road road signs and walk around near roads.)

zasdffaa 4y ago

Microsoft bought github and then did its copilot thing without asking. Asking about copilot is to miss the microsoft elephant in the room. This is MS doing its thing all over again.

jhoelzel 4y ago

Muhahahah. If this has any legal grounds, Machine learning as a hole, is in a lot of danger. It also shows in global competition. Here in germany I have seen scientists trying to train a gdpr conforming data set.... Lets just say that you obviously get much better resuls, the bigger your training set.

jarbus 4y ago

This is an entirely new type of product developed with a completely new type of technology that our existing laws were not designed to handle. A lot of folks seem to want Copilot to exist under one existing legal concept or another, but I think we really just need to define a new concept altogether for models and their output trained on publicly available data.

vharuck 4y ago

Doesn't GitHub's own Terms of Service prevent them from doing something like Copilot? https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#d-user-generated-content https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... >This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program. Copilot is not part of GitHub's services or archival efforts. At least, it was not when they were training the model. And the TOS don't mention Copilot at all (or the terms "train" or "model").

fargle 4y ago

I think a lot of people are focusing too much on whether an AI could ever be creative or transformative or not (FWIW I'm convinced they can't). But it's not relevant - a lazy human programmer could easily infringe by copying snippets of copyrighted code too. If anyone shows an example of co-pilot automatically producing something too closely resembling copyrighted code that's too significant to be fair use, you got a problem regardless of what technology got you there. If that lazy programmer "toils" away behind a corporate wall (sadly too likely), you might never know what he's up to. But you've put his "work" on display and let anyone on the internet record his behavior with this thing. At some point, co-pilot is going to be able to "suggest" something that's traceable and someone's going to sue. I think it will come down to whether what gets produced is copyrightable or fair use, not whether it was an AI or not that scraped and copied it.