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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

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.
Zambyte 4y ago
They would need to remove all code that isn't put in the public domain from their training data. Permissive licenses like MIT require derivatives to propagate the copyright notice, which Copilot does not do.

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.

Zambyte 4y ago

They would need to remove all code that isn't put in the public domain from their training data. Permissive licenses like MIT require derivatives to propagate the copyright notice, which Copilot does not do.