4 ms·

Independent recreation of the allegedly infringing work is an absolute defense. If you were to write all those ideas and idioms down and pass them to someone w

Independent recreation of the allegedly infringing work is an absolute defense. If you were to write all those ideas and idioms down and pass them to someone who had not seen the Linux source code, who then used it to reimplement similar functionality, neither of you would probably be guilty of copyright infringement. (there are still patents of course). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design Copyright doesn’t protect programming idioms and concepts. It protects against verbatim copying, more or less. It all comes down to how you characterize what Copilot does. We will just have to wait for new caselaw or even legislation that accounts for autonomous systems in defining legal wrongdoing.

BeefWellington 4y ago
> If you were to write all those ideas and idioms down and pass them to someone who had not seen the Linux source code, who then used it to reimplement similar functionality, neither of you would probably be guilty of copyright infringement. (there are still patents of course). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design This response doesn't relate to the example provided by CameronNemo, as it's a different scenario. At any rate, there is no clean room because copilot has "seen" the literal source. It is not comparable to clean room implementation in any fashion.
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  a training program reads source code and produces a model the software running the model does not have access to source code as the parent said, it depends how you characterize it, which is why this will be decided by whoever can afford the best lawyers.
  - BeefWellington 4y ago
    Well, the problem is with that characterization is that it's shown to be false already. Copilot has reproduced entire functions from existing codebases, which invalidates the idea it doesn't have access to source code.
    - jazzyjackson 4y ago
      I would have to better understand language transform models to back up my argument, but my impression is that copilot is not sitting ontop of a SQL database ripping the most likely line of code out of a row of a table, rather, it is a lossy compression that happens to be able to reconstruct some data better than others
jazzyjackson 4y ago
thanks for bringing up clean room design, I think it's a good analogy. The model, tho it may reproduce verbatim source code, does not contain the original source as such, right? But if that were the case, one could get away with copying music by merely compressing it - I am not copying the data, I have a totally different set of data that happens to get decoded into a similar performance. That's roughly analogous to a machine learning model, isn't it? compressing an enormous dataset into a "model" that is capable of being decoded in myriad ways depending on context.
adra 4y ago
IANAL but I don't see a double-rot13 "machine process" as any defense against demonstrably identical code. Just because it passes through a process doesn't make it clean. There were numerous examples of whole functions and code blocks repeated verbatim from its source material. I'm not sure the state of the application now, but the effort to prove an output snippet isn't copyrighted with restrictions by the source feels like an O(N) problem that nobody would want to ever do. At best, if copilot told you explicitly (by doing the very hard work of identifying the likely sources of the code output ) you could make some (more) informed decisions as to if it's worth the risk to include it.

BeefWellington 4y ago

> If you were to write all those ideas and idioms down and pass them to someone who had not seen the Linux source code, who then used it to reimplement similar functionality, neither of you would probably be guilty of copyright infringement. (there are still patents of course). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design This response doesn't relate to the example provided by CameronNemo, as it's a different scenario. At any rate, there is no clean room because copilot has "seen" the literal source. It is not comparable to clean room implementation in any fashion.

jazzyjackson 4y ago
a training program reads source code and produces a model the software running the model does not have access to source code as the parent said, it depends how you characterize it, which is why this will be decided by whoever can afford the best lawyers.
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  Well, the problem is with that characterization is that it's shown to be false already. Copilot has reproduced entire functions from existing codebases, which invalidates the idea it doesn't have access to source code.
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    I would have to better understand language transform models to back up my argument, but my impression is that copilot is not sitting ontop of a SQL database ripping the most likely line of code out of a row of a table, rather, it is a lossy compression that happens to be able to reconstruct some data better than others

jazzyjackson 4y ago

thanks for bringing up clean room design, I think it's a good analogy. The model, tho it may reproduce verbatim source code, does not contain the original source as such, right? But if that were the case, one could get away with copying music by merely compressing it - I am not copying the data, I have a totally different set of data that happens to get decoded into a similar performance. That's roughly analogous to a machine learning model, isn't it? compressing an enormous dataset into a "model" that is capable of being decoded in myriad ways depending on context.

adra 4y ago

IANAL but I don't see a double-rot13 "machine process" as any defense against demonstrably identical code. Just because it passes through a process doesn't make it clean. There were numerous examples of whole functions and code blocks repeated verbatim from its source material. I'm not sure the state of the application now, but the effort to prove an output snippet isn't copyrighted with restrictions by the source feels like an O(N) problem that nobody would want to ever do. At best, if copilot told you explicitly (by doing the very hard work of identifying the likely sources of the code output ) you could make some (more) informed decisions as to if it's worth the risk to include it.