7 ms·

"A commons of knowledge is a public good." Yes but this copilot model takes that, adds value and doesn't itself join the public common good. Instead it takes i

"A commons of knowledge is a public good." Yes but this copilot model takes that, adds value and doesn't itself join the public common good. Instead it takes it, and makes you pay to have it back in another form. If copilot were open source and the model released for the public good, being built of public data (in your scenario) we would have a very different conversation.

andybak 4y ago
And I really don't mind. I want every line of code I've ever written to be used as much as possible. I find "intellectual property" to be dubious to the core. I'm not confident enough in my feelings to be a zealot, but if I had to pick sides then I know which side I would pick.
- JoshTriplett 4y ago
  You're welcome to use a "do whatever you want" license on your code, and people should respect that. (Though even those licenses tend to require attribution, and copilot doesn't do even that.) Other people use licenses that try to create a commons where if you want to use it you need to share your own code, as a counterpoint to the non-commons in which you can't use code at all. And if people use those licenses, they should be respected as well. By all means, eliminate copyright, and let all code be copied freely. And until that happens, as long as proprietary code exists and doesn't let anyone copy it, respect copyleft licenses as well.
  - andybak 4y ago
    A fair point. "What to do in a world where copyright already exists" is a tougher question to answer and one in which I tend to go back and forth.
- sirsinsalot 4y ago
  If an AI "listened" to music and created new samples for musicians to use for a fee, do you not think the original musicians should be compensated? The value transfer is basically theft. It isn't about the usefulness of the service, or even that something similar is a good thing ... it is about the execution and what it says about fairness for those that worked to create the data it depends on to produce value.
  - andybak 4y ago
    I'm not sure I was clear enough when I expressed my doubts about the concept of intellectual property. Your musical example is playing out in the courts in multiple forms. The Marvin Gaye case, Led Zeppelin, Katie Perry etc. And each case pushes me further towards wanting to rip down the whole rotten edifice. We've lived through 4 or 5 decades of unprecedented expansion of the domain to which IP lays claim. Surely it's time for the pendulum to swing the other way?
  - HeavyStorm 4y ago
    If I listen to music and create samples to be sold, is it theft?
    - sirsinsalot 4y ago
      If your aim is to produce music that is directly derived from what you listened to ... yes. And this has been tested in court time and again. AI isn't being inspired or creative, it is mass scale and mechanised bootlegging. To compare it to human inspiration is naive or wishful thinking.
Guid_NewGuid 4y ago
Yes they haven't paid it forward, or back, but why fight on the occupier's territory. By calling for legal frameworks to enforce this we accept the language and terms of the dominant party. By using courts and the law and creating new law for copyright we actually move further from the goal of abolishing copyright and IP entirely. Every time we use courts to enforce IP we're strengthening the Walt Disneys and Nintendos of the world. (I accept I am in a group of like 3 people with this goal but it's my view) Edit: to expand slightly more on this. People should be able to decompile/reverse engineer whatever the hell they want. They shouldn't have to worry about armed goons kicking down their doors. Every time cases are used to strengthen the enforcement of IP/licensing, whether for the light (FSF) or dark (Micro$oft, Google, etc) the outcome is the same, we move further from that goal.
- handoflixue 4y ago
  > Every time we use courts to enforce IP we're strengthening the Walt Disneys and Nintendos of the world. Can you actually point to substantial examples where Disney or Nintendo benefited significantly from a precedent set by an open source court case? Open source has been around for decades, so it should be trivial to find numerous clear-cut examples at this point... if your theory is actually correct.
  - Guid_NewGuid 4y ago
    No, I honestly have no idea. I know nothing about the law and understand even less. I may be wrong about all of this, but if we take the (laughable) idea of justice being blind it stands to reason any precedent that protects a single open source developer also protects Amazon's code.
- JoshTriplett 4y ago
  Proprietary software is more than willing to use those legal frameworks. Unilaterally disarming while your opponent does not is a losing strategy. As long as copyright exists, copyleft should be respected.
- ozim 4y ago
Varqu 4y ago
People (github in this case) do something to make your life easier so that you can save time for the price of 1 latte per month and you complain? Software Developers seem to be the most whining profession in the world and I despise this attitude (while being a developer myself)
- tuckerman 4y ago
  People aren't whining because the price is too high, they are upset because some (myself included) believe Microsoft is exploiting developers by copying their work against their wishes and then turning around and selling other developers a product which may or may not be generating code which violates copyright/patent licenses. A developer who inadvertently uses a copilot suggestion which gets them into hot water is going to be spending a lot more than a the cost of a latte to defend themselves in court.
  - sirsinsalot 4y ago
    This. It is a matter of (a) consent and (b) compensating people that, without their data, the model would be useless.
  - Varqu 4y ago
    If someone contributes to open source, then they shouldn't be surprised that someone else uses this code. The licensing hell is something that shouldn't belong in IT.
    - tuckerman 4y ago
      When source code is made available under an open source license, there are strings attached; attaching those strings is the author’s right! Assuming you or any company has the right to do anything you want with that code without respecting the license is immoral. That “licensing hell” (i.e. strong copyleft protections) is the reason we enjoy such a vibrant and large open source community today. I don’t take it for granted that open source as we have it today was inevitable: it required a lot of work and I’d hate to see that slip away.
jppope 4y ago
> "Yes but this copilot model takes that, adds value and doesn't itself join the public common good. Instead it takes it, and makes you pay to have it back in another form." $10/ month ... how much to you think this thing cost to build, and to maintain?
- nightski 4y ago
  That's the whole point. Without the data, it would be worthless. Microsoft is not paying the full cost because it is ripping the data without asking consent. I'm not saying what they are doing is illegal per se, but it's definitely immoral.
  - Guid_NewGuid 4y ago
    But why is it immoral? All that code is still out there, if I had the time and the resources I could build a language model. Unlike commons in the real world (e.g. land, fresh water, etc) a code commons is purely additive. With the release of Copilot (which I don't intend to pay for or use) nothing has been destroyed, instead we'll get more code for less work where companies do pay for their developers to use it, some might even find its way back into the commons as new open-source code (whether more code of copilot generated quality in general is an unalloyed good is left as an exercise to the reader).
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      Because copilot is violating the terms I put for my code. My code is GPL. It cannot be put into projects with incompatible licenses. That’s my code, and I share it with strings attached. You can’t just copy my code and sell to other parties no strings attached. If that’s fine and dandy, Microsoft should also train Copilot on their source code repositories, so we can use that knowledge, too.
      - ShamelessC 4y ago
        I guess I've just never had to work with GPL code before, but the complaints essentially only seem to be coming from coders who like this style of open source where you still get to make it kind of a pain in the ass to actually use your software. I guess you have the right to do this, but it doesn't mesh at all with why I personally contribute (without any expectation of attribution), which is that (much like stack overflow), programmers mostly agreed awhile ago that it's just easier if we all share. So much of what's wrong with the modern economy comes down to seeking rent on an idea that should just be public knowledge. Sorry if my viewpoint towards your work is apathetic, but the whole field is already infested with academics who only understand citation as a useful metric. Further, the point remains that anyone with enough money could do this - not just Microsoft (Salesforce has released several models for python competitive with Copilot). Times are changing - maybe don't share code anymore? I imagine in ten-twenty years this whole conversation will seem pretty petty though when your entire program is trivially recreated from its GitHub description without ever needing to have seen it in the first place.
visarga 4y ago
It costs money to run a huge language model with low latency, in the loop with you - charging 10$/month is reasonable. You need multiple GPUs to load even a single copy. Copilot is adding something extra to the original code - it selects the recommendation from the whole corpus, while keeping the surrounding context into consideration and adapting to your variable names. And in reality 99.9% of the generated code has no long ngrams in common with the training set, it's already original. All they need to do is to enforce never to generate data identical to the training set, something that can be implemented with a bloom filter, then the generated code is impossible to attribute and should have no legal problems. In the end what do models like Copilot do? They act like culture - absorbing and replicating memes. They free the knowledge and make it reusable. They can act like a general purpose NLP tool for information extraction, classification and text generation. You can implement your ideas faster with it, don't need to label much data. It works even with just a prompt. Try OpenAi Codex to extract a receipt to see what I am talking about - it gives you the output in JSON. It's a new tool and a new interface to the computer. There are going to be plenty of open source implementations as well, some are already under training.
- sirsinsalot 4y ago
  You are incorrect. The code it generates is substantially the same (complete with comments) as the input, which is often sought without permission and in violation of license. And offers nothing back to those authors in return.
- HeavyStorm 4y ago
  Thank you for you this. I wouldn't never been able to articulate it better - people are just annoyed that someone is making m money and they aren't, without considering why that is.
  - sirsinsalot 4y ago
    That's not at all what people are annoyed at and to be reductive like that is childish. The issue is consent of using people's code as input and paying nothing back. Also the parent comment is substantially technically wrong on a number of points, but feel free to use it as validation for yourself.
jazzyjackson 4y ago
If it was just published as a public good it would probably be as illegal as sci-hub I consider the $10/m as a donation to the microsoft legal defense fund to allow free access to accumulated knowledge.
- sirsinsalot 4y ago
  To allow access to a service that grants you the accumulated knowledge's output in small bits. I'm all for a world where these tools help developers, but i'm not here for a system that isn't open. I want to own my tools. Copilot is a bit like musicians paying a monthly fee for access to a loop library. Except all the loops are rip-offs of other peoples hard work and there's no effort to compensate them. If I made an AI that resampled music into derivative tracks ... you can be damn sure i'd be sued until my ears bled.
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    > monthly fee for access to a loop library. Except all the loops are rip-offs of other peoples hard work and there's no effort to compensate them. the analogy works if there were an open access library of music (restricted licenses tho they may be…) that was available to search and browse without the tool then an auto-composer could suggest music to fill in gaps in my own composition, using snippets of audio from the otherwise freely available library that's a plug-in I would pay for too, but yea if my "no commercial use allowed" melody made it into someone else's composition, I would want my license terms to be surfaced to them as well except I personally wouldn't want to live in a future where every line of code has to have some claim of "who authored this function first" or "who wrote this melody and rhythm first", pursuant to licensing terms in perpetuity. that sounds terrible.
  - ece 4y ago
    I'm all here for openness and tools you own, so there could be a FOSS implementation. Microsoft could just open it up and still charge the $10/mo for hosting the model, and I hope that happens. Making the tool better without verbatim copying and making it more effective should be the priority, IMO. Trying to control it too much would be missing the point of the tool.
spullara 4y ago
It absolutely adds to the common good in the form of people using it to write more open source code.
- sirsinsalot 4y ago
  Seeing as copilot is known to output code thats a straight copy from non-permissive code where the author's permission wasn't obtained ... I'd say it is helping you steal from code authors without giving back (as there is no obligation to open source your code). Given Microsoft's record of persuing IP violations aggresively through the legal system, I'd say the whole thing is ironic.

andybak 4y ago

And I really don't mind. I want every line of code I've ever written to be used as much as possible. I find "intellectual property" to be dubious to the core. I'm not confident enough in my feelings to be a zealot, but if I had to pick sides then I know which side I would pick.

JoshTriplett 4y ago
You're welcome to use a "do whatever you want" license on your code, and people should respect that. (Though even those licenses tend to require attribution, and copilot doesn't do even that.) Other people use licenses that try to create a commons where if you want to use it you need to share your own code, as a counterpoint to the non-commons in which you can't use code at all. And if people use those licenses, they should be respected as well. By all means, eliminate copyright, and let all code be copied freely. And until that happens, as long as proprietary code exists and doesn't let anyone copy it, respect copyleft licenses as well.
- andybak 4y ago
  A fair point. "What to do in a world where copyright already exists" is a tougher question to answer and one in which I tend to go back and forth.
sirsinsalot 4y ago
If an AI "listened" to music and created new samples for musicians to use for a fee, do you not think the original musicians should be compensated? The value transfer is basically theft. It isn't about the usefulness of the service, or even that something similar is a good thing ... it is about the execution and what it says about fairness for those that worked to create the data it depends on to produce value.
- andybak 4y ago
  I'm not sure I was clear enough when I expressed my doubts about the concept of intellectual property. Your musical example is playing out in the courts in multiple forms. The Marvin Gaye case, Led Zeppelin, Katie Perry etc. And each case pushes me further towards wanting to rip down the whole rotten edifice. We've lived through 4 or 5 decades of unprecedented expansion of the domain to which IP lays claim. Surely it's time for the pendulum to swing the other way?
- HeavyStorm 4y ago
  If I listen to music and create samples to be sold, is it theft?
  - sirsinsalot 4y ago
    If your aim is to produce music that is directly derived from what you listened to ... yes. And this has been tested in court time and again. AI isn't being inspired or creative, it is mass scale and mechanised bootlegging. To compare it to human inspiration is naive or wishful thinking.

Guid_NewGuid 4y ago

Yes they haven't paid it forward, or back, but why fight on the occupier's territory. By calling for legal frameworks to enforce this we accept the language and terms of the dominant party. By using courts and the law and creating new law for copyright we actually move further from the goal of abolishing copyright and IP entirely. Every time we use courts to enforce IP we're strengthening the Walt Disneys and Nintendos of the world. (I accept I am in a group of like 3 people with this goal but it's my view) Edit: to expand slightly more on this. People should be able to decompile/reverse engineer whatever the hell they want. They shouldn't have to worry about armed goons kicking down their doors. Every time cases are used to strengthen the enforcement of IP/licensing, whether for the light (FSF) or dark (Micro$oft, Google, etc) the outcome is the same, we move further from that goal.

handoflixue 4y ago
> Every time we use courts to enforce IP we're strengthening the Walt Disneys and Nintendos of the world. Can you actually point to substantial examples where Disney or Nintendo benefited significantly from a precedent set by an open source court case? Open source has been around for decades, so it should be trivial to find numerous clear-cut examples at this point... if your theory is actually correct.
- Guid_NewGuid 4y ago
  No, I honestly have no idea. I know nothing about the law and understand even less. I may be wrong about all of this, but if we take the (laughable) idea of justice being blind it stands to reason any precedent that protects a single open source developer also protects Amazon's code.
JoshTriplett 4y ago
Proprietary software is more than willing to use those legal frameworks. Unilaterally disarming while your opponent does not is a losing strategy. As long as copyright exists, copyleft should be respected.
ozim 4y ago

Varqu 4y ago

People (github in this case) do something to make your life easier so that you can save time for the price of 1 latte per month and you complain? Software Developers seem to be the most whining profession in the world and I despise this attitude (while being a developer myself)

tuckerman 4y ago
People aren't whining because the price is too high, they are upset because some (myself included) believe Microsoft is exploiting developers by copying their work against their wishes and then turning around and selling other developers a product which may or may not be generating code which violates copyright/patent licenses. A developer who inadvertently uses a copilot suggestion which gets them into hot water is going to be spending a lot more than a the cost of a latte to defend themselves in court.
- sirsinsalot 4y ago
  This. It is a matter of (a) consent and (b) compensating people that, without their data, the model would be useless.
- Varqu 4y ago
  If someone contributes to open source, then they shouldn't be surprised that someone else uses this code. The licensing hell is something that shouldn't belong in IT.
  - tuckerman 4y ago
    When source code is made available under an open source license, there are strings attached; attaching those strings is the author’s right! Assuming you or any company has the right to do anything you want with that code without respecting the license is immoral. That “licensing hell” (i.e. strong copyleft protections) is the reason we enjoy such a vibrant and large open source community today. I don’t take it for granted that open source as we have it today was inevitable: it required a lot of work and I’d hate to see that slip away.

jppope 4y ago

> "Yes but this copilot model takes that, adds value and doesn't itself join the public common good. Instead it takes it, and makes you pay to have it back in another form." $10/ month ... how much to you think this thing cost to build, and to maintain?

nightski 4y ago
That's the whole point. Without the data, it would be worthless. Microsoft is not paying the full cost because it is ripping the data without asking consent. I'm not saying what they are doing is illegal per se, but it's definitely immoral.
- Guid_NewGuid 4y ago
  But why is it immoral? All that code is still out there, if I had the time and the resources I could build a language model. Unlike commons in the real world (e.g. land, fresh water, etc) a code commons is purely additive. With the release of Copilot (which I don't intend to pay for or use) nothing has been destroyed, instead we'll get more code for less work where companies do pay for their developers to use it, some might even find its way back into the commons as new open-source code (whether more code of copilot generated quality in general is an unalloyed good is left as an exercise to the reader).
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Because copilot is violating the terms I put for my code. My code is GPL. It cannot be put into projects with incompatible licenses. That’s my code, and I share it with strings attached. You can’t just copy my code and sell to other parties no strings attached. If that’s fine and dandy, Microsoft should also train Copilot on their source code repositories, so we can use that knowledge, too.
    - ShamelessC 4y ago
      I guess I've just never had to work with GPL code before, but the complaints essentially only seem to be coming from coders who like this style of open source where you still get to make it kind of a pain in the ass to actually use your software. I guess you have the right to do this, but it doesn't mesh at all with why I personally contribute (without any expectation of attribution), which is that (much like stack overflow), programmers mostly agreed awhile ago that it's just easier if we all share. So much of what's wrong with the modern economy comes down to seeking rent on an idea that should just be public knowledge. Sorry if my viewpoint towards your work is apathetic, but the whole field is already infested with academics who only understand citation as a useful metric. Further, the point remains that anyone with enough money could do this - not just Microsoft (Salesforce has released several models for python competitive with Copilot). Times are changing - maybe don't share code anymore? I imagine in ten-twenty years this whole conversation will seem pretty petty though when your entire program is trivially recreated from its GitHub description without ever needing to have seen it in the first place.

visarga 4y ago

It costs money to run a huge language model with low latency, in the loop with you - charging 10$/month is reasonable. You need multiple GPUs to load even a single copy. Copilot is adding something extra to the original code - it selects the recommendation from the whole corpus, while keeping the surrounding context into consideration and adapting to your variable names. And in reality 99.9% of the generated code has no long ngrams in common with the training set, it's already original. All they need to do is to enforce never to generate data identical to the training set, something that can be implemented with a bloom filter, then the generated code is impossible to attribute and should have no legal problems. In the end what do models like Copilot do? They act like culture - absorbing and replicating memes. They free the knowledge and make it reusable. They can act like a general purpose NLP tool for information extraction, classification and text generation. You can implement your ideas faster with it, don't need to label much data. It works even with just a prompt. Try OpenAi Codex to extract a receipt to see what I am talking about - it gives you the output in JSON. It's a new tool and a new interface to the computer. There are going to be plenty of open source implementations as well, some are already under training.

sirsinsalot 4y ago
You are incorrect. The code it generates is substantially the same (complete with comments) as the input, which is often sought without permission and in violation of license. And offers nothing back to those authors in return.
HeavyStorm 4y ago
Thank you for you this. I wouldn't never been able to articulate it better - people are just annoyed that someone is making m money and they aren't, without considering why that is.
- sirsinsalot 4y ago
  That's not at all what people are annoyed at and to be reductive like that is childish. The issue is consent of using people's code as input and paying nothing back. Also the parent comment is substantially technically wrong on a number of points, but feel free to use it as validation for yourself.

jazzyjackson 4y ago

If it was just published as a public good it would probably be as illegal as sci-hub I consider the $10/m as a donation to the microsoft legal defense fund to allow free access to accumulated knowledge.

sirsinsalot 4y ago
To allow access to a service that grants you the accumulated knowledge's output in small bits. I'm all for a world where these tools help developers, but i'm not here for a system that isn't open. I want to own my tools. Copilot is a bit like musicians paying a monthly fee for access to a loop library. Except all the loops are rip-offs of other peoples hard work and there's no effort to compensate them. If I made an AI that resampled music into derivative tracks ... you can be damn sure i'd be sued until my ears bled.
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  > monthly fee for access to a loop library. Except all the loops are rip-offs of other peoples hard work and there's no effort to compensate them. the analogy works if there were an open access library of music (restricted licenses tho they may be…) that was available to search and browse without the tool then an auto-composer could suggest music to fill in gaps in my own composition, using snippets of audio from the otherwise freely available library that's a plug-in I would pay for too, but yea if my "no commercial use allowed" melody made it into someone else's composition, I would want my license terms to be surfaced to them as well except I personally wouldn't want to live in a future where every line of code has to have some claim of "who authored this function first" or "who wrote this melody and rhythm first", pursuant to licensing terms in perpetuity. that sounds terrible.
- ece 4y ago
  I'm all here for openness and tools you own, so there could be a FOSS implementation. Microsoft could just open it up and still charge the $10/mo for hosting the model, and I hope that happens. Making the tool better without verbatim copying and making it more effective should be the priority, IMO. Trying to control it too much would be missing the point of the tool.

spullara 4y ago

It absolutely adds to the common good in the form of people using it to write more open source code.

sirsinsalot 4y ago
Seeing as copilot is known to output code thats a straight copy from non-permissive code where the author's permission wasn't obtained ... I'd say it is helping you steal from code authors without giving back (as there is no obligation to open source your code). Given Microsoft's record of persuing IP violations aggresively through the legal system, I'd say the whole thing is ironic.