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Papers on GitHub Copilot, copyright law, and ownership for AI-generated code

129 points by jrepinc 4y ago

samwillis 4y ago
This extends so much further than just GitHub and open source. Almost all “AI” based generative tools are trained on public datasets, in some cases they have licensed these datasets, but my understanding is that they are often just trained on the “public” internet. There is currently clear legal protection of scraping, however you can’t “republish” that data, only significant derivative work. I don’t know if these tools fall into that category - IANAL - but that’s the billion dollar question. The text/language and image generation are all capable of outputting results that are clearly based on particular input imagery. This is such an important debate to have and my fear is that the companies investing in this tech have deep pockets, the lobbying around it could result in a unbalanced outcome. This isn’t really an area where “move fast and break things” is necessarily the right process. Exciting though to see where this technology could lead, co-pilot blows my mind at times.
- leereeves 4y ago
  At some point image generation tools will be good enough to create recognizable images of Disney and Marvel characters, and the legal question will become very important in Washington. But what we mere citizens have to say about it, I fear, won't matter much.
  - CrazyStat 4y ago
    >At some point image generation tools will be good enough to create recognizable images of Disney and Marvel characters They already are. Even Dall-E mini does a respectable job at cartoon characters (it struggles a lot with people, especially faces, but handles cartoons quite well).
  - cdrini 4y ago
    Some examples of Dallee generating characters of Homer Simpson: https://twitter.com/Dalle2Pics/status/1534718838377529344 https://twitter.com/Dalle2Pics/status/1534718838377529344
jimmySixDOF 4y ago
Tangentially related is the similar position of CLIP Guided Diffusion models like DALL E (2) (Craiyon mini) & Midjourney. There are cases in the NFT world where DCMA take down requests are being contested as we speak [1] and there is a reasonable discussion today [2] on the present state of law although for some reason I got downvoted for pointing out the current position from the US Copyright Office is that provable "Human Authorship" is required to uphold protections although IANAL either. [1] https://luckytrader.com/news/x2-y2-to-release-dmca-takedown-policy-after-bayc-incident https://luckytrader.com/news/x2-y2-to-release-dmca-takedown-... [2] Ask HN: Why do devs feel CoPilot has stolen code but DALL-E is praised for ART? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31868837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31868837
wodenokoto 4y ago
My personal opinion is that the source data does not exist inside the model, so the model does not in and off itself comprise of a copyright violation. It is also not a derivative work, as it is not recognizable as any of the works it was trained on. However, if the output it produces is close enough to existing copyrighted works, than that output cannot be used without a license. That seems fair, and just like how we would judge a human being.
- samwillis 4y ago
  The trouble is that these models are very specialised, and have an enormous corpus of data they have trained on. No human has read every line of open source code on GitHub, comparing what these "AI" models do to human intelligence conflates two very different arguments.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  I don't think anyone knows of the source data is encoded somehow in the model. Sure it is not explicitely, but it has been shown (at least for simpler models but also for copilot) that you can with the right prompts get them to output exact copies of results (even with possible typos in comments). That to me means the models do in fact somehow contain the source. On the topic of derivative, backpropagation the method of training a model relies specifically on calculating the gradients or derivatives of your data.
  - visarga 4y ago
    But those gradients get averaged out, they don't stay separate for each input example.
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      So by averaging you remove it being derivative work?
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  This is much clearer cut in UK law AIUI as without Fair Use we don't have the rights to train an AI. The model is fed works, you can't feed it copyright works without permission, good luck training it to make facsimile works that weren't already generic (bear in mind the Red Bus Case, however). What I wonder here is if you train a model with no Disney works, then tell it "draw a black mouse with red shorts" and it draws a close facsimile of Mickey RTM then what? You created the work without copying and provably so; you can derive from that work without infringement ... that would seem to break copyright in rather wonderful way?!?
Waterluvian 4y ago
I don’t yet have any strong opinions, just thoughts. One thought is that in construction you will learn to do things through others teaching you. And then you’ll do them at future sites, and they’ll be nearly identical. There’s only so many ways to build walls or run electrical, etc. to code. I think coding is often similar. Let’s not fool ourselves: a lot of what we write isn’t novel or interesting or challenging. It’s the total end product that is.
- Varqu 4y ago
  And copilot is doing exactly this - it's a tool, like a plumber box.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Well the way electrical is run isn't copyrighted and is, in fact, constrained by building codes. That said, to my non-legal mind, I don't see Copilot as being that much different from taking a code block from a book or Stack Overflow or wherever to implement some function. Clearly there are some limits; Copilot probably couldn't lift an entire grammar checker or whatever. But people reuse function templates and the like all the time and no one generally cares. And I doubt most people upset about Copilot really want the copyright police scrutinizing every single line of code.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    > Well the way electrical is run isn't copyrighted I think that’s another item I keep thinking about. Why should code be copyrightable? Especially when so much of it is just, like plumbing, just plumbing. I think I might share your thoughts. Isn’t copilot just a template/boilerplate generator but on steroids? If anything, I think Copilot is forcing the industry to recognize: a lot of the code people write is not the valuable or interesting part. The real value is in figuring out what to write and in what way it should all be connected together and interacted with.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      >Why should code be copyrightable? This was an open question for a long time. Is it just a set of functional instructions about how to do something (which wouldn't typically be copyrightable) or is it a creative work? It wasn't even an interesting question in the early part of the computer industry because software was mostly something created so that companies could sell hardware. Or it was written for internal use. However, in 1974 the Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) was established in the US and decided computer programs were in general copyrightable. Congress added this to copyright law in 1980.
wrycoder 4y ago
I’d be interested in Eben Moglen’s views on the matter. And Stallman’s.
blackoil 4y ago
I think copyright issues are getting blown out of proportion. Ethically it is not very different from myself reading books, blogs and other available source codes, and then writing my own program based on whatever I learned. Legally, IANAL but either the code generated would be novel, common enough or otherwise easily searchable to original source. For case 3, developer can take the call to keep it or not.
- simion314 4y ago
  The analogy is wrong, AI does not at all look similar to a human mind, it is a more complex algorithm , a obfuscated script that if done wrong will output the exact input you used it for training. This can happen probably very often withy original stuff and less often with trivial stuff.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >AI does not at all look similar to a human mind That is a matter of some debate among neurophysiologists and others. There are clearly differences but there also seem to be similarities that go beyond mere analogy.
    - simion314 4y ago
      That depends on how you define similarities. This ANN AIs are a complex version of a polynomial interpolation , you have some points from a measurements and you build a function to fit those points, so in the end you have a function with a giant matrix of data as a "knowledge" database behind. But even with the human mind, I am 100% sure Microsoft would not like it if I read their precious Windows source code and then go and work on wine, they might claim that I did not learned from their code but memorize secret algorithms , or maybe would claim that I did not ask for permissions first.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        These days I doubt Microsoft would care much. But to your broader point, yes, that's why you do clean room implementations of public APIs. If you've never seen an implementation, you can't really be accused of copying it. This is really different though in that this code is all open source. The argument is that sufficient code is being verbatim copies so as to be a derivative work.
akagusu 4y ago
At the end of the day, all decisions related to AI generated content, no matter if its code, art, text or something else, will favor big corporations. If I take a dataset of public available images of Disney characters, which are obviously copyrighted, and train a model to generate new characters, they will sue me until they find a judge that rules I infringed their copyright just by using their copyrighted work, even if the result does not have any similarity with the copyrighted work. But if a big corporation take a copyrighted public dataset to train a model, and this model start to regurgitate exactly copies of the copyrighted work, which apparently is the case of Github Co-pilot, in the case of a lawsuit, the big corporation will spend money until they find a judge that rules their use of the copyrighted work as fair use. So, at the end, any decision will benefit big corporations. The real question is if people will make big corporations fight for their victory or if people will let them win easily.
- visarga 4y ago
  It's not just regular people vs big corporations, it's also an emerging technology with huge potential. You can't stop it, better to find ways to adapt.
  - akagusu 4y ago
    It's is an emerging technology with huge potential owned by big corporations that as any other technology will or will not be regulated according big corporations interest, which usually goes against the regular people interest.
Satam 4y ago
What I think it really comes down to, is whether copilot-like tech becomes a 2x (or even 10x) productivity multiplier. If it becomes that powerful, we'll ignore these and other concerns. Just imagine Chinese or Russian devs moving 2x or 10x faster because they have no regard for our privileged concerns. Don't even have to go that far, a competitor is using GPT-17 and you're not - good luck! And if it stagnates and never goes far beyond the current capabilities, then sure, it might become fashionable to try and hunt for copyright infringements caused by Copilot.
- _v7gu 4y ago
  Unfortunately this argument also makes a case for slavery. I’d rather not push ethics aside in favour of productivity
  - shikoba 4y ago
    Absolutely not. Slavery is an inefficient system, otherwise it would still be the actual system.
    - trention 4y ago
      This is a practical (at most you could call it purely utilitarian) argument and not a deontological one.
      - Satam 4y ago
        I don't think they are making an argument about ethics necessarily.
  - Satam 4y ago
    I don't think mentioning slavery is helpful or relevant to this discussion. --- Let's take Google as a better example of an overpowering technology. Its world-domination has been built on scraping everyone else's data, and regurgitating it to users in a very useful manner. Had it been less useful, I'm sure you'd have everyone constantly complaining about them "stealing" public information. Either way, I wasn't making a judgment of how the world should be, merely how it's probably going to work out. Copilot in its ideal final form would be: 1) great at writing good code 2) if needed, very good at obfuscating any stolen code into something that looks brand new. Good luck fighting this mostly-undectable, productivity-boosting technology that has no obvious victims.
williamcotton 4y ago
Considering the opinions here [1] and the fact that Microsoft’s lawyers even signed off on something as seemingly risky as Copilot, it seems very likely that courts will not find Copilot to infringe on copyright. I encourage you to read the linked article and respond to the authors instead of making me argue their case for them! [1] https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications-of-the-use-of-code-repositories-to-train-a-machine-learning-model https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications...
lta 4y ago
I am very happy to see the starting to think about and gather the community around this novel issue. This sheds a new light on existing IP laws. It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus, such tool would not have been possible, hence the (IMHO) justified derivative work question. Companies and individuals have spent decades building this open corpus and in exchange they deserve to have their will (aka license) respected. For a significant fraction of those, it means sharing the derivative works under the same license. It's pretty sad, though not surprising to many of us, to see that Microsoft isn't really playing openly and nicely with the FOSS community about those issues. When people started saying Microsoft had changed and was a fair player now, I had my doubts, and this doesn't help.
- tzs 4y ago
  > It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus, such tool would not have been possible, hence the (IMHO) justified derivative work question. Note though that a work not being possible without your work is not sufficient to make that work a derivative work of your work. It just suggests that you need to take a closer look at the relationship between your work and the other work. For example Windows applications, even ones that make intimate use of the behavior of Windows and would take significant rewrites to port elsewhere or to run under current Windows compatible operating systems like ReactOS or under things like Wine, are not automatically derivative works of Windows. To be a derivative work the work has to include copyrighted elements from your work in a way that is not covered by fair use. That's why clean room reverse engineering works--by making sure the coders do not have access to the work being reverse engineered they cannot copy any copyrighted elements from it and so cannot produce a derivative work. I suspect that under current copyright law it is possible to do something like Copilot without the output violating copyright but it may need to be more sophisticated than the current Copilot. From the few examples of Copilot output I've seen it seems to output stuff that would probably either be covered by fair use or that doesn't have enough creativity to be copyrighted. But from what people have said it occasionally spits out longer things that seem likely to be copyrighted and not covered by fair use. What may be necessary for systems like this is to couple them with a second AI that can recognize when the first AI is making a suggestion that goes beyond fair use and stops it. I don't know if it is currently possible to make such an AI. Where would you get a good set of training data? The above was about the output of Copilot. Another question is whether Copilot itself is legal. When you train an AI on some data is there a copy of that data in the AI? If there is then Copilot may be an infringement of the copying right. In the US copyright law defines copies in 17 USC 101, where they are defined as > [...] material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term “copies” includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed. Is a collection of neural net weights something from which you can perceive, reproduce, or otherwise communicate the individual works the net was trained on? Or is it more like some kind of hash of the work? My guess is that both the output of AIs and the AIs themselves are sufficiently beyond what anyone was contemplating the last time there was a major update of copyright to deal with new technology that to fit AI in we are probably going to need a major update to the law.
trention 4y ago
I won't pretend to know the specifics of the legal decision that will follow from this, but it's easy to guess that when those tools start causing structural unemployment (and that will happen soon enough), there will be a backlash. Even the most naive takes I see here (it's no different than you reading public code = "the AI should be treated the same as a human") will be forced to re-evaluate their position once they become unemployable because of these AIs.
- V__ 4y ago
  > when those tools start causing structural unemployment (and that will happen soon enough) Is this actually happening? Some years ago there were articles about neural networks which can find errors/interesting points in law documents or find tumors during cancer imaging, but did this actually replace any jobs instead of just being an additional tool?
  - trention 4y ago
    There is a capability line that needs to be crossed before we start seeing this. Which I think most of those older systems didn't cross. For me, one answer to this could be given when we're able to compare the number of illustrators employed in the US in June 2022 vs in June 2027. + the delta of the average salary.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- cdrini 4y ago
  I don't think Copilot is at any risk of causing unemployment yet, but Dalle could very likely replace a number of graphic design jobs in marketing right now. I think it's an important question, but at the same time, replacing jobs didn't stop the spinning Jenny from taking the textile industry by storm. In fact the exact opposite was true. It was popular specifically because it replaced paid jobs with fewer paid jobs. I don't know if there was backlash at the time, but jobs get destroyed and rebuilt by technology all the time, for better or worse. Edit: actually I take that back. I think a team that previously needed 3 developers might get away with only 1 or 2 developers thanks to improved productivity from copilot. So it can replace jobs in that way. Dalle can make a team that has one designer go to 0 designers.
ghoward 4y ago
I wrote a paper for this, but it was rejected. It's not surprising why; I only had a few days to do it. Anyway, my paper is at https://gavinhoward.com/2021/10/my-whitepaper-about-github-copilot/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/10/my-whitepaper-about-github-c... .
saurik 4y ago
I think what is really going to be interesting is when someone finally does this trick for music, as the RIAA is 100% going to sue whomever pulls off "give me a song about my ex girlfriend that sounds like Taylor Swift singing a hypothetical cover of a song in the style of one from Bob Dylan" and we will finally have a real test of all of these laws (...likely followed by a ton of frantic edits driven by their interests). In contrast, photographers and artists have always been in relatively weak positions and the only software developers having issues right now are almost by definition of the task going to be from the open source ecosystem, and so what comes out of these discussions is mostly just a lot of frustration rather than a true throwing down of the gauntlet, an activity for which the RIAA is always ready.
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  > I think what is really going to be interesting in when someone finally does this trick for music Already done, although I don't think an actual lawsuit has been filed. https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw
  - saurik 4y ago
    (In case anyone else sees this and thinks this is useful without clicking the link, it isn't: this is one of those stupid "I generated every possible X and so obviously copyright has failed" pranks.)
beebmam 4y ago
To be honest, I don't really care if Copilot is legal. If it isn't, it should be legal. Change the laws to make it legal.
Eliah_Lakhin 4y ago
Informally speaking, the idea of the free software movement and the copyleft specifically was born as a response to fundamental conflict between a business environment that in its ultimate goal wants to have a full control over the software and independent individual creators who just want to be free in creativity and are fine to share their work with anyone who also follows these principals in some way. The members of the movement are also quite often criticizing Copyright laws. While I agree that the law is not ideal, to my vision the Berne Convention foundations are on the individual creators side. Fighting against Copyright, in my opinion, is a shooting yourself in the foot. I'm not a big fan of the FSF and other similar movements rhetoric because of this(even though, I agree with some points). If creators just want to share their work with other people, and they don't care about the business "plutocracy", they can offer a License contract that would simply restrict the work usage by individuals only. It could still be a free of charge License that would allow even commercial use of the work, but the License should grant permissions to individuals only who are not representing a 3rd party interests(a business in particular). Such License is not a FOSS License in common sense, but in my opinion it could solve the initial goals laying behind the FOSS movements true intentions.
- enriquto 4y ago
  > the idea of the free software movement (...) was born as a response to fundamental conflict between a business environment (...) and independent individual creators This is a skewed and very narrow view. The main contrast is not between "businesses" and "individual creators", but between people who control and people who use software. For example, between governments that hire programmers to write software, and citizens that get to use this software. The idea of the free software movement is that users of any software should have the right to know exactly what the software does, and to change it as they see fit. This has really nothing to do with business. > The members of the movement are also quite often criticizing Copyright laws. Do you have a reference for that? My impression is that the FSF is quite respectful of copyright laws, and acknowledges their importance. This is an orthogonal issue to that of software freedom.
  - Eliah_Lakhin 4y ago
jjluoma 4y ago
What about General Data Protection Regulation and anonymization? My source code files usually start with copyright notice with my name and email address followed by a reference to the license. In this case anonymization may be against my interests and rights.
fartcannon 4y ago
So which licence will prevent use by copilot? I do not wish to feed the beast. First and foremost anyone who cares should remove their code from github.
- collaborative 4y ago
  I never made my repos public and now it appears my aversion was justified Anyway, time to move back to bitbucket
siilats 4y ago
Guys Microsoft gives you github for free and copilot makes you a better programmer. Isn’t the whole point to make singularity not worry about mit license
skyzyx 4y ago
I think this is an interesting discussion to have, and I’m interested to see where the lawyers end up on this. But please don’t start with an organization as utterly biased as the FSF.
NicoleJO 4y ago
Fun Fact: You don't have to put up with this. File an official complaint against these companies for their blatant theft and sale of your copyrighted content with the FTC, BBB, CA State Attorney General, San Francisco DA office & FBI IP Theft division. Like I did.

129 points by jrepinc 4y ago

This extends so much further than just GitHub and open source. Almost all “AI” based generative tools are trained on public datasets, in some cases they have licensed these datasets, but my understanding is that they are often just trained on the “public” internet. There is currently clear legal protection of scraping, however you can’t “republish” that data, only significant derivative work. I don’t know if these tools fall into that category - IANAL - but that’s the billion dollar question. The text/language and image generation are all capable of outputting results that are clearly based on particular input imagery. This is such an important debate to have and my fear is that the companies investing in this tech have deep pockets, the lobbying around it could result in a unbalanced outcome. This isn’t really an area where “move fast and break things” is necessarily the right process. Exciting though to see where this technology could lead, co-pilot blows my mind at times.

leereeves 4y ago
At some point image generation tools will be good enough to create recognizable images of Disney and Marvel characters, and the legal question will become very important in Washington. But what we mere citizens have to say about it, I fear, won't matter much.
- CrazyStat 4y ago
  >At some point image generation tools will be good enough to create recognizable images of Disney and Marvel characters They already are. Even Dall-E mini does a respectable job at cartoon characters (it struggles a lot with people, especially faces, but handles cartoons quite well).
- cdrini 4y ago
  Some examples of Dallee generating characters of Homer Simpson: https://twitter.com/Dalle2Pics/status/1534718838377529344 https://twitter.com/Dalle2Pics/status/1534718838377529344

jimmySixDOF 4y ago

Tangentially related is the similar position of CLIP Guided Diffusion models like DALL E (2) (Craiyon mini) & Midjourney. There are cases in the NFT world where DCMA take down requests are being contested as we speak [1] and there is a reasonable discussion today [2] on the present state of law although for some reason I got downvoted for pointing out the current position from the US Copyright Office is that provable "Human Authorship" is required to uphold protections although IANAL either. [1] https://luckytrader.com/news/x2-y2-to-release-dmca-takedown-policy-after-bayc-incident https://luckytrader.com/news/x2-y2-to-release-dmca-takedown-... [2] Ask HN: Why do devs feel CoPilot has stolen code but DALL-E is praised for ART? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31868837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31868837

wodenokoto 4y ago

My personal opinion is that the source data does not exist inside the model, so the model does not in and off itself comprise of a copyright violation. It is also not a derivative work, as it is not recognizable as any of the works it was trained on. However, if the output it produces is close enough to existing copyrighted works, than that output cannot be used without a license. That seems fair, and just like how we would judge a human being.

samwillis 4y ago
The trouble is that these models are very specialised, and have an enormous corpus of data they have trained on. No human has read every line of open source code on GitHub, comparing what these "AI" models do to human intelligence conflates two very different arguments.
cycomanic 4y ago
I don't think anyone knows of the source data is encoded somehow in the model. Sure it is not explicitely, but it has been shown (at least for simpler models but also for copilot) that you can with the right prompts get them to output exact copies of results (even with possible typos in comments). That to me means the models do in fact somehow contain the source. On the topic of derivative, backpropagation the method of training a model relies specifically on calculating the gradients or derivatives of your data.
- visarga 4y ago
  But those gradients get averaged out, they don't stay separate for each input example.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    So by averaging you remove it being derivative work?
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
This is much clearer cut in UK law AIUI as without Fair Use we don't have the rights to train an AI. The model is fed works, you can't feed it copyright works without permission, good luck training it to make facsimile works that weren't already generic (bear in mind the Red Bus Case, however). What I wonder here is if you train a model with no Disney works, then tell it "draw a black mouse with red shorts" and it draws a close facsimile of Mickey RTM then what? You created the work without copying and provably so; you can derive from that work without infringement ... that would seem to break copyright in rather wonderful way?!?

Waterluvian 4y ago

I don’t yet have any strong opinions, just thoughts. One thought is that in construction you will learn to do things through others teaching you. And then you’ll do them at future sites, and they’ll be nearly identical. There’s only so many ways to build walls or run electrical, etc. to code. I think coding is often similar. Let’s not fool ourselves: a lot of what we write isn’t novel or interesting or challenging. It’s the total end product that is.

Varqu 4y ago
And copilot is doing exactly this - it's a tool, like a plumber box.
ghaff 4y ago
Well the way electrical is run isn't copyrighted and is, in fact, constrained by building codes. That said, to my non-legal mind, I don't see Copilot as being that much different from taking a code block from a book or Stack Overflow or wherever to implement some function. Clearly there are some limits; Copilot probably couldn't lift an entire grammar checker or whatever. But people reuse function templates and the like all the time and no one generally cares. And I doubt most people upset about Copilot really want the copyright police scrutinizing every single line of code.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  > Well the way electrical is run isn't copyrighted I think that’s another item I keep thinking about. Why should code be copyrightable? Especially when so much of it is just, like plumbing, just plumbing. I think I might share your thoughts. Isn’t copilot just a template/boilerplate generator but on steroids? If anything, I think Copilot is forcing the industry to recognize: a lot of the code people write is not the valuable or interesting part. The real value is in figuring out what to write and in what way it should all be connected together and interacted with.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >Why should code be copyrightable? This was an open question for a long time. Is it just a set of functional instructions about how to do something (which wouldn't typically be copyrightable) or is it a creative work? It wasn't even an interesting question in the early part of the computer industry because software was mostly something created so that companies could sell hardware. Or it was written for internal use. However, in 1974 the Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) was established in the US and decided computer programs were in general copyrightable. Congress added this to copyright law in 1980.

wrycoder 4y ago

I’d be interested in Eben Moglen’s views on the matter. And Stallman’s.

blackoil 4y ago

I think copyright issues are getting blown out of proportion. Ethically it is not very different from myself reading books, blogs and other available source codes, and then writing my own program based on whatever I learned. Legally, IANAL but either the code generated would be novel, common enough or otherwise easily searchable to original source. For case 3, developer can take the call to keep it or not.

simion314 4y ago
The analogy is wrong, AI does not at all look similar to a human mind, it is a more complex algorithm , a obfuscated script that if done wrong will output the exact input you used it for training. This can happen probably very often withy original stuff and less often with trivial stuff.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >AI does not at all look similar to a human mind That is a matter of some debate among neurophysiologists and others. There are clearly differences but there also seem to be similarities that go beyond mere analogy.
  - simion314 4y ago
    That depends on how you define similarities. This ANN AIs are a complex version of a polynomial interpolation , you have some points from a measurements and you build a function to fit those points, so in the end you have a function with a giant matrix of data as a "knowledge" database behind. But even with the human mind, I am 100% sure Microsoft would not like it if I read their precious Windows source code and then go and work on wine, they might claim that I did not learned from their code but memorize secret algorithms , or maybe would claim that I did not ask for permissions first.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      These days I doubt Microsoft would care much. But to your broader point, yes, that's why you do clean room implementations of public APIs. If you've never seen an implementation, you can't really be accused of copying it. This is really different though in that this code is all open source. The argument is that sufficient code is being verbatim copies so as to be a derivative work.

akagusu 4y ago

At the end of the day, all decisions related to AI generated content, no matter if its code, art, text or something else, will favor big corporations. If I take a dataset of public available images of Disney characters, which are obviously copyrighted, and train a model to generate new characters, they will sue me until they find a judge that rules I infringed their copyright just by using their copyrighted work, even if the result does not have any similarity with the copyrighted work. But if a big corporation take a copyrighted public dataset to train a model, and this model start to regurgitate exactly copies of the copyrighted work, which apparently is the case of Github Co-pilot, in the case of a lawsuit, the big corporation will spend money until they find a judge that rules their use of the copyrighted work as fair use. So, at the end, any decision will benefit big corporations. The real question is if people will make big corporations fight for their victory or if people will let them win easily.

visarga 4y ago
It's not just regular people vs big corporations, it's also an emerging technology with huge potential. You can't stop it, better to find ways to adapt.
- akagusu 4y ago
  It's is an emerging technology with huge potential owned by big corporations that as any other technology will or will not be regulated according big corporations interest, which usually goes against the regular people interest.

Satam 4y ago

What I think it really comes down to, is whether copilot-like tech becomes a 2x (or even 10x) productivity multiplier. If it becomes that powerful, we'll ignore these and other concerns. Just imagine Chinese or Russian devs moving 2x or 10x faster because they have no regard for our privileged concerns. Don't even have to go that far, a competitor is using GPT-17 and you're not - good luck! And if it stagnates and never goes far beyond the current capabilities, then sure, it might become fashionable to try and hunt for copyright infringements caused by Copilot.

_v7gu 4y ago
Unfortunately this argument also makes a case for slavery. I’d rather not push ethics aside in favour of productivity
- shikoba 4y ago
  Absolutely not. Slavery is an inefficient system, otherwise it would still be the actual system.
  - trention 4y ago
    This is a practical (at most you could call it purely utilitarian) argument and not a deontological one.
    - Satam 4y ago
      I don't think they are making an argument about ethics necessarily.
- Satam 4y ago
  I don't think mentioning slavery is helpful or relevant to this discussion. --- Let's take Google as a better example of an overpowering technology. Its world-domination has been built on scraping everyone else's data, and regurgitating it to users in a very useful manner. Had it been less useful, I'm sure you'd have everyone constantly complaining about them "stealing" public information. Either way, I wasn't making a judgment of how the world should be, merely how it's probably going to work out. Copilot in its ideal final form would be: 1) great at writing good code 2) if needed, very good at obfuscating any stolen code into something that looks brand new. Good luck fighting this mostly-undectable, productivity-boosting technology that has no obvious victims.

williamcotton 4y ago

Considering the opinions here [1] and the fact that Microsoft’s lawyers even signed off on something as seemingly risky as Copilot, it seems very likely that courts will not find Copilot to infringe on copyright. I encourage you to read the linked article and respond to the authors instead of making me argue their case for them! [1] https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications-of-the-use-of-code-repositories-to-train-a-machine-learning-model https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications...

lta 4y ago

I am very happy to see the starting to think about and gather the community around this novel issue. This sheds a new light on existing IP laws. It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus, such tool would not have been possible, hence the (IMHO) justified derivative work question. Companies and individuals have spent decades building this open corpus and in exchange they deserve to have their will (aka license) respected. For a significant fraction of those, it means sharing the derivative works under the same license. It's pretty sad, though not surprising to many of us, to see that Microsoft isn't really playing openly and nicely with the FOSS community about those issues. When people started saying Microsoft had changed and was a fair player now, I had my doubts, and this doesn't help.

tzs 4y ago
> It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus, such tool would not have been possible, hence the (IMHO) justified derivative work question. Note though that a work not being possible without your work is not sufficient to make that work a derivative work of your work. It just suggests that you need to take a closer look at the relationship between your work and the other work. For example Windows applications, even ones that make intimate use of the behavior of Windows and would take significant rewrites to port elsewhere or to run under current Windows compatible operating systems like ReactOS or under things like Wine, are not automatically derivative works of Windows. To be a derivative work the work has to include copyrighted elements from your work in a way that is not covered by fair use. That's why clean room reverse engineering works--by making sure the coders do not have access to the work being reverse engineered they cannot copy any copyrighted elements from it and so cannot produce a derivative work. I suspect that under current copyright law it is possible to do something like Copilot without the output violating copyright but it may need to be more sophisticated than the current Copilot. From the few examples of Copilot output I've seen it seems to output stuff that would probably either be covered by fair use or that doesn't have enough creativity to be copyrighted. But from what people have said it occasionally spits out longer things that seem likely to be copyrighted and not covered by fair use. What may be necessary for systems like this is to couple them with a second AI that can recognize when the first AI is making a suggestion that goes beyond fair use and stops it. I don't know if it is currently possible to make such an AI. Where would you get a good set of training data? The above was about the output of Copilot. Another question is whether Copilot itself is legal. When you train an AI on some data is there a copy of that data in the AI? If there is then Copilot may be an infringement of the copying right. In the US copyright law defines copies in 17 USC 101, where they are defined as > [...] material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term “copies” includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed. Is a collection of neural net weights something from which you can perceive, reproduce, or otherwise communicate the individual works the net was trained on? Or is it more like some kind of hash of the work? My guess is that both the output of AIs and the AIs themselves are sufficiently beyond what anyone was contemplating the last time there was a major update of copyright to deal with new technology that to fit AI in we are probably going to need a major update to the law.

trention 4y ago

I won't pretend to know the specifics of the legal decision that will follow from this, but it's easy to guess that when those tools start causing structural unemployment (and that will happen soon enough), there will be a backlash. Even the most naive takes I see here (it's no different than you reading public code = "the AI should be treated the same as a human") will be forced to re-evaluate their position once they become unemployable because of these AIs.

V__ 4y ago
> when those tools start causing structural unemployment (and that will happen soon enough) Is this actually happening? Some years ago there were articles about neural networks which can find errors/interesting points in law documents or find tumors during cancer imaging, but did this actually replace any jobs instead of just being an additional tool?
- trention 4y ago
  There is a capability line that needs to be crossed before we start seeing this. Which I think most of those older systems didn't cross. For me, one answer to this could be given when we're able to compare the number of illustrators employed in the US in June 2022 vs in June 2027. + the delta of the average salary.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cdrini 4y ago
I don't think Copilot is at any risk of causing unemployment yet, but Dalle could very likely replace a number of graphic design jobs in marketing right now. I think it's an important question, but at the same time, replacing jobs didn't stop the spinning Jenny from taking the textile industry by storm. In fact the exact opposite was true. It was popular specifically because it replaced paid jobs with fewer paid jobs. I don't know if there was backlash at the time, but jobs get destroyed and rebuilt by technology all the time, for better or worse. Edit: actually I take that back. I think a team that previously needed 3 developers might get away with only 1 or 2 developers thanks to improved productivity from copilot. So it can replace jobs in that way. Dalle can make a team that has one designer go to 0 designers.

ghoward 4y ago

I wrote a paper for this, but it was rejected. It's not surprising why; I only had a few days to do it. Anyway, my paper is at https://gavinhoward.com/2021/10/my-whitepaper-about-github-copilot/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/10/my-whitepaper-about-github-c... .

saurik 4y ago

I think what is really going to be interesting is when someone finally does this trick for music, as the RIAA is 100% going to sue whomever pulls off "give me a song about my ex girlfriend that sounds like Taylor Swift singing a hypothetical cover of a song in the style of one from Bob Dylan" and we will finally have a real test of all of these laws (...likely followed by a ton of frantic edits driven by their interests). In contrast, photographers and artists have always been in relatively weak positions and the only software developers having issues right now are almost by definition of the task going to be from the open source ecosystem, and so what comes out of these discussions is mostly just a lot of frustration rather than a true throwing down of the gauntlet, an activity for which the RIAA is always ready.

Dracophoenix 4y ago
> I think what is really going to be interesting in when someone finally does this trick for music Already done, although I don't think an actual lawsuit has been filed. https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw
- saurik 4y ago
  (In case anyone else sees this and thinks this is useful without clicking the link, it isn't: this is one of those stupid "I generated every possible X and so obviously copyright has failed" pranks.)

beebmam 4y ago

To be honest, I don't really care if Copilot is legal. If it isn't, it should be legal. Change the laws to make it legal.

Eliah_Lakhin 4y ago

Informally speaking, the idea of the free software movement and the copyleft specifically was born as a response to fundamental conflict between a business environment that in its ultimate goal wants to have a full control over the software and independent individual creators who just want to be free in creativity and are fine to share their work with anyone who also follows these principals in some way. The members of the movement are also quite often criticizing Copyright laws. While I agree that the law is not ideal, to my vision the Berne Convention foundations are on the individual creators side. Fighting against Copyright, in my opinion, is a shooting yourself in the foot. I'm not a big fan of the FSF and other similar movements rhetoric because of this(even though, I agree with some points). If creators just want to share their work with other people, and they don't care about the business "plutocracy", they can offer a License contract that would simply restrict the work usage by individuals only. It could still be a free of charge License that would allow even commercial use of the work, but the License should grant permissions to individuals only who are not representing a 3rd party interests(a business in particular). Such License is not a FOSS License in common sense, but in my opinion it could solve the initial goals laying behind the FOSS movements true intentions.

enriquto 4y ago
> the idea of the free software movement (...) was born as a response to fundamental conflict between a business environment (...) and independent individual creators This is a skewed and very narrow view. The main contrast is not between "businesses" and "individual creators", but between people who control and people who use software. For example, between governments that hire programmers to write software, and citizens that get to use this software. The idea of the free software movement is that users of any software should have the right to know exactly what the software does, and to change it as they see fit. This has really nothing to do with business. > The members of the movement are also quite often criticizing Copyright laws. Do you have a reference for that? My impression is that the FSF is quite respectful of copyright laws, and acknowledges their importance. This is an orthogonal issue to that of software freedom.
- Eliah_Lakhin 4y ago

jjluoma 4y ago

What about General Data Protection Regulation and anonymization? My source code files usually start with copyright notice with my name and email address followed by a reference to the license. In this case anonymization may be against my interests and rights.

fartcannon 4y ago

So which licence will prevent use by copilot? I do not wish to feed the beast. First and foremost anyone who cares should remove their code from github.

collaborative 4y ago
I never made my repos public and now it appears my aversion was justified Anyway, time to move back to bitbucket

siilats 4y ago

Guys Microsoft gives you github for free and copilot makes you a better programmer. Isn’t the whole point to make singularity not worry about mit license

skyzyx 4y ago

I think this is an interesting discussion to have, and I’m interested to see where the lawyers end up on this. But please don’t start with an organization as utterly biased as the FSF.

NicoleJO 4y ago

Fun Fact: You don't have to put up with this. File an official complaint against these companies for their blatant theft and sale of your copyrighted content with the FTC, BBB, CA State Attorney General, San Francisco DA office & FBI IP Theft division. Like I did.