4 ms·

How is it abusive?

• Guest42 4y ago
  It was trained using source code whose licenses don't permit such usage.
  • skybrian 4y ago
    This is unclear. I have never seen an open source license that was explicit about this. Seems like a grey area. It's not even clear how often training machine learning algorithms on code results in copyright violations. CoPilot does have a setting to detect and disallow direct copying, but how well does it work? This legal uncertainty is enough that I wouldn't advise using it, but maybe people who use it will be fine?
    • int_19h 4y ago
      It's messy enough it's likely to end up a Supreme Court case in US (and I wouldn't want to be a party to it). Europeans will probably preempt that with legislation.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • sidlls 4y ago
    In what sense? Copilot isn’t a derivative work in the sense these licenses usually are understood to mean. And given that they’re open source code bases I expect licenses to explicitly disallow things, and consider anything not explicitly disallowed as permitted.
    • teddyh 4y ago
      > Copilot isn’t a derivative work in the sense these licenses usually are understood to mean The phrase “derived work” is, IIUC, a phrase from copyright law. And you’d have a hard time convincing me that Copilot-generated code is not a derived work from its training data. > And given that they’re open source code bases I expect licenses to explicitly disallow things, and consider anything not explicitly disallowed as permitted. That is very much not how copyright and licences work. Copyright law gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to make copies of the work, making derived works, (and to do some other related things, like making a public performance of it, etc.), so to do any of those things, you need explicit permission, i.e. a license from the copyright holder to do it. A license is not a list of things you are forbidden to do; on the contrary, it is a list of things you are permitted to do, which you would not otherwise be legally allowed to do according to copyright law.
      • skybrian 4y ago
        Sure, but there are things you can do without a license because they're not copyright violations. You can read the work, learn from it, and sometimes make quotations under fair use. This is a novel scenario. It seems unclear how the courts will interpret it? Never mind what we think, will they decide it's a derivative work, or is it a transformative use? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use
        • teddyh 4y ago
          “Fair use” is, technically, not actually permitted by copyright law. ISTR that “fair use” is only a defense you can use when you are being sued for copyright violation. Suppose we create a new AI image generator, and use as training input every image ever made of a Disney character (official images by Disney, that is, no fan art), including every frame of every Disney movie. Could we just use the output images of that AI however we wanted to? (Not withstanding trademarks.)
          • skybrian 4y ago
            Looks like there is case law that fictional characters are protected if they are "sufficiently delineated." I don't see how that applies to code, though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fictional_characters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fic...
            • teddyh 4y ago
              I guess we’ll find out.
• Gigachad 4y ago
  There is a common trend of devs on HN getting angry that their work has been "stolen" to train copilot, While none of them raised the same concerns when everything else like art, music, literature, etc was used to train other models. Now that it affects them its a real issue.
  • sidlls 4y ago
    Yes. It's especially amusing given that much of the other things you note are actually intended for commercial use (i.e. sales) from the start, unlike open source software. I just don't understand the OSS community sometimes. "Software should be open and free (libre) for me to study and modify" includes what Github did for copilot. If you don't want your software to be free (in either sense), don't host it on an open source platform, especially one that makes it available gratis to the public. There's possibly a valid argument that any private repo code that was used for copilot doesn't fit the proper definition of "open" (or gratis). But I haven't actually read the Github license around this, so I don't know.
    • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      Your argument fails to distinguish between "open source" and "free software". Copyleft, free software, GPL style licenses do not have their source open purely for the purpose of studying and modifying. Their licenses also require that derivative works also be free and that such modifications be distributed. Copilot does not comply with this. And so violates the spirit of those licenses, and probably also the letter of the law.
      • sidlls 4y ago
        I literally use “libre” and “gratis” to make that precise distinction. And it’s at best questionable whether copilot is derivative of the code it is trained on.
        • xigoi 4y ago
          It's not about the distinction between “libre” and “gratis”, but about the distinction between copyleft and permissive.