7 ms·

Copilot wouldn't be shut down or neutered because "a few vocal people" protested against it. It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desire

• scarface74 4y ago
  > It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. I wonder how many people on HN would be on the side of the creators if we were talking about content created by Walt Disney and whether pirating was ethical?
  • lbotos 4y ago
    Wait, I'm not sure what you are trying to say? Can you clarify?
    • scarface74 4y ago
      That many people who are criticizing Microsoft for using open source code and claiming “fair use” and saying it’s not fair to creators are the same ones that say pirating digital content is harmless.
      • pornel 4y ago
        Because issues aren't automatically symmetrical, and impact of actions isn't equal in both ways, especially when there's power difference between the sides of the conflict, e.g. it's not hypocritical to punish a bully punching their victim, but not the victim for punching the bully back. Disney used its power to distort copyright laws in a self-serving manner. As an individual you don't have equal power to oppose them (you were supposed to have in a democracy, but lobbying is legal and corporations are people). Disney is a huge corporation that won't even notice if you pirate a movie, which you may not even have been able to pay for anyway, because of their region-locked twisted maze of distribution and DRM. OTOH you may be screwed if you're a creator making a living from your work, and a big corp can just take it without paying, launder it through "… in the style of $YOURNAME" query, and say they own it now, because unlike your copyright, their Terms Of Service apply. Even people who think copyright shouldn't exist may rely on using copyright — against itself. You can't unilaterally say "I don't believe in copyright", because the law doesn't care, but if you license something as copyleft, then the law does care about your anti-copyright license.
    • numpad0 4y ago
      There’s an assumption that hackers are automatically anarcho-communist, and unconditionally, wholeheartedly, vocally supportive of content piracy, which is not correct.
      • concordDance 4y ago
        Hackers mostly are, but Hacker news is mostly frequented by bog standard developers, who mostly aren't.
  • Spivak 4y ago
    I don’t think anyone at all is here arguing that an AI trained on a massive corpus of movies that outputs snippets of film based on a prompt would be illegal. Such a thing would literally be the same as Midjourney with images. The fact that you can likely coax any AI to output snippets close to some of the source material is not likely to really matter and would be as if you recreated a copyrighted work using any other tools.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      What’s the difference here then?
  • yarg 4y ago
    It'd probably turn towards Disney's history of bribing congress for copyright extensions whenever the mouse is about to enter the public domain.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      The same copyright laws that the open source proponents are complaining about MS breaking?
      • yarg 4y ago
        Steamboat Willie was released in 1928. People probably would have less of a problem if microsoft breached the license on 100 year old code.
      • drstewart 4y ago
        There is a certain amount of irony that a likely possible outcome will be the strengthening of copyright laws and enforcement, at which point people will realize they won the battle but lost the war
        • yarg 4y ago
          The problem with copyright isn't that it exists and provides protections - this incentivises creators. But life of the creator + 70 years? Reminds me of this: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/research-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/research-optim... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1436186 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1436186
        • shagie 4y ago
          But isn't it copyright upon which open source is founded? The license is based on the right of the owner of the copyright to authorize someone else to create a derivative work? Without copyright, it would be perfectly legitimate and legal for someone to not follow a license (because it would bear no legal weight because of the lack of copyright). I would argue that open source is best served by strong copyright protections that allow the people created the software to make sure that further changes to it are released back to the community. Weakening copyright law means that it is that much easier for big companies to co-opt some software and not need to release the changes back.
  • reachableceo 4y ago
    Equal protection under the law. I am 100% on the side of content creators. Regardless of who they are . The courts tend to take a dim view of theft. Which is what this is. The article clearly lays out that multiple requests for sound legal basis have gone unanswered . It simply doesn’t exist and Microsoft is operating on a forgiveness vs permission model. Licensing is 100% about permissions. Clear and explicit enumeration of the permissions (or lack thereof ) for a work. This class action lawsuit should surprise nobody. It’s a class that is sick and tired of being exploited. Do not take my work that I contributed with explicit permissions and use it in a way I didn’t grant permission for. Full stop. It isn’t complicated. You wouldn’t download a car and all that jazz….
    • naikrovek 4y ago
      > The courts tend to take a dim view of theft. Which is what this is. https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#d-user-generated-content https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... so much animosity over rights you gave GitHub when you put your code there. "Theft" gimme a break. you license your code to GitHub so they can show it to others. This is separate to the stated license in your code. Nowhere in that terms of service document are the means that the code is shown to users specified.
      • cycomanic 4y ago
        Give me a break. Did you even read the license? You read that it is restricted to "the service". That service cannot be copilot, because it didn't even exist when most people agreed to the license. Moreover the license explicitly states they cannot use the code to distribute in any other way or sell it. So if anything they are violating their own agreement. Also MS themselves don't even claim that training is covered by their terms of service, they claim it is fair use.
        • abigail95 4y ago
          What do you think is more likely, that Microsoft stuffed their own terms and conditions? Or you are mistaken and "the service" of github, includes all features available on the website including copilot. Even if you're right and a court rules against them, what's to stop them changing the terms to become compliant?
  • int_19h 4y ago
    I don't think many people here would object if Copilot was trained on all the publicly available source code from before 1930.
• beebmam 4y ago
  Why should Copilot engineers, and the company that invests in it, not be rewarded for their incredible product and SaaS offering they spend resources on providing?
  • lucasyvas 4y ago
    • visarga 4y ago
      That's not theft. Was the original code deleted? No. Then it's copying. And not even that, is the model replicating the training set like Google search? No. Then it's some kind of derivative work. And especially for Github it's OK because user agreements allow MS to do it. Is "imagining" the same with "copying"? Does copy-right cover learning-right? Can learning and practicing be restricted by the authors? Can visual styles, algorithms and facts be copyrighted? I say no to all of them.
      • jacooper 4y ago
        I think he is using theft because currently piracy(which is basically copying files) is legally considered theft.
        • larsiusprime 4y ago
          Larceny and copyright infringement are two distinct legal categories for two distinct kinds of crimes. One involves a taking of property and the other involves the violation of a government granted monopoly
      • lucasyvas 4y ago
        Human's aren't even allowed to do this. It has to be done clean room - this is not learning, it's copying and has been proven so. The only implementation that would be allowed is if they had to describe the code via a specification and Codepilot was able to generate it from scratch. It does not do that - it just reorganizes stuff it's already seen, which is a copyleft violation in humans, therefore it should be for a machine created by humans. The code has had its license violated.
• Spivak 4y ago
  > If they re-released Copilot as FOSS, a lot of the valid criticisms would evaporate. That changes nothing at all. A FOSS license is, in a legal sense, no different then a proprietary one. If it’s illegal it’s illegal regardless of whether it’s FOSS.
  • rockemsockem 4y ago
    I mean, legally, yes, but the point at issue was public outcry, which has almost nothing to do with laws. If Copilot was FOSS there'd probably be a few absolutists complaining, but they'd be mostly ignored.
  • btdmaster 4y ago
    If Copilot is deemed a derivative work of its inputs, it would resolve the issue that it does not comply with the AGPL because it currently does not provide source code to its users under an AGPL-compliant license.
• deworms 4y ago
  • rtmarket 4y ago
  • noitpmeder 4y ago
    It definitely does violate licenses -- this is true EVEN WHEN the repo they pulled it from is the original violator.
  • rwalle 4y ago
    Well... If you do a search you'll find that there are actually lots of lawsuits related to open source license violation, mostly around GPL license. Maybe educate yourself first
  • batmanturkey 4y ago
    Your assertion thst copyright doesn’t matter and that people should “get used to it” is… pretty incorrect on the former (surely there are still pending copyright suits on earth circa 2022) and ill-conceived on the latter (I’ll just rob your house while you sleep and you should just get used to it)
  • nathanaldensr 4y ago
    Your comment amounts to "sometimes crime occurs; therefore, laws are pointless."`
• visarga 4y ago
  > It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. Copilot makes source code much more open, if you think about it. It implements code reuse in a different way than classes and libraries. It offers its skills equally to everyone, skills learned from everyone. As for the cost of the API - it's expensive to run large language models, I think the price is justified. But there are free models if you like to run your own.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    And if it preserves licenses that's fine. Otherwise it's copyright infringement.
  • jacooper 4y ago
    Free/libre software ≠ free as beer.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  They should in addition release all code generated as a combo of AGPL, GPL, MIT, etc. and put a comment on every usage. Users would then need to license their code accordingly. For a commercial version, run it on Microsoft's internal code, the code they actually own!
• Aeolun 4y ago
  > It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. Yeah, the vocal few. Do you think I give a rats ass that Copilot is duplicating my OS code? I have to imagine most people are completely ambivalent. Of course I have no proof, I just can’t imagine anything else. The lines probably fall somewhere along the MIT vs GPL camps.
  • nathanaldensr 4y ago
    The funny thing is that even the MIT license requires attribution, which of course Copilot doesn't provide.
  • smt88 4y ago
    > Of course I have no proof, I just can’t imagine anything else. "Ambivalent" means "of two minds," but I'm going to assume you meant that you're indifferent. If people are/were indifferent, their licenses should reflect that. They overwhelmingly don't. Regardless, Microsoft is legally bound to obey the licenses.
    • seadan83 4y ago
      I consider GPL as meaning, "don't make the same app as me using this very source code". Cribbing one method out of quarter million line code-base, hardly seems to be redistributing the source code. Literally, it is, but is there no concept scale? Can we go to an extreme and force anyone with a `catch(Exception e)` line in their Java code to go and prove they did not take it from a GPL (or similarly licensed project)? I think this indicates there is a line, at some point it is enough code where you are recreating the functionality of the software - to me that is the thing that matters. I don't give a crap if you use my GPL code to learn from and use any parts of it to build whatever software, but I do care if you recreate the same software using my GPL code. I would accept a claim of license violation if someone used copilot to autocomplete so many methods from one specific project that you have recreated that original project. I still think it is a matter of scope. It can still be the case that a relatively small module is not cool to lift, but I think in this case we are still talking about such small subsets of functionality that it is completely divorced from the original software. Like, I could see it if a specific method were really key in some way to a unique application, a very novel solution to a difficult problem - but if that were the case, how can an AI possibly use that for a training model? In other words, the auto-suggestions of an AI are going to be common coding solutions to common coding problems that the AI has seen hundreds of thousands of times. That individual proprietary GPL, unique and novel solution is not really the stuff of an AI suggestion. In other words, the code that co-pilot is going to suggest is going to be non-unique, generic, and not really specific to the overall application at all.
• concordDance 4y ago
  > It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus I'm almost entirely certain you're wrong about the desires bit. 99% of the developers who wrote that code won't mind.
  • shuger 4y ago
    > 99% of the developers who wrote that code won't mind This is completely unsubstantiated. I for one would mind microsoft profiting from the closed source code I wrote.