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All this discussion of legality is interesting to me, because I'm pretty sure that if Github ran a search in the background, found the corresponding license for

All this discussion of legality is interesting to me, because I'm pretty sure that if Github ran a search in the background, found the corresponding license for the code snippet, then showed it to the user in some cookie-banner like annoyance, it would be completely legal. This is what Github already does on their website with a search bar. Yet somehow I think most people upset about Copilot would not like that outcome.

culi 4y ago
How do you run a search on the product of a bunch of neural network weights? Do you just mean like double-checking that the code it produced isn't a direct copy of something copyrighted? If so I think that introduces a lot of other issues. There's an interesting phenomenon of different independent comedians suing talk shows for stealing their jokes. It almost always turned out that those jokes weren't actually stolen. Instead, there's only so many jokes you can make about a given news story and there's bound to be overlap between a whole room of comedians trying to milk every event of any comedic value and random independent comedians doing the same
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  You run search on the text output. Yes I mean that they would search the code. It's certainly legal to show LGPL code snippets along with the license (It may also be legal without this, IANAL).
stingraycharles 4y ago
It’s interesting and pretty much uncharted territory from a legal perspective, that’s for sure. It very much relates back to the discussion about accountability of machine learning models, in that it’s desirable to be able to explain how/why some output was generated. I don’t think a banner would be sufficient here, though; perhaps some references to the inputs that were used to generate the output, but that’s often very difficult to pinpoint. Whatever happens, if this ends up setting some sort of legal precedent it will have a big impact on the industry, and I personally hope it leads to more accountability and transparency of the models, rather than the black boxes they are now.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  How could a banner not be sufficient? Under what legal theory is Copilot + banner illegal, but code search is legal?
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    I’d argue that copilot’s core functionality is distributing code, which is very different from search (pointing to original code). Very different from a copyright / fair use perspective.
a254613e 4y ago
By the way, Amazon's CodeWhisperer does that. > in very rare cases, an independently generated code recommendation may resemble a unique code snippet in the training data. By notifying you when this happens, and providing you the repository and licensing information, CodeWhisperer makes it easier for you to decide whether to use the code in your project and make the relevant source code attributions as you see fit.

culi 4y ago

How do you run a search on the product of a bunch of neural network weights? Do you just mean like double-checking that the code it produced isn't a direct copy of something copyrighted? If so I think that introduces a lot of other issues. There's an interesting phenomenon of different independent comedians suing talk shows for stealing their jokes. It almost always turned out that those jokes weren't actually stolen. Instead, there's only so many jokes you can make about a given news story and there's bound to be overlap between a whole room of comedians trying to milk every event of any comedic value and random independent comedians doing the same

mgraczyk 4y ago
You run search on the text output. Yes I mean that they would search the code. It's certainly legal to show LGPL code snippets along with the license (It may also be legal without this, IANAL).

stingraycharles 4y ago

It’s interesting and pretty much uncharted territory from a legal perspective, that’s for sure. It very much relates back to the discussion about accountability of machine learning models, in that it’s desirable to be able to explain how/why some output was generated. I don’t think a banner would be sufficient here, though; perhaps some references to the inputs that were used to generate the output, but that’s often very difficult to pinpoint. Whatever happens, if this ends up setting some sort of legal precedent it will have a big impact on the industry, and I personally hope it leads to more accountability and transparency of the models, rather than the black boxes they are now.

mgraczyk 4y ago
How could a banner not be sufficient? Under what legal theory is Copilot + banner illegal, but code search is legal?
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  I’d argue that copilot’s core functionality is distributing code, which is very different from search (pointing to original code). Very different from a copyright / fair use perspective.

a254613e 4y ago

By the way, Amazon's CodeWhisperer does that. > in very rare cases, an independently generated code recommendation may resemble a unique code snippet in the training data. By notifying you when this happens, and providing you the repository and licensing information, CodeWhisperer makes it easier for you to decide whether to use the code in your project and make the relevant source code attributions as you see fit.