11 ms·

It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrigh

• MarcelOlsz 4y ago
  If it was also free and open source, sure. But it's not, it's a paid product that one party reaps the profits from.
• culi 4y ago
  Yeah I think it just means a non-commercial alternative would be made to replace it
• nightski 4y ago
  Personally I'm not worried about the end user using copyrighted code. That is their responsibility. If you have verbatim GPL code in your commercial closed source code base that is a liability and it might be dangerous to use copilot. What I have more of a problem with is Microsoft charging for copilot which was trained on copyrighted code without any permission whatsoever which they really have no right to utilize/charge for.
  • andyp-kw 4y ago
    As a human, if I learn how to program by studying copyrighted code, is it unethical for me to use that knowledge to make a living ?
    • skydhash 4y ago
      If you go around pasting code ad verbatim, a lot of people would be upset too.
    • jakelazaroff 4y ago
      Unless Microsoft is secretly powering Copilot with Mechanical Turk, that isn't what's happening here.
      • noasaservice 4y ago
        Why not complete that analogy? What if instead of Copilot, it was a bunch of humans who were searching all the source code they could access and then copying/autocompleting that code, regardless of the license. Is that still OK? If yes, why?
        • jakelazaroff 4y ago
          You're reading too much into my comment. All I'm saying is that Copilot isn't "learning" like a human does.
        • ctvo 4y ago
          A paid service where tens of hundreds of people search for publicly available code snippets and send them to you? I believe they call that outsourcing in some circles.
        • remram 4y ago
          In this case we'd be sending subpoenas to those people to make sure they hadn't been instructed to disregard licenses or copy large pieces of code verbatim.
        • didibus 4y ago
          That wouldn't be ok, I'm assuming that's what you're implying as well? In any case I would say that's not ok. Copying code, even if its from a mix of many different places, and the results look like a mosaic, would still be copying. If the Mturk worker just suggested an implementation they came up with that be fine.
• jakelazaroff 4y ago
  > It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. Sure — in the same way that hacking into a competitor's GitHub account and copying their private source code is "genuinely useful" to you. As the person benefitting from unlawfully using their source code, of course you wouldn't care that it reproduces it. But you're not really the person we're trying to help here.
  • dmix 4y ago
    > in the same way that hacking into a competitor's GitHub account That's like comparing grand-theft auto to someone stealing a pack of gum from a convenience store. It's not a useful analogy. The latter is still a problem, but we don't need to be FUDy about it. And OPs right, this will keep happening until we come up with better ways of solving this problem. Whether that's educating companies on the legal (and moral) risks their developers IDE tools are exposing them to, better licensing database/indexing, working with future OSS devs building these tools instead of treating them like criminals, suing the for-profit companies like Microsoft who seek to profit from this until they invest in this problem, etc.
    • jakelazaroff 4y ago
      OP can correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't seem particularly interested in solving anything. They literally said "I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content." So the problem, as I see it, is the people who see the laundering of open source and proprietary code as a draw, rather than a drawback.
      • comex 4y ago
        Not sure if they edited their comment, but the end of it contradicts your interpretation: > I won't be afraid of accidently violating copyright myself, because I won't be trying to bait it into reproducing heavily copy&pasted cherrypicked examples, and I won't use 20 lines of its output with zero modification.
• burkaman 4y ago
  I don't think most people are concerned that Copilot is going to be reproducing verbatim copyrighted code, it's more that it sucks that a giant corporation is going to make a billion dollars from a tool that is entirely built off of millions of peoples' work who were never asked permission and will never be compensated.
  • rmahan 4y ago
    GitHub’s free code storage, static site hosting, etc. is compensation If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.
    • remram 4y ago
      You can't give someone a dime (that they could have easily picked up from any of your competitors too) and then break into their house claiming they had been compensated. In this case they even steal code authored by people who never used GitHub at all, but had someone else mirror it or publish it on GitHub.
      • mkmk3 4y ago
        Not fair, while giving you the dime I'm pretty sure they quietly whispered something about them getting to live in your walls as compensation
    • speedgoose 4y ago
      GitHub’s business model is simple, they use the free tier to stay the main platform and easily attract paying customers.
    • LtWorf 4y ago
      Uh? What about projects that are mirrored on github? Why are their original authors being punished if they don't even own a github account?
  • johnfn 4y ago
    That's hardly a new thing! For instance, Google search makes billions of dollars by indexing content that other people make.
• baby 4y ago
  I call these people open source haters. They selectively choose what they want open source to mean, and are against the fundamental ideas of open source. Long live Copilot. It’s an amazing product that shows what we are capable of thanks to crowdsourcing and bleeding edge technology. We live in the future, and progress never remembers those who tried to stop it.
  • shbooms 4y ago
    > the fundamental ideas of open source A bit ironic that Copilot itself is not open source.
    • bamboozled 4y ago
      Really had to laugh at this one...
  • didibus 4y ago
    The plea seems to be against proprietary tech built off open source efforts. If they open sourced Copilot then it would probably comply with most of the licenses anyways. Like at the very, least, respect the licenses, that means, give attribution, and provide your own source as open source and under the same terms. Open source is what allowed this progress in the first place, and the way I see it, commercial interest is actually simply trying to slow it down by keeping it behind proprietary trade secrets.
  • lassant 4y ago
    The definition of "open-source" will be given by the license included with the software (or lack thereof). It could mean that we adhere to the Open Source Initiative, or it could mean that the source code is freely available even though its use is not permissive. The license will tell, not your pre-defined conception of "open-source".
  • the_lucifer 4y ago
    > I call these people open source haters. They selectively choose what they want open source to mean, and are against the fundamental ideas of open source. B..but, Copilot isn't open source though?
• usefulcat 4y ago
  Fine, but what happens if Copilot is so successful that it ends up actively harming the very projects that it requires for training material? If you value Copilot then you should be concerned about that, even if you don't care at all about any ethical considerations. Seems very similar to a "tragedy of the commons" type of situation.
• thomasahle 4y ago
  > It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. I feel like the title of the article is literally written for you: """Maybe you don’t mind if GitHub Copi­lot used your open-source code with­out ask­ing. But how will you feel if Copi­lot erases your open-source com­mu­nity?""" If you want to keep having useful tools based on open source code in the future, it is in your interest that people still want to write open source code. It is still too early to say how much of a chilling effect projects like Copilot will have on that. But clearly many (just read this comment section, myself included) are having second thoughts.
  • solidasparagus 4y ago
    But that part of the argument is far more nebulous and bullshitty than the copyright argument. The idea that copilot is killing any substantial open-source project just isn't true right now. Copilot doesn't generate libraries worth of functionality, it generates small functions or less. Open-source projects remain as important as they were before copilot.
• neurostimulant 4y ago
  > I won't be afraid of accidently violating copyright myself, because I won't be trying to bait it into reproducing heavily copy&pasted cherrypicked examples, and I won't use 20 lines of its output with zero modification. Maybe you can exercise some discipline when using copilot, but what about your coworkers? Many companies might not want their employees to insert copyrighted codes into their projects accidentally.
  • perryizgr8 4y ago
    > Many companies might not want their employees to insert copyrighted codes into their projects accidentally. They can opt not to pay for this entirely voluntary service.
• pengaru 4y ago
  > It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. Plagiarizing is already understood to be a genuinely useful practice.
  • concordDance 4y ago
    No, its mostly isn't. It's mostly done to cheat on academic contests (and thus getting a less skilled student/researcher for positions). Copying entire works of fiction doesn't really add anything to the world. Copying a passage here and there when making a new work? I don't think the courts have ever ruled that plagiarism.
• 123_abc 4y ago
  >The only way you can get it to do that is to bait it with the function names of functions I get that using function names is an obvious way to get copilot to generate contested code, but has someone tried to get copilot to generate contested code in a way that users might sincerely be using copilot for productivity ? How do you get to the claim it is the "only way" ?
• Test0129 4y ago
  > It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It enables the large scale theft of code. It completely ignores licenses. There are plenty of open source licenses that allow code use with proper attribution yet Copilot doesn't (and probably can't) figure a way to comply with all of them. Copilot, as the article suggests, is a marketing stunt. To me it's more than that. It's Microsoft pushing the boundaries of law using it's money muscle again. I have been screaming from the rooftops that VSCode was just M$ spyware and I get legitimately made fun of for it. Now we have Copilot as well and they aren't even hiding it. To address your point more directly if you do any work for monetary gain Copilot is a defacto liability. You can't just take 20 lines of completely stolen code, modify a few things, and call it your own. That's why legal reverse engineering has an entire black-box method of development. QA, researchers, and developers aren't even allowed to talk to each other directly. I hope Copilot does get shutdown. Along with everything like it. It is one thing to have an AI trained on your workplace's code, or specific code following specific licenses, but the blatant theft of not only licensed open source code, but also private code, is a terrible precedent to have.
  • concordDance 4y ago
    So many comments like this, but none list a tangible harm that's anywhere near the millions of man hours systems like this will save. Heck, basically none (including this one!) list a harm at all!
    • mkmk3 4y ago
      Honestly, kinda fair. How is it different to pirating anything, and the moral qualms that come in there? Some people see it as a massive issue, others don't believe the harm is significant. Probably makes an OSS dev enjoy their working being open source less, I imagine, which may have larger ramifications in terms of the ecosystem it promotes, but outside of that I'm guessing (I'm also trying to understand) it's just a matter of who's seeing the benefit from this tech. I think that's a reasonable thing to be concerned about, when wealth seems to have a tendency to centralize, and the average worker doesn't have the level of power we would ideally like.
    • 4y ago
• forgotpwd16 4y ago
  >I won't be trying to bait it into reproducing heavily copy&pasted cherrypicked examples You don't have to bait it. >I won't use 20 lines of its output with zero modification. Depending on changes that may still be derivative work. The entire concept reminds me that can I copy your homework meme.
• macspoofing 4y ago
  >The only way you can get it to do that is to bait it with the function names of functions that have already been copy and pasted thousands of times onto GitHub without proper licenses. How do you know that this is the only way for copilot to reproduce copyrighted code?
• the_gipsy 4y ago
  > I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. Do you also just rip any open source code, violating the licenses? Nice.