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> 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 copyri

> 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.
    - jakelazaroff 4y ago
      No, that was there, but it doesn’t contradict my interpretation. Copyright doesn’t only cover reproducing code verbatim. It also includes derivative works.
      - dmix 4y ago
        Maybe in court which interprets software dev very strictly, but in practice a developer automatically copying a single function from some 'freemium' style licensed library [1] posted publicly on Github - getting autocompleted into a different codebase with many thousands of lines of custom code isn't the same as going into some proprietary codebase and stealing their code to compete / build the same product as another company. We could come up with scenarios where there might be some fancy algorithms posted on some public Git repo that's super efficient or unique, and that somehow fits into the size of individual functions that could be auto-inserted into some other person's codebase. But IRL that sort of thing is rarely ever going to be the thing that these IDE tools do. At least in a way that meaningfully contributes to another project. That is still a concern yes, but it's still a niche usecase, which doesn't justify killing off otherwise extremely useful tools. Maybe I'm being too techno-libertarian here, but I believe existing courts + public feedback cycles + iterating on how the public code is consumed by these tools + spreading awareness of the issue is enough to address the licensing problems. The more accurately we explain the problem, the quicker we'll find good solutions. [1] usually licensing saying commercial projects need to either pay or not use it at all. Or some attribution clause
        smaudet 4y ago
        "Maybe I'm being too techno-libertarian here, but I believe existing courts + public feedback cycles + iterating on how the public code is consumed + spreading awareness of the issue is enough to address the licensing problems." I think you are, though. You have to automate the justice as well, traditional courts can't keep pace. You'll just end up with more automated DMCA-style takedowns, not less.
        4y ago
  - nearbuy 4y ago
    OP said they don't care that it can reproduce copyrighted content because they're not going to do so with it. That's roughly the opposite of what you're implying.
    - smaudet 4y ago
      No they are just going to let other people commit crimes and claim they will never do it... Do you really believe Microsoft employees aren't going to be using this, illegally or unofficially? "Yes! We (Microsoft) aren't doing anything illegal, but we are going to turn a blind eye to everyone using it illegally as we directly benefit from it - and here's the kicker! Our employees are legally liable not us evil laughter all the way to the bank" Of course the legal execs aren't using it, this is classic Microsoft (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish).
      - Ajedi32 4y ago
        If accidental reproduction of copyrighted material by AI systems is illegal under current law then we should change the law immediately so that it's not. These AI systems are highly novel, transformative, and useful. Their development is exactly the sort of thing copyright law was originally created to encourage. If it's hindering them instead, that's a problem. (And no, I'm not saying people should be allowed to use AI to intentionally launder stolen code; use some common sense here.)
        jakelazaroff 4y ago
        Why is it so outlandish to expect the people who make money by selling AI systems to only train them using material for which they have a license? As many commenters have pointed out, no one would have a problem had Microsoft trained Copilot on the Windows source code. The fact that they intentionally left it out of the training set is a huge red flag.
        Ajedi32 4y ago
        Because AI systems require large amounts of training data, the more the better, and requiring manual review of those datasets to ensure compliance with copyright would consume significant resources and slow down the pace of innovation across the entire AI industry. Now let me flip that question around on you: What benefit would society gain from that forcing AI developers to do all that extra work?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- SantalBlush 4y ago
  >That's like comparing grand-theft auto to someone stealing a pack of gum from a convenience store. They're both more like grand-theft auto, but one involves the valet driver leaving with your car, and the other involves smashing a window.
oefrha 4y ago
I use Copilot all the time and I’ve never once used it to generate a whole prepackaged function that’s more than maybe three lines. So no, I don’t benefit from its reproducing other people’s code at all. Tell me you don’t use Copilot without telling me about it.
- remram 4y ago
  > Tell me you don’t use Copilot without telling me about it. You don't accept arguments against the use of Copilot from people unless they... use it? That's a nifty way to ignore any and all criticism of Copilot, or indeed any discussion about any ethical issue ever.
  - oefrha 4y ago
    They should at least try to understand how it’s actually used, not imagining how it’s simply used to steal their largely replaceable code.
    - xigoi 4y ago
      It doesn't matter how it's used. Do you think Microsoft would be happy with someone training a model on Windows source code, as long as they didn't use it to reproduce the code?
      - sangnoir 4y ago
        If Microsoft were confident Copilot doesn't produce infringing code, they would have included the Windows and Office codebases in the training data. I wonder what will come out of discovery
        manmal 4y ago
        You think MS‘ code quality is high enough to train an AI on?
        4y ago
concordDance 4y ago
I've yet to see anyone come up with a harm current CoPilot could do that is within an order of magnitude of the good it does. Why on earth should we care that it resulted in 20 lines of code being copied in some rare circumstances? The transaction costs alone make that code worthless as a saleable thing.
onethought 4y ago
Straw man. That isn't what Github/Copilot is doing. If open source communities are worried about having their source code copied... then don't open the source. Keep it closed, keep it off GitHub... I mean the genie is already out of the bottle, so doesn't really matter what they do now. You can't prompt Copilot with things like: # Function that detects spam accurately And get anything useful/sensitive/competitive Is there really super sensitive algorithms out there that Copilot is exposing that are otherwise unknown?
neoromantique 4y ago
Hi! I'll give some insight onto why I benefit tremendously from CoPilot I have a very severe ADHD and as a result terrible memory, I've been working as a dev for almost a decade now and it always was almost entirely in the browser with a search bar, not IDE, and me working with infrastructure doesn't help as I encounter more than one programming language at a time, daily. CoPilot helps me not making dozens of jr. dev level search queries daily as I can formulate query right in the IDE and it will fill in the basic algo's, data types, language abstractions that I know exist (as I use them all the time), but I don't remember how to actually invoke them, despite doing so just an hour ago. This is the most useful part of copilot, not the complex and very specific code.
woah 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 What? You left out the second line of the quote. It never reproduces copyrighted content for me because I'm not trying to bait it into doing that.

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.
  - jakelazaroff 4y ago
    No, that was there, but it doesn’t contradict my interpretation. Copyright doesn’t only cover reproducing code verbatim. It also includes derivative works.
    - dmix 4y ago
      Maybe in court which interprets software dev very strictly, but in practice a developer automatically copying a single function from some 'freemium' style licensed library [1] posted publicly on Github - getting autocompleted into a different codebase with many thousands of lines of custom code isn't the same as going into some proprietary codebase and stealing their code to compete / build the same product as another company. We could come up with scenarios where there might be some fancy algorithms posted on some public Git repo that's super efficient or unique, and that somehow fits into the size of individual functions that could be auto-inserted into some other person's codebase. But IRL that sort of thing is rarely ever going to be the thing that these IDE tools do. At least in a way that meaningfully contributes to another project. That is still a concern yes, but it's still a niche usecase, which doesn't justify killing off otherwise extremely useful tools. Maybe I'm being too techno-libertarian here, but I believe existing courts + public feedback cycles + iterating on how the public code is consumed by these tools + spreading awareness of the issue is enough to address the licensing problems. The more accurately we explain the problem, the quicker we'll find good solutions. [1] usually licensing saying commercial projects need to either pay or not use it at all. Or some attribution clause
      - smaudet 4y ago
        "Maybe I'm being too techno-libertarian here, but I believe existing courts + public feedback cycles + iterating on how the public code is consumed + spreading awareness of the issue is enough to address the licensing problems." I think you are, though. You have to automate the justice as well, traditional courts can't keep pace. You'll just end up with more automated DMCA-style takedowns, not less.
        4y ago
- nearbuy 4y ago
  OP said they don't care that it can reproduce copyrighted content because they're not going to do so with it. That's roughly the opposite of what you're implying.
  - smaudet 4y ago
    No they are just going to let other people commit crimes and claim they will never do it... Do you really believe Microsoft employees aren't going to be using this, illegally or unofficially? "Yes! We (Microsoft) aren't doing anything illegal, but we are going to turn a blind eye to everyone using it illegally as we directly benefit from it - and here's the kicker! Our employees are legally liable not us evil laughter all the way to the bank" Of course the legal execs aren't using it, this is classic Microsoft (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish).
    - Ajedi32 4y ago
      If accidental reproduction of copyrighted material by AI systems is illegal under current law then we should change the law immediately so that it's not. These AI systems are highly novel, transformative, and useful. Their development is exactly the sort of thing copyright law was originally created to encourage. If it's hindering them instead, that's a problem. (And no, I'm not saying people should be allowed to use AI to intentionally launder stolen code; use some common sense here.)
      - jakelazaroff 4y ago
        Why is it so outlandish to expect the people who make money by selling AI systems to only train them using material for which they have a license? As many commenters have pointed out, no one would have a problem had Microsoft trained Copilot on the Windows source code. The fact that they intentionally left it out of the training set is a huge red flag.
        Ajedi32 4y ago
        Because AI systems require large amounts of training data, the more the better, and requiring manual review of those datasets to ensure compliance with copyright would consume significant resources and slow down the pace of innovation across the entire AI industry. Now let me flip that question around on you: What benefit would society gain from that forcing AI developers to do all that extra work?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
SantalBlush 4y ago
>That's like comparing grand-theft auto to someone stealing a pack of gum from a convenience store. They're both more like grand-theft auto, but one involves the valet driver leaving with your car, and the other involves smashing a window.

oefrha 4y ago

I use Copilot all the time and I’ve never once used it to generate a whole prepackaged function that’s more than maybe three lines. So no, I don’t benefit from its reproducing other people’s code at all. Tell me you don’t use Copilot without telling me about it.

remram 4y ago
> Tell me you don’t use Copilot without telling me about it. You don't accept arguments against the use of Copilot from people unless they... use it? That's a nifty way to ignore any and all criticism of Copilot, or indeed any discussion about any ethical issue ever.
- oefrha 4y ago
  They should at least try to understand how it’s actually used, not imagining how it’s simply used to steal their largely replaceable code.
  - xigoi 4y ago
    It doesn't matter how it's used. Do you think Microsoft would be happy with someone training a model on Windows source code, as long as they didn't use it to reproduce the code?
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      If Microsoft were confident Copilot doesn't produce infringing code, they would have included the Windows and Office codebases in the training data. I wonder what will come out of discovery
      - manmal 4y ago
        You think MS‘ code quality is high enough to train an AI on?
        4y ago

concordDance 4y ago

I've yet to see anyone come up with a harm current CoPilot could do that is within an order of magnitude of the good it does. Why on earth should we care that it resulted in 20 lines of code being copied in some rare circumstances? The transaction costs alone make that code worthless as a saleable thing.

onethought 4y ago

Straw man. That isn't what Github/Copilot is doing. If open source communities are worried about having their source code copied... then don't open the source. Keep it closed, keep it off GitHub... I mean the genie is already out of the bottle, so doesn't really matter what they do now. You can't prompt Copilot with things like: # Function that detects spam accurately And get anything useful/sensitive/competitive Is there really super sensitive algorithms out there that Copilot is exposing that are otherwise unknown?

neoromantique 4y ago

Hi! I'll give some insight onto why I benefit tremendously from CoPilot I have a very severe ADHD and as a result terrible memory, I've been working as a dev for almost a decade now and it always was almost entirely in the browser with a search bar, not IDE, and me working with infrastructure doesn't help as I encounter more than one programming language at a time, daily. CoPilot helps me not making dozens of jr. dev level search queries daily as I can formulate query right in the IDE and it will fill in the basic algo's, data types, language abstractions that I know exist (as I use them all the time), but I don't remember how to actually invoke them, despite doing so just an hour ago. This is the most useful part of copilot, not the complex and very specific code.

woah 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 What? You left out the second line of the quote. It never reproduces copyrighted content for me because I'm not trying to bait it into doing that.