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> 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 ignor

> 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.
- toastal 4y ago
  If it's going to do that much "good" for humanity, then the dataset should be 0BSD or CC0, not proprietary. Project Gutenberg does good by archiving and allowing access to a lot of books and everything is under Creative Commons to continue to allow people the freedom to use the data as well as attribute the original authors. GitHub isn't doing this at all and is instead selling a proprietary product built on scanning open source that didn't consent.
- SantalBlush 4y ago
  You could say this about all software piracy. So Microsoft can work to end software copyright instead of trying to corner the market on pirated software and asking forgiveness after the fact.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    No, you can't. Because most software piracy is of saleable software. 20 line snippets are not for sale, mostly because the transaction costs are higher than the snippet value.
- trention 4y ago
  Eventually (not in the next 5 years but probably in the next 15) a system like this is going to lower the market salaries of developers (or make some of them outright unemployable). While using their own code as input to achieve that, without ever obtaining actual permission. Seems like a pretty tangible harm to me.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
> you can't just take 20 lines of completely stolen code, modify a few things, and call it your own. Now I hope that Copilot sticks around for this exact reason: cause endless inane lawsuits claiming that actual original code was stolen and laundered through Copilot or reverse engineers going cowboy. Make it enough of a problem clogging the courts that they start dropping copyright cases.
- Test0129 4y ago
  Copyright has a purpose. I don't mean a purpose in the Disney Hegemony sense but a real, actual purpose. Dropping copyright cases is great if you hate proprietary code. That's fine. Open source is also powered by copyright. If we start dumping copyright cases we don't get the "well bob we may as well open source it!" We get large companies like Google just completely ignoring copyright and using open source code without attribution. What you've described (causing enough a problem in the courts) is the exact purpose of GPL. If we start dropping copyright cases altogether the open source movement may as well be dead in the water.
woah 4y ago
> You can't just take 20 lines of completely stolen code, modify a few things, and call it your own. That's exactly what I said in my comment. I wouldn't take 20 lines of code, since it wouldn't actually work. Even if it was able to spit out 20 lines of correct code, they would be tailored to my codebase, and not violating copyright. The only time you see CoPilot violating copyright is when someone coaxes it into that, in a completely empty codebase with no context. The violation of copyright is not possible when it is used as intended.

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.
toastal 4y ago
If it's going to do that much "good" for humanity, then the dataset should be 0BSD or CC0, not proprietary. Project Gutenberg does good by archiving and allowing access to a lot of books and everything is under Creative Commons to continue to allow people the freedom to use the data as well as attribute the original authors. GitHub isn't doing this at all and is instead selling a proprietary product built on scanning open source that didn't consent.
SantalBlush 4y ago
You could say this about all software piracy. So Microsoft can work to end software copyright instead of trying to corner the market on pirated software and asking forgiveness after the fact.
- concordDance 4y ago
  No, you can't. Because most software piracy is of saleable software. 20 line snippets are not for sale, mostly because the transaction costs are higher than the snippet value.
trention 4y ago
Eventually (not in the next 5 years but probably in the next 15) a system like this is going to lower the market salaries of developers (or make some of them outright unemployable). While using their own code as input to achieve that, without ever obtaining actual permission. Seems like a pretty tangible harm to me.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

> you can't just take 20 lines of completely stolen code, modify a few things, and call it your own. Now I hope that Copilot sticks around for this exact reason: cause endless inane lawsuits claiming that actual original code was stolen and laundered through Copilot or reverse engineers going cowboy. Make it enough of a problem clogging the courts that they start dropping copyright cases.

Test0129 4y ago
Copyright has a purpose. I don't mean a purpose in the Disney Hegemony sense but a real, actual purpose. Dropping copyright cases is great if you hate proprietary code. That's fine. Open source is also powered by copyright. If we start dumping copyright cases we don't get the "well bob we may as well open source it!" We get large companies like Google just completely ignoring copyright and using open source code without attribution. What you've described (causing enough a problem in the courts) is the exact purpose of GPL. If we start dropping copyright cases altogether the open source movement may as well be dead in the water.

woah 4y ago

> You can't just take 20 lines of completely stolen code, modify a few things, and call it your own. That's exactly what I said in my comment. I wouldn't take 20 lines of code, since it wouldn't actually work. Even if it was able to spit out 20 lines of correct code, they would be tailored to my codebase, and not violating copyright. The only time you see CoPilot violating copyright is when someone coaxes it into that, in a completely empty codebase with no context. The violation of copyright is not possible when it is used as intended.