4 ms·

It's kinda weird how seemingly the same people who usually argue that software patents/copyrighted algorithm implementations are bullshit, now suddenly get all

• crakenzak 4y ago
  Probably because they feel their jobs are being threatened by these AI systems. Cognitive dissonance at its best.
  • stingraycharles 4y ago
    I don’t think that’s it; I think its mostly the lack of credit, and supposed claims of Copilot “generating” code, that makes it look very bad when its just basically copy/pasting someone else’s code without credit. I bet the same people would be fine if this code was included verbatim with appropriate attribution and licenses. But that’s not the case.
• a3w 4y ago
  The dev is defending (his) copyleft, not patents. So let me stick to discussing the former, not the latter, in the following post: His opinion, as well as the current state of law: His code could and shall be used pretty freely, but a comment referring to the original license/author is needed. The context: Having an option to "leave out copyrighted code", that does not do what the option suggests, is a flaw, both in a functional and secondly with law-as-is, in a legal way.
• dottedmag 4y ago
  It's kind a weird how patents and copyright are lumped together.
  • williamcotton 4y ago
    Wouldn't it be nice if people knew the distinction? Copyright is for useless things like music and poetry and does not cover utilitarian features. Patents are for utilitarian inventions. The problem is that code is text-based and obviously some kind of writing while mostly being a utilitarian invention. The courts of course recognize this distinction (because unlike the average software developer, lawyers and judges have studied the law) so they have come up with a number of ways to filter out what is and isn't covered by copyright with regards to software.
  • bitofhope 4y ago
    It did get me thinking about something here. The deal with patents is that you make the way your invention works public knowledge. You document the principle and in exchange you get a limited-time monopoly on its implementation. An alternative for this is a trade secret. As long as you guard the secret, you can remain the only one profiting off it. Of course, some things are impractical to keep secret. It's easier to keep a method of making a fizzy drink under wraps than how the gears are laid out in the gadget you sell. You also can't really make the contents of a book a secret. Anyone can just look at their copy, arrange words in the same order as you did and sell your book. It also makes no sense to patent the words. The contents are already inherently public knowledge to a certain extent and now people could just buy the book from a patent office. And the clerks don't like filing novel-length applications. Music is not quite as easy to make a 1-to-1 copy of, especially before wide adoption of sound recording technology, but a lot of people can carry a tune well enough to plagiarize one. And sometimes you get a child prodigy Mozart illegally transcribing Miserere. Since it has been deemed desirable [if not unanimously] that writers and artists also have a period of monopoly rights over their work, copyright needs to work differently from patents. Software has interesting properties. Unlike a book, you can distribute a program but keep its "recipe" a secret. We'll disregard people who are capable of working with compiled binaries; consider them modern-day transcribers of Miserere. Proprietary code is typically guarded just as any trade secret would be. Perhaps software should have been covered by patents instead of copyright from the beginning. After the patent expires, the algorithm would be unencumbered and public knowledge. But that's not the world we live in. Software is considered to be like a book, not like a pocket watch. You could mail me a printout of the entire Windows 11 source and there's hardly anything I could ever legally do with it. I could change it for my own amusement I guess, like I can take a red pen and change all the names in my copy of Postmodernism for beginners.
• batch12 4y ago
  Are these the same people? On another note, I wonder how many people who find/found the practices of Microsoft questionable give it a pass when it benefits them.
• tokai 4y ago
  That's a bad faith take. People that think copyright is bullshit don't want a world were copyright restricts everyone except for companies that can break it at scale.
  • Kiro 4y ago
    You have no right to say what I want. I rather see someone (including companies) break it than no-one. I want copyright to be abolished and the only way to get there is to actively work against it.
    • arrosenberg 4y ago
      You aren’t working against it by letting the biggest companies in the world be exempt from the laws, you are just turning copyright into a moat for those companies.
• School-Cotton 4y ago
  Patents and copyrights are not the same. Don’t conflate them. I’m totally against software patents and totally in favor of software copyright, fwiw.
  • Kiro 4y ago
    You should be against both if you care about free software.
    • mort96 4y ago
      Free Software can't exist without copyright. Free Software is all about forcing people who re-sell your code to make their code available to their customers, and copyright is the legal mechanism by which that is done. Open Source software can exist in a world without copyright; that's basically what permissive licenses are. Proprietary software can exist in a world without copyright; just don't release the source code, only distribute build artifacts. But free software is dead without copyright.
      • bitofhope 4y ago
        Free Software vs Open Source is not about copyleft vs permissive. The GPL is both a Free and an Open Source license. The MIT license also counts as both Free and Open Source. Most permissive licenses — and most popular permissive licenses — include a copyright statement and conditions which would not be enforceable without copyright. They usually require redistribution of the original copyright notice and license text to be distributed along with copies or derivatives of the work.
      • Timwi 4y ago
        > copyright is the legal mechanism by which that is done. That doesn't mean there can't be other legal mechanisms that would also accomplish software freedom. Closed-source software should just be illegal. Then you don't need copyright to ensure freedom. With copyright gone, you are now guaranteed free to reuse any code. The law should not prohibit copying, it should only require attribution (i.e., prohibit plagiarism).
• Ialdaboth 4y ago
  Speaking about this, there is something I don't understand about AI-produced work : given how you need to train AI on an existing set of existing code (or artworks, or novels, or whatever), I don't even understand how it would be possible to patent/copyright the output as it is, to some remote degree, derivative by nature ? Humans don't need AIs to produce code, but the opposite is not true.
  • Filligree 4y ago
    Humans also read code, though. I don’t think we want a world where programmers are required never to read someone else’s code, or otherwise be barred from the profession.
    • Dalewyn 4y ago
      That is the world we live in, though. For a prominent example, WINE goes to extreme ends to ensure their code isn't derived from any prior direct knowledge of Microsoft code. Replicating functions of released binaries with original code is fair game, but reverse engineering or copying Microsoft code is a hard no-go. As far as AI is concerned in all this, it's probably even easier to distinguish the unacceptable. Whereas humans can argue for plausible deniability, we clearly know what data an AI is fed to generate subsequent output. So unless an AI is certified to never have eaten licensed materials, literally everything it produces will be license infringements.
    • Ialdaboth 4y ago
      Feels fallacious ? Most good developers I personally know, when doing code, tend to think about the problem at hand, establish the logic of how they want to solve it, and then implement the solution. They rarely try to do this by doing pattern-hunting & merge on a mountain of code from similar projects.
      • Filligree 4y ago
        Why do you assume copilot is doing the latter? The training data doesn’t exist at runtime, and if the developers are competent then it only learned a bit or two from each input snippet. So, though even though it’s certainly a highly capable compression algorithm, verbatim copies shouldn’t be… possible. My best guess for this bug is that a lot of already plagiarised the code. AI has a habit of holding up a mirror to humanity. Sometimes we don’t like what we see.
• ddevault 4y ago
  I am a copyright abolitionist and a Copilot critic, and this worldview is not dissonant. An ideal world would not have copyright and would require all software to be free software, but we live in a world where copyright exists. FOSS projects throwing up their hands and saying "forget the licenses" is counter-productive because the commercial world will not throw up their hands and say "forget copyright, do whatever you want with our code". But, at the same time, they will gladly consume FOSS work into their products. The war on copyright has not yet been won, so the weapons cannot be set aside. Addressing this exact premise is the purpose of copyleft licenses like the GPL. I would expect GitHub of all companies to understand this, and it's a spit in the face to disregard it, a spit in the face of the entire FOSS community to which they owe their success. Disclosure: founder of a GitHub competitor
• mathfailure 4y ago
  They aren't the same people. If I post my code somewhere online - that means I had already decided to share my code with the public and I don't give a crap who, how and where uses it and whether they claim ownership or claim to be Napoleon.
• agilob 4y ago
  It's also crazy how MS is defending stealing code, because variables are renamed. Is it ok for us to publish `Window MT` source on GH now?
• bitofhope 4y ago
  I don't think I've seen anyone bring up patents. Those are a different matter altogether. "Copyrighted algorigthm implementations" is a little trickier, since any program code is essentially an "algorithm implementation" so there's a lot of potential nuance where to draw the line on where (if anywhere) a mere algorithm ends and a work with claimable copyright begins, in a moral sense. Most software licenses are not full carte-blanche do-whatever copyright waivers. Sure, it would be hypocritical to get up in arms about copilot emitting CC0/WTFPL/Unlicense code, but comparatively little software is released under such licenses. The GPL (in all its versions) is almost as notable for the specific conditions placed on the freedoms it offers as it is for those freedoms themselves. One possible reason to release your code under GPL is that it you don't want your work used in proprietary developer tools. It doesn't really matter then if the code is used in a proprietary developer tool's training data set instead of its own program code. Even permissive licenses typically come with some conditions attached. If I release a program under MIT license and someone then uses portions of that code in their own project, I expect to see my name and the MIT license included in some way. Perhaps a line in the README, an ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.txt or a comment like // This function taken from quuxifier (https://example.org/software/quux) // ⓒ bitofhope 2022, used under the MIT license. See doc/licenses/MIT or // https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT.html for details. The same, in my opinion, applies if recognizable (for some definition and threshold of recognizable, which can and does get deep into lawyer territory) portions of that code are emitted by a convolution network. If Copilot can write my function, why can't it write my name and choice of license too? Even if you are a full copyright abolitionist, you can still point out the hypocrisy from the opposite side. Github's parent company Microsoft is notoriously protective of its proprietary code and its copyright. The company has historically been explicitly hostile to the free software community and despite its later unilateral declaration of love for open source continues to profit from their proprietary code, including Copilot. If you spend a decade or a few calling open source a cancer and campaigning against it, you can expect that to come bite you in the ass when you later try to sell a neural network trained on a vast corpus of free and open source software.
• account42 4y ago
  Yes? You can be both against copyright in general and against a known copyright abuser ignoring copyright of others when it suits them.
• marcosdumay 4y ago
  It's kinda weird how the same organization that pushes for worldwide copyrights enforcement, and gets plenty of people into courts (on some places asking for jail time) for violating their copyrights is now profiting from violating the copyrights of thousands of people. Or, well, no, "weird" is not the correct name.