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I'd like to stake out the position, which I hope remains within the overton window, as tenable, that "information wants to be free". There was a pretty strong c

I'd like to stake out the position, which I hope remains within the overton window, as tenable, that "information wants to be free". There was a pretty strong contingent of people in the tech world that believed that at one point, though tech has grown to the point that "adults" have stepped in, and lawyers, and big money, etc, etc. I remember using Napster for the first time back in the day. Amazing! All this free music at my fingertips, sharing P2P, so cool. And I thought Aaron Swartz was a hero. More recently, SciHub is one of the greatest things to happen to knowledge sharing ever. Software patents are stupid and cause more harm than they're worth, and everyone hates patent trolls, right? Copyright is just a tool to be abused by Disney's lobbyists. I think the latest tools like Copilot and the stuff Stability AI is releasing fits right in here as amazing tools heralding a new future of exploration and leveling up the power of creators to create. Remixing existing data, maybe copying it, whatever. Obviously, I'm an adult now, and when working for my corporation I have to be diligent about respecting software licenses and getting lawyer clearance for using tools like Copilot and such, but at some level I've got the Mr Anderson vs Neo thing going on in my head and it feels a little bit like we've lost something from the freewheeling days of early tech.

koyanisqatsi 4y ago
If information wants to be free then information belongs to the commons and not corporate entities that obfuscate the real source of value so that they can profit from it. Making code more accessible is great, profiting from it and not giving back to all the folks that made it possible is not. I tried co-pilot and understand why statistical auto-completion based on the efforts of large groups of open source volunteers is useful but if Microsoft wants to charge a fee for the service then they need to respect the licensing terms of the code they are using because without the data set provided by all those volunteers co-pilot (and statistical auto-completion in general) would be impossible.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  > need to respect the licensing terms of the code they are using because without the data set provided by all those volunteers co-pilot (and statistical auto-completion in general) would be impossible. You assume that is even possible. I do not believe that would be possible, at all, at least completely impractical. Copilot would not exist. Also, remember Copilot is from the United States, where we have a thing called "fair use." If a court finds that Copilot is "fair use," copyright and license are completely irrelevant. Cry me a river, it doesn't matter. We already know many things in tech are fair use: - Google v Oracle showed copying API titles was fair use. Even if you copied tens of thousands of them, for the near entirety of Java. Also see ReactOS, which clones the Windows API; and Linux, which cloned the UNIX API. Imagine how Microsoft and the UNIX vendors felt - but it did not matter. - Just because John Goodall had `AddTwoNumbers(int x, int y)` implemented as `return x + y;" back in 1981 doesn't mean you can't too. Even if you read his work. There is a degree of copying that is legal, despite copyright or potential infringement, that is decided in courts on a case-by-case basis when someone complains. - And finally... even if it regurgitates proprietary code once in a while, that does not make a service de-facto illegal. See YouTube. Just because someone gets clearly copyrighted material (such as an entire movie) on there doesn't make YouTube illegal if YouTube takes it down and tries to prevent it from occurring. If GitHub argues the same, that they try to prevent large regurgitations in good faith, and remove complained-about regurgitations on request, the odds of the court shutting Copilot down approach 0%.
  - koyanisqatsi 4y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding the point here. The point is that co-pilot is not "fair use". Co-pilot can not exist without ingesting entire codebases to encode their aggregate statistics which Microsoft then uses to recommend auto-completions. So what you're arguing is untenable, co-pilot does not just ingest the header files for some C library and then somehow magically provides the function implementations, it literally copies and statistically obfuscates the entire codebase (headers and all). This is obviously not "fair use". The equivalent argument here is homomorphically encrypting an entire codebase and searching through it for matching snippets and not attributing credit to the original code/source. This is essentially what co-pilot is doing but using AI hype as a cover.
    - gjsman-1000 4y ago
      It's not obvious to a court, at all. Two (edit: three) significant arguments against it being obvious: 1. What do our human brains do? How is that different from how a human brain may function? Our brains take large amounts of information, from all sorts of places, and boil it down just as Copilot tries to do. 2. According to courts, website scraping is completely legal and "fair use." Even if you scrape 200,000 profiles. How is this not different than website scraping, but with code? I expect that argument to also come up. And if it isn't quite the same, consider the legal arguments that allowed website scraping to pass as "fair use" - they will likely apply. Edit: 3. Currently, ingesting large amounts of material, for the purposes of creating an AI-generated result, is considered legal, even if there aren't many cases. This is also how Stability AI, DALL-E, and others exist. Courts always loathe to shut down fledging industries because it makes them look political. Odds of success overturning that principle outright? I'd give it less than 10%. In a nutshell, legally, it is not obvious. Edit @belorn (stupid posting too fast limit): There is actually a difference. YouTube uses a "rolling key" scheme, which actually qualifies as a DMCA "technical protection measure" under some courts. In which case, pardon a narrow exception granted by the Library of Congress every 3 years (say, for news reporting), your dataset would be illegally obtained - for bypassing DRM. A really, really weak DRM, but courts don't care about strength when determining these things. Which is why it isn't OK. However, if YouTube didn't do that, you actually would, under current law, be OK with training a model against YouTube whether YouTube liked it or not. Code on GitHub does not have any TPMs on it, so it is legal to obtain, and thus legal for training.
lofatdairy 4y ago
Interestingly enough, I think a lot of the complaints were from authors of copyleft code. For them, Copilot doesn't do enough to ensure that their code will be perpetually open and attributed (it definitely doesn't do anything for attribution), since it doesn't attach a GPL license if it draws of GPL code. FWIW I completely agree with regards to copyrighted code, I think there's definitely an argument to be made against intellectual property rights and laws as they currently are, but I'm not qualified to make those arguments.
- zero_comp 4y ago
  Consider this: > [Microsoft] doesn't attach a GPL license if it draws of GPL code. It's been a routine practice by developers in industry, for at least a decade, to go read an implementation of a GPL thing, then "rewrite" it in "C#" or "Swift" or "Go", and diligently not tell anyone, and that's it, the GPL code was whitewashed. GPL has been effective at preventing a specific kind of commercial productization of a specific codebase. Given how influential GPL protected code really is, it failed to prevent Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft from copying GPL code unattributed in all the ways that actually matter. Copilot is distilling big corporate programming culture. Copying ("rewriting") code found online, let alone in complete implementations, isn't something I do anymore, maybe for years, in my daily software engineering practice. But copying is essential to big corporate programming as trackpants, oily hair and working 1 day a week.
  - lofatdairy 4y ago
    Well, I mean I don't disagree that GPL is not that well enforced[^1], but it still doesn't make that a good thing. Yeah, Copilot wonton disregard for GPL is maybe a symptom of corporate culture, but I think the impact of that connect you draw is that this makes holding Copilot and MS accountable all the more important, since there's a potential precedent being set now. [^1]: Probably, I only know about the French court case a few years back and I recall there being a bit of nuance in what the actual implications were.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    Authors read books to learn and then go on to reuse the same words and ideas. That doesn't mean an author that exactly rips off other authors isn't in violation of copyright.
warent 4y ago
I largely agree with you. The problem is that huge organizations are apparently the only ones magically allowed to do stuff like this. Normal people and small businesses get completely demolished by DMCA takedowns etc which often times are completely abusive, but yet go entirely unreviewed. Because fuck those dumb, money thieving criminals. But if it's Google or Github doing the thing, it's suddenly an act of brilliance and they're above these plebian rules. Disgusting
- arh68 4y ago
  Right. It just seems like a matter of time before MS strikes / takes down someone's original code for "infringing" upon Copilot output. Seems like above a certain size, stealing becomes a great business strategy.
AlexandrB 4y ago
The phrase is "information wants to be free", not "information wants to be $10/month". If this was an FOSS project anyone could access freely I would have much less of a problem with it.
- tzs 4y ago
  > The phrase is "information wants to be free", not "information wants to be $10/month" Actually it is kind of both. The full phrase was "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away", from Stewart Brand's "The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT". That was a more succinct expression of something he said earlier to Steve Wozniak at a conference: > On the one hand you have — the point you’re making Woz — is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.
  - iostream25 4y ago
    So, it's not Microsofts information they are selling for $10/month. They are wholesale ripping it, sans attribution and sans licenses, IN VIOLATION OF LAW on an industrial scale. It surely must be stopped and punished, or no license will ever be respected again. MS is taking OTHER PEOPLES CODE and using it ways those people explicitly do not allow and putting it in a walled-garden tool for paid access: license violation as a service.
- klyrs 4y ago
  If it was a FOSS project, they probably wouldn't be inclined to strip licenses out wholesale. If there was a way to get Copilot to emit proper attribution, the issue would be moot.
rumpelstinkin 4y ago
information doesn't "want" anything... let's not forget that what matters is people. Copyright today is grossly abused by corps, but it was created for good reason, as plenty of authors and artists went bankrupt because of piracy before copyright law was created (example: Alessandro Manzoni, father of the modern Italian language). Copyright will be eliminated after money will be eliminated and everyone will get equal access to a decent basic living.
pessimizer 4y ago
> I think the latest tools like Copilot and the stuff Stability AI is releasing fits right in here as amazing tools heralding a new future of exploration and leveling up the power of creators to create. Remixing existing data, maybe copying it, whatever. I agree with this, but information seems only to be free for very large players, while it's still very expensive for small/medium-sized players and individuals. It's an absolute inversion of the nominal purpose and justification of copyright if it only protects the strong from the weak.
iostream25 4y ago
My, how odd that copilot wants to "liberate" other peoples code from attribution, licenses, the project it was ripped from... How curious that copilot doesn't ripoff Microsoft Windows or Office code... Spare us the astroturfed ideals. You are not one of "us", Microsoft PR person. You sound like a Russian diplomat defending the indefensible.
minraws 4y ago
I know a guy who got sued by his previous employer because he made something open-source he had been working on free time and had been kind enough to use that in for the company as well. Because they want their name attached to it, and don't want its copyright held by him. I could be wrong but it's double standards unless something like this applies other way around as well. I should be able to sue and bring down a company I don't want using my code under shitty licenses by using say GPL, so that they have to make their own code OSS as well if they use my work. I want to be able to sue them to the ground, if they can sue me and my friends to the ground on a bullshit whim.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  That guy was naive, and he's learned a lesson about the world. Always get it in writing if you decide to do something like this.

koyanisqatsi 4y ago

If information wants to be free then information belongs to the commons and not corporate entities that obfuscate the real source of value so that they can profit from it. Making code more accessible is great, profiting from it and not giving back to all the folks that made it possible is not. I tried co-pilot and understand why statistical auto-completion based on the efforts of large groups of open source volunteers is useful but if Microsoft wants to charge a fee for the service then they need to respect the licensing terms of the code they are using because without the data set provided by all those volunteers co-pilot (and statistical auto-completion in general) would be impossible.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
> need to respect the licensing terms of the code they are using because without the data set provided by all those volunteers co-pilot (and statistical auto-completion in general) would be impossible. You assume that is even possible. I do not believe that would be possible, at all, at least completely impractical. Copilot would not exist. Also, remember Copilot is from the United States, where we have a thing called "fair use." If a court finds that Copilot is "fair use," copyright and license are completely irrelevant. Cry me a river, it doesn't matter. We already know many things in tech are fair use: - Google v Oracle showed copying API titles was fair use. Even if you copied tens of thousands of them, for the near entirety of Java. Also see ReactOS, which clones the Windows API; and Linux, which cloned the UNIX API. Imagine how Microsoft and the UNIX vendors felt - but it did not matter. - Just because John Goodall had `AddTwoNumbers(int x, int y)` implemented as `return x + y;" back in 1981 doesn't mean you can't too. Even if you read his work. There is a degree of copying that is legal, despite copyright or potential infringement, that is decided in courts on a case-by-case basis when someone complains. - And finally... even if it regurgitates proprietary code once in a while, that does not make a service de-facto illegal. See YouTube. Just because someone gets clearly copyrighted material (such as an entire movie) on there doesn't make YouTube illegal if YouTube takes it down and tries to prevent it from occurring. If GitHub argues the same, that they try to prevent large regurgitations in good faith, and remove complained-about regurgitations on request, the odds of the court shutting Copilot down approach 0%.
- koyanisqatsi 4y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding the point here. The point is that co-pilot is not "fair use". Co-pilot can not exist without ingesting entire codebases to encode their aggregate statistics which Microsoft then uses to recommend auto-completions. So what you're arguing is untenable, co-pilot does not just ingest the header files for some C library and then somehow magically provides the function implementations, it literally copies and statistically obfuscates the entire codebase (headers and all). This is obviously not "fair use". The equivalent argument here is homomorphically encrypting an entire codebase and searching through it for matching snippets and not attributing credit to the original code/source. This is essentially what co-pilot is doing but using AI hype as a cover.
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    It's not obvious to a court, at all. Two (edit: three) significant arguments against it being obvious: 1. What do our human brains do? How is that different from how a human brain may function? Our brains take large amounts of information, from all sorts of places, and boil it down just as Copilot tries to do. 2. According to courts, website scraping is completely legal and "fair use." Even if you scrape 200,000 profiles. How is this not different than website scraping, but with code? I expect that argument to also come up. And if it isn't quite the same, consider the legal arguments that allowed website scraping to pass as "fair use" - they will likely apply. Edit: 3. Currently, ingesting large amounts of material, for the purposes of creating an AI-generated result, is considered legal, even if there aren't many cases. This is also how Stability AI, DALL-E, and others exist. Courts always loathe to shut down fledging industries because it makes them look political. Odds of success overturning that principle outright? I'd give it less than 10%. In a nutshell, legally, it is not obvious. Edit @belorn (stupid posting too fast limit): There is actually a difference. YouTube uses a "rolling key" scheme, which actually qualifies as a DMCA "technical protection measure" under some courts. In which case, pardon a narrow exception granted by the Library of Congress every 3 years (say, for news reporting), your dataset would be illegally obtained - for bypassing DRM. A really, really weak DRM, but courts don't care about strength when determining these things. Which is why it isn't OK. However, if YouTube didn't do that, you actually would, under current law, be OK with training a model against YouTube whether YouTube liked it or not. Code on GitHub does not have any TPMs on it, so it is legal to obtain, and thus legal for training.

lofatdairy 4y ago

Interestingly enough, I think a lot of the complaints were from authors of copyleft code. For them, Copilot doesn't do enough to ensure that their code will be perpetually open and attributed (it definitely doesn't do anything for attribution), since it doesn't attach a GPL license if it draws of GPL code. FWIW I completely agree with regards to copyrighted code, I think there's definitely an argument to be made against intellectual property rights and laws as they currently are, but I'm not qualified to make those arguments.

zero_comp 4y ago
Consider this: > [Microsoft] doesn't attach a GPL license if it draws of GPL code. It's been a routine practice by developers in industry, for at least a decade, to go read an implementation of a GPL thing, then "rewrite" it in "C#" or "Swift" or "Go", and diligently not tell anyone, and that's it, the GPL code was whitewashed. GPL has been effective at preventing a specific kind of commercial productization of a specific codebase. Given how influential GPL protected code really is, it failed to prevent Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft from copying GPL code unattributed in all the ways that actually matter. Copilot is distilling big corporate programming culture. Copying ("rewriting") code found online, let alone in complete implementations, isn't something I do anymore, maybe for years, in my daily software engineering practice. But copying is essential to big corporate programming as trackpants, oily hair and working 1 day a week.
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  Well, I mean I don't disagree that GPL is not that well enforced[^1], but it still doesn't make that a good thing. Yeah, Copilot wonton disregard for GPL is maybe a symptom of corporate culture, but I think the impact of that connect you draw is that this makes holding Copilot and MS accountable all the more important, since there's a potential precedent being set now. [^1]: Probably, I only know about the French court case a few years back and I recall there being a bit of nuance in what the actual implications were.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  Authors read books to learn and then go on to reuse the same words and ideas. That doesn't mean an author that exactly rips off other authors isn't in violation of copyright.

warent 4y ago

I largely agree with you. The problem is that huge organizations are apparently the only ones magically allowed to do stuff like this. Normal people and small businesses get completely demolished by DMCA takedowns etc which often times are completely abusive, but yet go entirely unreviewed. Because fuck those dumb, money thieving criminals. But if it's Google or Github doing the thing, it's suddenly an act of brilliance and they're above these plebian rules. Disgusting

arh68 4y ago
Right. It just seems like a matter of time before MS strikes / takes down someone's original code for "infringing" upon Copilot output. Seems like above a certain size, stealing becomes a great business strategy.

AlexandrB 4y ago

The phrase is "information wants to be free", not "information wants to be $10/month". If this was an FOSS project anyone could access freely I would have much less of a problem with it.

tzs 4y ago
> The phrase is "information wants to be free", not "information wants to be $10/month" Actually it is kind of both. The full phrase was "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away", from Stewart Brand's "The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT". That was a more succinct expression of something he said earlier to Steve Wozniak at a conference: > On the one hand you have — the point you’re making Woz — is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.
- iostream25 4y ago
  So, it's not Microsofts information they are selling for $10/month. They are wholesale ripping it, sans attribution and sans licenses, IN VIOLATION OF LAW on an industrial scale. It surely must be stopped and punished, or no license will ever be respected again. MS is taking OTHER PEOPLES CODE and using it ways those people explicitly do not allow and putting it in a walled-garden tool for paid access: license violation as a service.
klyrs 4y ago
If it was a FOSS project, they probably wouldn't be inclined to strip licenses out wholesale. If there was a way to get Copilot to emit proper attribution, the issue would be moot.

rumpelstinkin 4y ago

information doesn't "want" anything... let's not forget that what matters is people. Copyright today is grossly abused by corps, but it was created for good reason, as plenty of authors and artists went bankrupt because of piracy before copyright law was created (example: Alessandro Manzoni, father of the modern Italian language). Copyright will be eliminated after money will be eliminated and everyone will get equal access to a decent basic living.

pessimizer 4y ago

> I think the latest tools like Copilot and the stuff Stability AI is releasing fits right in here as amazing tools heralding a new future of exploration and leveling up the power of creators to create. Remixing existing data, maybe copying it, whatever. I agree with this, but information seems only to be free for very large players, while it's still very expensive for small/medium-sized players and individuals. It's an absolute inversion of the nominal purpose and justification of copyright if it only protects the strong from the weak.

iostream25 4y ago

My, how odd that copilot wants to "liberate" other peoples code from attribution, licenses, the project it was ripped from... How curious that copilot doesn't ripoff Microsoft Windows or Office code... Spare us the astroturfed ideals. You are not one of "us", Microsoft PR person. You sound like a Russian diplomat defending the indefensible.

minraws 4y ago

I know a guy who got sued by his previous employer because he made something open-source he had been working on free time and had been kind enough to use that in for the company as well. Because they want their name attached to it, and don't want its copyright held by him. I could be wrong but it's double standards unless something like this applies other way around as well. I should be able to sue and bring down a company I don't want using my code under shitty licenses by using say GPL, so that they have to make their own code OSS as well if they use my work. I want to be able to sue them to the ground, if they can sue me and my friends to the ground on a bullshit whim.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
That guy was naive, and he's learned a lesson about the world. Always get it in writing if you decide to do something like this.