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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 prof

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.

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.