5 ms·

I am sorry for not bringing any kind of legal perspective here, but: Jesus Christ, I hope I live long enough to see copyright die. Here we are at the cusp of

I am sorry for not bringing any kind of legal perspective here, but: *Jesus Christ*, I hope I live long enough to see copyright die. Here we are at the cusp of a new paradigm of commanding computers to do stuff for us, right at the beginning of the first AI development which actually impresses me. And we are fucking bickering about how we were cheated out of $0.00034 because our repo from 2015 might have been used for training. I am also deeply disappointed in HackerNews; where is that deep hatred of patent trolls and smug satisfaction whenever something gets cracked or pirated now?

pjfin123 4y ago
Copyright needs to be largely abolished. This is ridiculous; we created A is that can program themselves and people are worried about incidental copyright infringement.
obiefernandez 4y ago
Amen. This lawsuit is sickening me at a “fuck this entire industry” magnitude.
- chillfox 4y ago
  The general attitude of AI researchers/developers is fuck as many other industries as possible, they generally don't care about consent at all. So it's hardly surprising that someone eventually decides to challenge that.
Guid_NewGuid 4y ago
Yes, the passion to defend copyright trolling for isEven functions (an example included in the filing) from people here is bizarre. I can't decide if people just hate Microsoft enough that a future where you must pay to include an iseven function in your code is a price worth paying to give them a bloody nose, or there are just a large contingent of users making millions off their GPL code who are put out. More seriously yes, copilot damages copyright (or is perceived to) and that is a good outcome irrespective of the actor. I will never see eye to eye with people defending the existing legal framework.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  The idea that using copilot "damages" copyright seems ill-considered. Suppose a commercial software company just took GPL-licensed software and openly incorporated into their own code and then sold. Would that "damage" copyright also? Remember, there's no legal principle that says "if we catch violating copyright, your stuff is now free". The copyright holder can sue for damages or to stop distribution and that's it. People like Larry Ellison of Oracle have claimed they just steal GPL'd stuff 'cause it there. But Oracle defends it's copyrighted code very aggressively. Oppositely, the GPL is intended to allow more open access than public domain in a time where commercial companies want to take anything they can get.
franciscop 4y ago
I am only slightly hopeful for a lawsuit so that it loses spectacularly and sets a precedent that this is legal; however I don't trust the legal system enough to think they'll logically reach that conclusion. My code is 100% in Github Pilot, is there any way to publicly say that I'm against the lawsuit even if they pretend to represent me?
- BenjiWiebe 4y ago
  If you'd license or relicense all your code to explicitly allow AI training without attribution on it, I would see that as you saying you're in favor of copilot here.
pelagicAustral 4y ago
I stand behind you on this one. I just hope they fail spectacularly at their attempt to hinder innovation.
throwaway675309 4y ago
Agreed. My only consolation is that as the technology improves and it becomes easier to train these types of models on modest hardware at home, the detractors of this technology have already lost, but rather than a mercy killing they prefer to bleed out slowly.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
MarcellusDrum 4y ago
I'm one of those who are against copyrights, but fully support this movement, for 2 reasons: 1) If Github Copilot is a free software liscensed under GPL, I'm all for it. Microsoft is using other's collective hard labour to benefit itself. 2) Its Microsoft. The king of dark patterns, monopolization, and the enemy of software freedom. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
D13Fd 4y ago
Wow, thank you. This is exactly right. The entire response to this suit on this site is mind-blowing to me. Everyone is up in arms that someone trained an AI model that could potentially spit out tiny, twisted fragments of public, open-source code. This response is nothing but selfish behavior that runs counter to the core principles of open source development and the free software movement.
- chlorion 4y ago
  It's selfish to want people to abide by the license I released my project under? That's pure nonsense.
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    Your code is protected by copyright. The license allows for what would otherwise be copyright infringement. But training an AI model on media (code or otherwise) is not copyright infringement, so the license is irrelevant. It's selfish to pretend otherwise and to try to assert a copyright right that doesn't exist, for the purpose of impeding progress in a field that benefits us all.
    - chlorion 4y ago
      Here is a snippet of things that copyright is intended to cover: >the right to exclude others from making certain uses of the work: copying it, making a derivative work based on that work, distributing copies of the work to the public, and publicly performing or displaying the work. So why would "training" "AI" on code with the intention of emitting derived works not be copyright infringement exactly? This product is transforming copyrighted code into something that's intended to be used or sold in other works. The snippets it emits are directly derived from copyrighted code. The most common argument against this is that humans also learn from copyrighted material. My argument against this is that CoPilot is not a human and should not be assumed to inherit rules intended for humans. >in a field that benefits us all As it stands currently CoPilot is proprietary and does not benefit anyone except for MicroSoft. If CoPilot was released under a FOSS license it would actually benefit us all. Most of the people against CoPilot are not against AI, but rather a proprietary AI product transforming FOSS work into other potentially proprietary works with the intention of profiting off of the completion service and hoarding the code that powers it.
RunSet 4y ago
> And we are fucking bickering about how we were cheated out of $0.00034 because our repo from 2015 might have been used for training. I just hope Microsoft AutoPlagiarist is not the Final Solution to Free Software they have been seeking since before the millennium's turn. Seems to me this discussion is likely to pivot on a fulcrum located between "old enough to remember Microsoft before Bill Gates began spending his ill-gotten gains on philanthropy" and "young enough to see Microsoft primarily as the Xbox people".
trention 4y ago
>where is that deep hatred of patent trolls Is it patent trolling when you are defending your future labor from being made obsolete by megacorps and signularitarians using your past labor without permission? No, it's justice.
an1sotropy 4y ago
You haven’t actually thought through what kind of world it would be if there was no copyright law, have you? I don’t know what your political leanings are, but I’ve met some libertarians who are blissfully naive about the extent to which their world and worldview is buttressed by laws and the governments that enforce them, and your comment reminds me of that.
- Filligree 4y ago
  I'm game. What terrible outcome will we see from a lack of copyright law?
  - anikom15 4y ago
    Someone with more money and more resources than you profiting off your work.
    - account42 4y ago
      So same as with copyright then.
    - blackbrokkoli 4y ago
      Fair theoretical point. Please do name one industry, niche or platform where copyright does actually prevent this from happening in any meaningful way today.
      - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
        use of GPL code in a subset (obviously not all) of proprietary software
      - anikom15 4y ago
        No. I’m not the one arguing for the system to change. It’s up to you to explain how my hypothetical scenario wouldn’t exist in a copyright-free world.
  - 4y ago
chillfox 4y ago
I don't think this is really about the money at all. To me, it looks like this is about consent.
erezsh 4y ago
The only thing worse than not having AI, is having all AI owned by a small group of people.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
truetraveller 4y ago
Nope. It's about a fairness. Until Microsoft/Google/Apple/BigCorp all release their software/designs/maps, count me in favor of copyright for the small guy. And I'm someone who especially hates copyright/patents.
joe_the_user 4y ago
1) This "copilot is great 'cause copyright is evil" argument breaks when you look at the fact that copilot is copyrighted, closed software tool for producing closed, copyrighted software. If you trained copilot on GPL'd software and specified that copilot's output was also GPL'd maybe you'd have some reasonable claim (but even then, the attribution claim would come in). 2) So far, these tools are "better search" schemes, not actual intelligence. Sure, many find them very useful. But given this, the (voluntary or involuntary) providers of data ought to get credit/benefit for/from this phenomena, along with the tool creators. Especially giving the current situation is Microsoft/OpenAI selling to commercial software developers who sell to general public.
- solomatov 4y ago
  >2) So far, these tools are "better search" schemes, not actual intelligence. Sure, many find them very useful. But given this, the (voluntary or involuntary) providers of data ought to get credit/benefit for/from this phenomena, along with the tool creators. Especially giving the current situation is Microsoft/OpenAI selling to commercial software developers who sell to general public. What they are good at is predicting what's after the text. The problem of predicting what's next could be used to create a universal artificial intelligence (there's a mathematical definition for this). I.e. if you have a system which is very good at predicting what's next, you could get to very powerful AI. If you are interested, you could read about it here: http://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm http://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    What they are good at is predicting what's after the text. The problem of predicting what's next could be used to create a universal artificial intelligence (there's a mathematical definition for this). I.e. if you have a system which is very good at predicting what's next, you could get to very powerful AI. The intelligence of human beings isn't unspecifically good "predicting what's next" but rather is good at particular sorts of predictions in particular contexts, often involving the person having helped create the situation. I'm fairly safe at driving because I maintain an arrange of my vehicle in a fashion that allows me to predict easily what's next as well as allowing me to adjust if my predictions are wrong. Self-driving software might predict what's next as well as me in normal circumstances but it's neither aware of larger context nor does it things to maintain "smooth traffic flow". Opposite, being able to predict anything generically would certainly be limitless intelligence but you can't describe any system with just that. Copilot is trained with a certain window, with the transforms special element giving more context but I don't think very many people doing current research expects that become generic prediction. I think I'm describing the consensus that it's a "better Google" for finding code one can use - and Google is a pretty good resource for this - if you aren't doing something unusual or difficult. Jeff Hawking also makes "prediction is intelligence" claim but I think your and his approach misses that human intelligence is good not by being generic but doing more specific things.
commoner 4y ago
On piracy, HN users defend Sci-Hub to protest against the academic publishing industry, which involves large corporations such as Elsevier charging publishing and subscription fees that are much more than the value that these corporations bring to the actual research, review, and publication. Academics need to publish in order to survive, and they individually do not have enough power to subvert the existing academic publishing system. Since academics do not receive royalties, Sci-Hub enables academics to pay less into the same system that exploits them for profit. By supporting Sci-Hub, HN users take a populist stance by supporting individuals against the system. The situation with Microsoft and Copilot is the exact opposite. Here, Microsoft is misusing its acquisition of GitHub to repackage the work of individual free and open source contributors into a proprietary product in violation of the authors' software licenses. These licenses do not even require Microsoft to pay. They only require attribution and redistribution under a compatible license. Supporting Microsoft's misuse of GitHub is an anti-populist stance that puts the interests of the corporation over the interests of the individuals.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  The argument for libgen is that whatever damage there is to the authors missing out on revenues is outweighed by people being able to get books that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford (especially in developing countries). In the case of copilot, the damage suffered by the authors is close to zero. And those who benefit the most are the authors themselves. A double digit percent productivity enhancement is worth more to me than a few million $ to a trillion dollar company, especially because MS has to pay for compute.
  - commoner 4y ago
    You're assuming that Microsoft needs to shut down Copilot to comply with the licenses of the software they misused. That is not the case. To make Copilot legitimate, all Microsoft has to do is restrict Copilot's inputs to non-proprietary code, release the Copilot dataset under a compatible license, and clarify that the code generated by Copilot is also covered under that license. Attribution can be done by inserting a comment with link to a paginated list of all of the contributors whose code was used in Copilot. Microsoft can even continue to sell Copilot as a service while keeping it license-compliant, since most developers are not going to self-host the entire dataset. Microsoft can also choose to exclude copyleft-licensed code from Copilot or create multiple flavors of Copilot, each licensed differently. You can get your "productivity enhancement" without needing Microsoft to violate software licenses. The damage is not in the monetary payment denied to free and open source software contributors, payment these contributors never demanded. The damage is in Microsoft violating other people's software licenses to create a proprietary product derived from copyleft-licensed and attribution-required code, and in Microsoft encouraging other developers to violate these licenses. Microsoft needs to rectify these violations with specific performance.
chlorion 4y ago
Nobody wants to completely ban AI or training. You can have progress in this area and still respect people's intellectual property. Framing this as destroying progress is silly. Why can't they train on the code they own, such as Windows sources for example? Or even better, why can't they release CoPilot itself under an open source license that is compatible with the licenses of code they would like to train on? Also, I don't think anyone cares about the monetary aspects. The idea behind the GPL style license is to make sure that code remains free, regardless of what or who uses it. Freedom in this context refers to the ability study the code, modify the code, and distribute any modifications. Without the GPL the code can be used in a proprietary product which strips those rights away from users of the product. Copeleft uses copyright laws to attempt to guarantee freedom for users. This is the inverse of what normal copyright does, which is allow a single entity to sit on the ideas and not allow other's to benefit from them. If we can just strip copyleft licenses from projects, we are giving up those guarantees that GPL code will remain free for all users. The GPL is trying to do it's job here, not slow down progress. Progress would be everyone benefiting from the technology behind CoPilot, rather than just MicroSoft sitting on the project and selling it as a service.
matjet 4y ago
Patent trolls that are hated look like: You develop package to do X from first principles, then get sued because someone patented using a known algorithm for the purpose of X. Copyright working in a supported/non hated way: You develop a package to do X by cribbing off someone else's package X. They sue you for stealing their work, not to make money off you. Situation at hand is case 2, hence the lack of interest in financial gain. Why is this case 2, when it does not always reproduce the copyrighted works exactly? Situation: You realise that rather than cribbing off of one persons package X, you can crib off two other package X's and mix/average their contents. Scale this to 100's of packages. Eventually, ML should avoid this by developing to work from first principles, writing in it's own style, with public code used only for validation of it's ability to understand and write code.
fsflover 4y ago
> I hope I live long enough to see copyright die. I actually agree. However this is not what's happening here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463800
az226 4y ago
Not just copyright, what Copilot does it fair use. If Google taking tens of thousands of lines directly and gets away with it, it's going to be impossible to see any logic that gets AI being trained on millions of lines of code, not being fair use for any individual open source copyright holder.

I am sorry for not bringing any kind of legal perspective here, but: *Jesus Christ*, I hope I live long enough to see copyright die. Here we are at the cusp of

pjfin123 4y ago

Copyright needs to be largely abolished. This is ridiculous; we created A is that can program themselves and people are worried about incidental copyright infringement.

obiefernandez 4y ago

Amen. This lawsuit is sickening me at a “fuck this entire industry” magnitude.

chillfox 4y ago
The general attitude of AI researchers/developers is fuck as many other industries as possible, they generally don't care about consent at all. So it's hardly surprising that someone eventually decides to challenge that.

Guid_NewGuid 4y ago

Yes, the passion to defend copyright trolling for isEven functions (an example included in the filing) from people here is bizarre. I can't decide if people just hate Microsoft enough that a future where you must pay to include an iseven function in your code is a price worth paying to give them a bloody nose, or there are just a large contingent of users making millions off their GPL code who are put out. More seriously yes, copilot damages copyright (or is perceived to) and that is a good outcome irrespective of the actor. I will never see eye to eye with people defending the existing legal framework.

joe_the_user 4y ago
The idea that using copilot "damages" copyright seems ill-considered. Suppose a commercial software company just took GPL-licensed software and openly incorporated into their own code and then sold. Would that "damage" copyright also? Remember, there's no legal principle that says "if we catch violating copyright, your stuff is now free". The copyright holder can sue for damages or to stop distribution and that's it. People like Larry Ellison of Oracle have claimed they just steal GPL'd stuff 'cause it there. But Oracle defends it's copyrighted code very aggressively. Oppositely, the GPL is intended to allow more open access than public domain in a time where commercial companies want to take anything they can get.

franciscop 4y ago

I am only slightly hopeful for a lawsuit so that it loses spectacularly and sets a precedent that this is legal; however I don't trust the legal system enough to think they'll logically reach that conclusion. My code is 100% in Github Pilot, is there any way to publicly say that I'm against the lawsuit even if they pretend to represent me?

BenjiWiebe 4y ago
If you'd license or relicense all your code to explicitly allow AI training without attribution on it, I would see that as you saying you're in favor of copilot here.

pelagicAustral 4y ago

I stand behind you on this one. I just hope they fail spectacularly at their attempt to hinder innovation.

throwaway675309 4y ago

Agreed. My only consolation is that as the technology improves and it becomes easier to train these types of models on modest hardware at home, the detractors of this technology have already lost, but rather than a mercy killing they prefer to bleed out slowly.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

MarcellusDrum 4y ago

I'm one of those who are against copyrights, but fully support this movement, for 2 reasons: 1) If Github Copilot is a free software liscensed under GPL, I'm all for it. Microsoft is using other's collective hard labour to benefit itself. 2) Its Microsoft. The king of dark patterns, monopolization, and the enemy of software freedom. They can't have their cake and eat it too.

D13Fd 4y ago

Wow, thank you. This is exactly right. The entire response to this suit on this site is mind-blowing to me. Everyone is up in arms that someone trained an AI model that could potentially spit out tiny, twisted fragments of public, open-source code. This response is nothing but selfish behavior that runs counter to the core principles of open source development and the free software movement.

chlorion 4y ago
It's selfish to want people to abide by the license I released my project under? That's pure nonsense.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  Your code is protected by copyright. The license allows for what would otherwise be copyright infringement. But training an AI model on media (code or otherwise) is not copyright infringement, so the license is irrelevant. It's selfish to pretend otherwise and to try to assert a copyright right that doesn't exist, for the purpose of impeding progress in a field that benefits us all.
  - chlorion 4y ago
    Here is a snippet of things that copyright is intended to cover: >the right to exclude others from making certain uses of the work: copying it, making a derivative work based on that work, distributing copies of the work to the public, and publicly performing or displaying the work. So why would "training" "AI" on code with the intention of emitting derived works not be copyright infringement exactly? This product is transforming copyrighted code into something that's intended to be used or sold in other works. The snippets it emits are directly derived from copyrighted code. The most common argument against this is that humans also learn from copyrighted material. My argument against this is that CoPilot is not a human and should not be assumed to inherit rules intended for humans. >in a field that benefits us all As it stands currently CoPilot is proprietary and does not benefit anyone except for MicroSoft. If CoPilot was released under a FOSS license it would actually benefit us all. Most of the people against CoPilot are not against AI, but rather a proprietary AI product transforming FOSS work into other potentially proprietary works with the intention of profiting off of the completion service and hoarding the code that powers it.

RunSet 4y ago

> And we are fucking bickering about how we were cheated out of $0.00034 because our repo from 2015 might have been used for training. I just hope Microsoft AutoPlagiarist is not the Final Solution to Free Software they have been seeking since before the millennium's turn. Seems to me this discussion is likely to pivot on a fulcrum located between "old enough to remember Microsoft before Bill Gates began spending his ill-gotten gains on philanthropy" and "young enough to see Microsoft primarily as the Xbox people".

trention 4y ago

>where is that deep hatred of patent trolls Is it patent trolling when you are defending your future labor from being made obsolete by megacorps and signularitarians using your past labor without permission? No, it's justice.

an1sotropy 4y ago

You haven’t actually thought through what kind of world it would be if there was no copyright law, have you? I don’t know what your political leanings are, but I’ve met some libertarians who are blissfully naive about the extent to which their world and worldview is buttressed by laws and the governments that enforce them, and your comment reminds me of that.

Filligree 4y ago
I'm game. What terrible outcome will we see from a lack of copyright law?
- anikom15 4y ago
  Someone with more money and more resources than you profiting off your work.
  - account42 4y ago
    So same as with copyright then.
  - blackbrokkoli 4y ago
    Fair theoretical point. Please do name one industry, niche or platform where copyright does actually prevent this from happening in any meaningful way today.
    - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
      use of GPL code in a subset (obviously not all) of proprietary software
    - anikom15 4y ago
      No. I’m not the one arguing for the system to change. It’s up to you to explain how my hypothetical scenario wouldn’t exist in a copyright-free world.
- 4y ago

chillfox 4y ago

I don't think this is really about the money at all. To me, it looks like this is about consent.

erezsh 4y ago

The only thing worse than not having AI, is having all AI owned by a small group of people.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

truetraveller 4y ago

Nope. It's about a fairness. Until Microsoft/Google/Apple/BigCorp all release their software/designs/maps, count me in favor of copyright for the small guy. And I'm someone who especially hates copyright/patents.

joe_the_user 4y ago

1) This "copilot is great 'cause copyright is evil" argument breaks when you look at the fact that copilot is copyrighted, closed software tool for producing closed, copyrighted software. If you trained copilot on GPL'd software and specified that copilot's output was also GPL'd maybe you'd have some reasonable claim (but even then, the attribution claim would come in). 2) So far, these tools are "better search" schemes, not actual intelligence. Sure, many find them very useful. But given this, the (voluntary or involuntary) providers of data ought to get credit/benefit for/from this phenomena, along with the tool creators. Especially giving the current situation is Microsoft/OpenAI selling to commercial software developers who sell to general public.

solomatov 4y ago
>2) So far, these tools are "better search" schemes, not actual intelligence. Sure, many find them very useful. But given this, the (voluntary or involuntary) providers of data ought to get credit/benefit for/from this phenomena, along with the tool creators. Especially giving the current situation is Microsoft/OpenAI selling to commercial software developers who sell to general public. What they are good at is predicting what's after the text. The problem of predicting what's next could be used to create a universal artificial intelligence (there's a mathematical definition for this). I.e. if you have a system which is very good at predicting what's next, you could get to very powerful AI. If you are interested, you could read about it here: http://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm http://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  What they are good at is predicting what's after the text. The problem of predicting what's next could be used to create a universal artificial intelligence (there's a mathematical definition for this). I.e. if you have a system which is very good at predicting what's next, you could get to very powerful AI. The intelligence of human beings isn't unspecifically good "predicting what's next" but rather is good at particular sorts of predictions in particular contexts, often involving the person having helped create the situation. I'm fairly safe at driving because I maintain an arrange of my vehicle in a fashion that allows me to predict easily what's next as well as allowing me to adjust if my predictions are wrong. Self-driving software might predict what's next as well as me in normal circumstances but it's neither aware of larger context nor does it things to maintain "smooth traffic flow". Opposite, being able to predict anything generically would certainly be limitless intelligence but you can't describe any system with just that. Copilot is trained with a certain window, with the transforms special element giving more context but I don't think very many people doing current research expects that become generic prediction. I think I'm describing the consensus that it's a "better Google" for finding code one can use - and Google is a pretty good resource for this - if you aren't doing something unusual or difficult. Jeff Hawking also makes "prediction is intelligence" claim but I think your and his approach misses that human intelligence is good not by being generic but doing more specific things.

commoner 4y ago

On piracy, HN users defend Sci-Hub to protest against the academic publishing industry, which involves large corporations such as Elsevier charging publishing and subscription fees that are much more than the value that these corporations bring to the actual research, review, and publication. Academics need to publish in order to survive, and they individually do not have enough power to subvert the existing academic publishing system. Since academics do not receive royalties, Sci-Hub enables academics to pay less into the same system that exploits them for profit. By supporting Sci-Hub, HN users take a populist stance by supporting individuals against the system. The situation with Microsoft and Copilot is the exact opposite. Here, Microsoft is misusing its acquisition of GitHub to repackage the work of individual free and open source contributors into a proprietary product in violation of the authors' software licenses. These licenses do not even require Microsoft to pay. They only require attribution and redistribution under a compatible license. Supporting Microsoft's misuse of GitHub is an anti-populist stance that puts the interests of the corporation over the interests of the individuals.

zarzavat 4y ago
The argument for libgen is that whatever damage there is to the authors missing out on revenues is outweighed by people being able to get books that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford (especially in developing countries). In the case of copilot, the damage suffered by the authors is close to zero. And those who benefit the most are the authors themselves. A double digit percent productivity enhancement is worth more to me than a few million $ to a trillion dollar company, especially because MS has to pay for compute.
- commoner 4y ago
  You're assuming that Microsoft needs to shut down Copilot to comply with the licenses of the software they misused. That is not the case. To make Copilot legitimate, all Microsoft has to do is restrict Copilot's inputs to non-proprietary code, release the Copilot dataset under a compatible license, and clarify that the code generated by Copilot is also covered under that license. Attribution can be done by inserting a comment with link to a paginated list of all of the contributors whose code was used in Copilot. Microsoft can even continue to sell Copilot as a service while keeping it license-compliant, since most developers are not going to self-host the entire dataset. Microsoft can also choose to exclude copyleft-licensed code from Copilot or create multiple flavors of Copilot, each licensed differently. You can get your "productivity enhancement" without needing Microsoft to violate software licenses. The damage is not in the monetary payment denied to free and open source software contributors, payment these contributors never demanded. The damage is in Microsoft violating other people's software licenses to create a proprietary product derived from copyleft-licensed and attribution-required code, and in Microsoft encouraging other developers to violate these licenses. Microsoft needs to rectify these violations with specific performance.

chlorion 4y ago

Nobody wants to completely ban AI or training. You can have progress in this area and still respect people's intellectual property. Framing this as destroying progress is silly. Why can't they train on the code they own, such as Windows sources for example? Or even better, why can't they release CoPilot itself under an open source license that is compatible with the licenses of code they would like to train on? Also, I don't think anyone cares about the monetary aspects. The idea behind the GPL style license is to make sure that code remains free, regardless of what or who uses it. Freedom in this context refers to the ability study the code, modify the code, and distribute any modifications. Without the GPL the code can be used in a proprietary product which strips those rights away from users of the product. Copeleft uses copyright laws to attempt to guarantee freedom for users. This is the inverse of what normal copyright does, which is allow a single entity to sit on the ideas and not allow other's to benefit from them. If we can just strip copyleft licenses from projects, we are giving up those guarantees that GPL code will remain free for all users. The GPL is trying to do it's job here, not slow down progress. Progress would be everyone benefiting from the technology behind CoPilot, rather than just MicroSoft sitting on the project and selling it as a service.

matjet 4y ago

Patent trolls that are hated look like: You develop package to do X from first principles, then get sued because someone patented using a known algorithm for the purpose of X. Copyright working in a supported/non hated way: You develop a package to do X by cribbing off someone else's package X. They sue you for stealing their work, not to make money off you. Situation at hand is case 2, hence the lack of interest in financial gain. Why is this case 2, when it does not always reproduce the copyrighted works exactly? Situation: You realise that rather than cribbing off of one persons package X, you can crib off two other package X's and mix/average their contents. Scale this to 100's of packages. Eventually, ML should avoid this by developing to work from first principles, writing in it's own style, with public code used only for validation of it's ability to understand and write code.

fsflover 4y ago

> I hope I live long enough to see copyright die. I actually agree. However this is not what's happening here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463800

az226 4y ago

Not just copyright, what Copilot does it fair use. If Google taking tens of thousands of lines directly and gets away with it, it's going to be impossible to see any logic that gets AI being trained on millions of lines of code, not being fair use for any individual open source copyright holder.