6 ms·

It's not transformative at all, nor quoted for study/discussion, and that's exactly what makes it a problem. If the snippets merely had attribution, they'd be

It's not transformative at all, nor quoted for study/discussion, and that's exactly what makes it a problem. If the snippets merely had attribution, they'd be both legal and acceptable to most open source authors. The code is not transformative because the quoted code is not used for some other purpose like as part of an article discussing whatever the code does, it is used to do exactly it's original job. If you wrote a book by quoting choice paragraphs from other books, without crediting any of them, presenting the new book as simply your pile of deep insights, that is not transformative, even though your book is not the same as any single of the source books. It's also not fair use, even though all the quoted bits are short, both because of the usage and the lack of accreditation. We could have something like copilot just fine if done above board, but as it is right now github are simply outlaw and with no excuse at all.

zarzavat 4y ago
I read these kinds of comments on HN and I wonder if the people complaining about copilot have actually used the thing for more than 5 minutes? Most of the time copilot is giving you one-line completions that are heavily adapted to the surrounding code. It’s not “writing a book by quoting choice paragraphs from other books”. It’s fancy autocomplete. You can direct copilot to give you anything you ask it for. If you ask it for an entire function, and you don’t give it any context, then you are more likely to get a snippet from inside its memory. But even when this happens you are unlikely to keep the entire snippet unmodified because the chance that it is what you were looking for is low.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- esperent 4y ago
  > you are unlikely to keep the entire snippet unmodified Does that matter? It's not the end users who are being accused of copyright violation, it's the tool itself.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    If the argument is that the tool is facilitating copyright infringement by users then it matters whether or not the users actually keep the supposedly infringing code, yes. If the code gets deleted immediately afterwards by the user then the claim of infringement by the user is farcical. If the argument is that copilot is infringing because it merely displays an allegedly copyrighted snippet for a few moments, even if the user does not accept the completion, or accepts it but then deletes it, then that is a completely different argument because there is very little identifiable damage to the authors, which bolsters an argument of fair use.
    - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
      > it matters whether or not the users actually keep the supposedly infringing code That's not how this works. If I give you a blob of uniformly random bits and then give you a passphrase you can use with a tool to turn that into a Hollywood movie, and you do so, and then you delete it, that isn't not copyright infringement.
      - drran 4y ago
        > If I give you a ... Hollywood movie, ... that isn't not copyright infringement. It is.
        wizzwizz4 4y ago
        I'm no lawyer, but judging how people reacted to DeCSS (09F9 1102 9D74 E35B D841 56C5 6356 88C0, anyone?)… why do you say this isn't copyright infringement?
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      The tool itself is infringing copyright. It possesses and reproduces copyrighted code without it's attribution. Full stop. If I steal your television, it doesn't matter how much I get for it at the pawn shop.
- NullPrefix 4y ago
  >Most of the time copilot is giving you one-line completions that are heavily adapted to the surrounding code. Keyword being "Most of the time"
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  There are countless examples of people just letting Copilot's "autocomplete" run wild and it ends up reproducing many lines of code, often verbatim, and not just single lines of code.
  - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
    A lot of people seem to think changing the variable names makes it new code.
  - dymk 4y ago
    The count is like 5
    - wizzwizz4 4y ago
      Considering how easy it is to generate additional examples, I think it's higher than 5. Five big, popular blog posts, maybe; but there are way more than 5 examples just on Twitter.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    You need to bait Copilot really hard to make it output that. To the point where it would be much easier to locate and copy-paste the code directly from the source yourself. It doesn't happen accidentally and it's not how you normally use Copilot.
- lokar 4y ago
  Most of the time I enter a bank I don’t rob it
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- dleslie 4y ago
  Sure. I used it for about twenty minutes before I turned it off because it seemed clear to me that it wasn't much different than copying code from open source repositories.
  - fooster 4y ago
    That is absolutely not my experience at all and wish people would stop with the hysterical hyperbole. The tool typically produces code that would only make sense in my codebase because it uses internal types which only make sense in my code base. That is not and cannot be copyright infringement.
    - veilrap 4y ago
      100% agree. This matches my actual usage of github copilot. All the drama around it seems to just be mostly for headlines to fuel the outrage machine.
    - dleslie 4y ago
      Sure, it's clever enough to swap identifiers correctly, but the shape of the code and techniques it uses were familiar to me from elsewhere, at times. It's not unlike copying code from stack overflow and swapping the identifiers around.
      - nl 4y ago
        > the shape of the code and techniques it uses were familiar to me from elsewhere. Isn't this exactly what you'd expect an AI coder to do?
        dleslie 4y ago
        That's precisely the problem with it. AI, as it is, can be considered a lossy compression technique with multiple document recovery, convolution and interpolation ability.
        4y ago
- woah 4y ago
  The authors of these comments have never used it. Their understanding of the issue comes from having seen a tweet where someone coaxed CoPilot into almost-reproducing a piece of code that thousands of people have copy and pasted into their GitHub repos over the years, such as the quake square root code or that matrix multiplication code. They also usually have a Luddite axe to grind. If they succeed in getting CoPilot outlawed (obviously they won’t), then I will rent $50 worth of GPU time and train my own, like some kind of cyberpunk outlaw.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ISL 4y ago
To attribution I would add license compliance.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  I agree but I'm saying that attribution would be all that's missing from compliance in most cases.
  - mikro2nd 4y ago
    But not, I'll hazard a guess (ianal), if its a Gnu GPL license. Right?
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      I didn't want to make an unreadably long comment by trying to solve every detail. But GPL just adds that the source be made available to any recipient of code you used. That's pretty easy to arrange because even a link satisfies it. If copilot can be made to spit out attribution, then it can spit out links at the same time. Another idea is copilot could be changed to only include code where the authors opted in to an aggregate credit where your new program only has to declare that it used copilot and a link to copilot's training set along with your programs source, without trying to itemize each bit of output. There could also be other versions of copilot that includes other code under other terms, like pure MIT or PD code where the original author already explicitly granted usage with no terms, or paid commercial code where github paid the authors to be able to include code to be used in this way and maybe with terms where the end user does not have to re-share.
      - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
        The "link" necessary here would be a link to the full source code of the software developed with the use of copilot, distributed with every copy of said software
sj4nz 4y ago
This isn't my experience with Co-pilot's suggestions. I've literally been able to have Co-pilot suggest a complete unit test based on a novel structure I hand-coded myself and a few words describing the unit test. The constants are often wrong, but it saves minutes of fidgeting with the syntax for unit tests and assertions. These are not quotations from other people's code but something about the deep structures of language and programming language semantics. However, I suspect if you knew enough of a snippet from other source you could coax Co-pilot to suggest code learned from that source, but it would likely be washed over by other code in the corpus where it coincided with meanings.
- CuriousCosmic 4y ago
  Worth noting with models like copilot is that if you deliberately give it an input similar to the training contents, odds are it'll near verbatim reiterate it. The main issue is that while you can use copilot to create "new"/transformative code, it's also trivial to get it to pump out licensed works in a form where you could claim "I didn't know it was taken from x project with y license because the tool made it for me". I personally have no problem with copilot in concept however to do it (or any other AI model based text/graphics tool) without infringing on people's copyrights is practically an unsolved problem (excluding just per-licensing the training data ahead of time).
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    I mean, you can prompt me (or any other engineer) to spit out copyrighted code. FizzBuzz comes to mind… as do a number of algorithms I’ve written in the past which belongs to my past employers… I really think we are entering some interesting territory that will likely be an interesting can of worms.
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      There is somehow something different if you knew the entire code to quickbooks from memory, and had an api where I could request any 10-line chunk of it I wanted, as many times as I wanted.
scatterhead 4y ago
> The code is not transformative because the quoted code is not used for some other purpose like as part of an article discussing whatever the code does, it is used to do exactly it's original job. Hmm.. > The printing press is not transformative because the printed text is not used for some other purpose, it is used to do exactly it's original job. See the error in your logic? The potentially transformative part is not the code itself. It's the impact to the process of creating the code.
- ericpauley 4y ago
  For copyright purposes the printing press is not transformative. No contradiction here.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
williamcotton 4y ago
Well lucky for us paragraphs of prose are artistic expression and the snippets of code returned by Copilot are utilitarian. The only things covered by copyright are creative choices. In software, as established by Whelan v. Jaslow [0] this is the structure, sequence and organization [1]. The district court ruling in the Whelan case drew on the established doctrine that even when the component parts of a work cannot be copyrightable, the structure and organization of a work may be. The court also drew support from the 1985 SAS Inst. Inc. v. S&H Computer Sys. Inc. in which it had been found that copyright protected organizational and structural details, not just specific lines of code. Structure, sequence and organization (SSO) in this case was defined as "the manner in which the program operates, controls and regulates the computer in receiving, assembling, calculating, retaining, correlating, and producing useful information." SSO refers to non-literal elements of computer programs that include "data input formats, file structures, design, organization and flow of the code, screen outputs or user interfaces, and the flow and sequencing of the screens." However: The Whelan decision initiated a period of excessively tight protection, suppressing innovation, since almost everything other than the broad purpose of a software work would be protected. The only exception was where the functionality could only be achieved in a very small number of ways. In these cases there could be no protection due to the merger doctrine, which applies when the expression and the idea are inextricably merged. Later the same year, in Broderbund v. Unison the court cited Whelan when finding that the overall structure, sequencing, and arrangement of screens, or the "total concept and feel", could be protected by copyright. For a brief overview of the merger doctrine: https://www.lucysnyder.com/index.php/copyright-law-merger-doctrine/ https://www.lucysnyder.com/index.php/copyright-law-merger-do... So this excessively tight protection was rectified in CAI Inc v Altai [2], which established the legal doctrine of Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison [3] which says "As we have already noted, a computer program's ultimate function or purpose is the composite result of interacting subroutines. Since each Subroutine is itself a program, and thus, may be said to have its own 'idea,' Whelan's general formulation that a program's overall Purpose equates with the program's idea is descriptively inadequate." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whelan_v._Jaslow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whelan_v._Jaslow [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates_International,_Inc._v._Altai,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates_Internatio.... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari...
yellowapple 4y ago
> If you wrote a book by quoting choice paragraphs from other books, without crediting any of them, presenting the new book as simply your pile of deep insights This is quite literally how most of the Old and New Testaments came into existence. The authors of Matthew and Luke certainly didn't bother mentioning that they copied a bunch of stuff from Mark and whatever the Q source is (my bet is on either the Gospel of Thomas or some source thereof). Nor did the authors of Leviticus and such mention how they ripped large swaths of what's now known as Mosaic Law straight from Hittite laws and the Code of Hammurabi. These works are nonetheless considered pretty transformative.
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  > This is quite literally how most of the Old and New Testaments came into existence. That happened a few (thousand) weeks before copyright law was invented. > The authors of Matthew and Luke certainly didn't bother mentioning that they copied a bunch of stuff from Mark and whatever the Q source is (my bet is on either the Gospel of Thomas or some source thereof). Nor did the authors of Leviticus and such mention how they ripped large swaths of what's now known as Mosaic Law straight from Hittite laws and the Code of Hammurabi. The Q source (two-source hypothesis and four-source hypothesis both) is speculative, and there are several reasons to criticise the theory – such as lack of corroborating historical evidence that the Q source ever existed as a separate document. That aside, Leviticus likely got its Hittite and Hammurabi influences via Mosaic Law, not (primarily) the other way around. (Legal systems influence other legal systems? Who knew‽) Merely saying the same thing isn't protected by modern copyright; facts are not copyrightable. (There is such a thing as "database rights", but that doesn't really come into play, here.) > These works are nonetheless considered pretty transformative. The merits of our current copyright regime aren't terribly relevant, here. If you want to change the law, change the law; don't try to have the existing law interpreted differently in select cases, especially if you're only doing that where it benefits already-powerful entities like Disney or Microsoft.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    > don't try to have the existing law interpreted differently in select cases, especially if you're only doing that where it benefits already-powerful entities like Disney or Microsoft. Who says it only benefits the already-powerful entities, or that it even benefits them at all in the long run? As evident from my other comments on this topic, my hope (and indeed expectation) is that they'll shoot themselves in the foot and be hoisted by their own copyright-infringing petard. It wasn't that long ago when copyright enforcement wasn't a thing, and that lack of enforcement didn't seem to stop people from creating all sorts of artistic and literary and musical works, great in quantity and quality alike. The more the megacorporations backtrack on their copyright absolutism and admit that ignoring copyright expedites creative work, the more ammunition the rest of us have against their continued insistence on copyright absolutism. Put simply: Copilot sets a precedent that I suspect will lead to the downfall of intellectual property law entirely. Probably not alone, but very likely one of several dominoes toppling toward that end result.
World177 4y ago
I think your opinion is bad while also misrepresenting machine learning. > It's not transformative at all, nor quoted for study/discussion, and that's exactly what makes it a problem. This model works in the same way as GPT-3. It's just predicting what the next most likely word will be given the previous words. It does this by creating a generalizaiton over the content that was used to train it. This generalization should be similar (or close to the same) to if it had a completely different set of training data. In the same way that you could create 60,000 new training images comparable to the MNIST dataset, and get a model that works at an equivalent level, you could do the same with source code. It doesn't matter where the original data is from because the end result should be very similar when models reach higher levels of accuracy. > but as it is right now github are simply outlaw and with no excuse at all. This is an insane view on machine learning. When you read content, neural weights are adjusted in your brain to keep it as a memory. Is that copyright infringement too? Do you now owe Disney royalties because you stored their movie in your memories? It's also an incredibly harmful view. Machine learning is dependent on data. Services like search, translation, recommendations, etc. are all dependent on training data. And, you're making the case, that since you don't like that it was trained on source code, it should all be illegal.
- hakre 4y ago
  Incrediblest full of all the harmfulsts! Not only Machine learning: "Watching ditigal Walt Disney Movies is dependent on data." It is illegal as the attribution is missing. Also copyright applies etc. see the lawsuit. Its less a technical thing, more a legal one.
  - World177 4y ago
    > Incrediblest full of all the harmfulsts! Not only Machine learning: I do not agree that it's a good idea to make using copyrighted data for training illegal. The people who are upset that GPL code was used for training should be happy that a large corporation believes that training on copyrighted works is fair use. It's a more democratized position. > It is illegal as the attribution is missing. Also copyright applies etc. see the lawsuit. Its less a technical thing, more a legal one. I think in reality, this is just a lawyer or group of lawyers who realized they had a case and a reactionary audience to possibly make them millions of dollars.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
If you wrote a book by clipping small bits of others' work and assembling it into something cohesive that would most definitely be fair use.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  Incorrect, if you did what I actually said, which mimics what copilot does.

zarzavat 4y ago

I read these kinds of comments on HN and I wonder if the people complaining about copilot have actually used the thing for more than 5 minutes? Most of the time copilot is giving you one-line completions that are heavily adapted to the surrounding code. It’s not “writing a book by quoting choice paragraphs from other books”. It’s fancy autocomplete. You can direct copilot to give you anything you ask it for. If you ask it for an entire function, and you don’t give it any context, then you are more likely to get a snippet from inside its memory. But even when this happens you are unlikely to keep the entire snippet unmodified because the chance that it is what you were looking for is low.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
esperent 4y ago
> you are unlikely to keep the entire snippet unmodified Does that matter? It's not the end users who are being accused of copyright violation, it's the tool itself.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  If the argument is that the tool is facilitating copyright infringement by users then it matters whether or not the users actually keep the supposedly infringing code, yes. If the code gets deleted immediately afterwards by the user then the claim of infringement by the user is farcical. If the argument is that copilot is infringing because it merely displays an allegedly copyrighted snippet for a few moments, even if the user does not accept the completion, or accepts it but then deletes it, then that is a completely different argument because there is very little identifiable damage to the authors, which bolsters an argument of fair use.
  - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
    > it matters whether or not the users actually keep the supposedly infringing code That's not how this works. If I give you a blob of uniformly random bits and then give you a passphrase you can use with a tool to turn that into a Hollywood movie, and you do so, and then you delete it, that isn't not copyright infringement.
    - drran 4y ago
      > If I give you a ... Hollywood movie, ... that isn't not copyright infringement. It is.
      - wizzwizz4 4y ago
        I'm no lawyer, but judging how people reacted to DeCSS (09F9 1102 9D74 E35B D841 56C5 6356 88C0, anyone?)… why do you say this isn't copyright infringement?
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    The tool itself is infringing copyright. It possesses and reproduces copyrighted code without it's attribution. Full stop. If I steal your television, it doesn't matter how much I get for it at the pawn shop.
NullPrefix 4y ago
>Most of the time copilot is giving you one-line completions that are heavily adapted to the surrounding code. Keyword being "Most of the time"
heavyset_go 4y ago
There are countless examples of people just letting Copilot's "autocomplete" run wild and it ends up reproducing many lines of code, often verbatim, and not just single lines of code.
- nopenopenopeno 4y ago
  A lot of people seem to think changing the variable names makes it new code.
- dymk 4y ago
  The count is like 5
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    Considering how easy it is to generate additional examples, I think it's higher than 5. Five big, popular blog posts, maybe; but there are way more than 5 examples just on Twitter.
- Kiro 4y ago
  You need to bait Copilot really hard to make it output that. To the point where it would be much easier to locate and copy-paste the code directly from the source yourself. It doesn't happen accidentally and it's not how you normally use Copilot.
lokar 4y ago
Most of the time I enter a bank I don’t rob it
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dleslie 4y ago
Sure. I used it for about twenty minutes before I turned it off because it seemed clear to me that it wasn't much different than copying code from open source repositories.
- fooster 4y ago
  That is absolutely not my experience at all and wish people would stop with the hysterical hyperbole. The tool typically produces code that would only make sense in my codebase because it uses internal types which only make sense in my code base. That is not and cannot be copyright infringement.
  - veilrap 4y ago
    100% agree. This matches my actual usage of github copilot. All the drama around it seems to just be mostly for headlines to fuel the outrage machine.
  - dleslie 4y ago
    Sure, it's clever enough to swap identifiers correctly, but the shape of the code and techniques it uses were familiar to me from elsewhere, at times. It's not unlike copying code from stack overflow and swapping the identifiers around.
    - nl 4y ago
      > the shape of the code and techniques it uses were familiar to me from elsewhere. Isn't this exactly what you'd expect an AI coder to do?
      - dleslie 4y ago
        That's precisely the problem with it. AI, as it is, can be considered a lossy compression technique with multiple document recovery, convolution and interpolation ability.
        4y ago
woah 4y ago
The authors of these comments have never used it. Their understanding of the issue comes from having seen a tweet where someone coaxed CoPilot into almost-reproducing a piece of code that thousands of people have copy and pasted into their GitHub repos over the years, such as the quake square root code or that matrix multiplication code. They also usually have a Luddite axe to grind. If they succeed in getting CoPilot outlawed (obviously they won’t), then I will rent $50 worth of GPU time and train my own, like some kind of cyberpunk outlaw.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ISL 4y ago

To attribution I would add license compliance.

Brian_K_White 4y ago
I agree but I'm saying that attribution would be all that's missing from compliance in most cases.
- mikro2nd 4y ago
  But not, I'll hazard a guess (ianal), if its a Gnu GPL license. Right?
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    I didn't want to make an unreadably long comment by trying to solve every detail. But GPL just adds that the source be made available to any recipient of code you used. That's pretty easy to arrange because even a link satisfies it. If copilot can be made to spit out attribution, then it can spit out links at the same time. Another idea is copilot could be changed to only include code where the authors opted in to an aggregate credit where your new program only has to declare that it used copilot and a link to copilot's training set along with your programs source, without trying to itemize each bit of output. There could also be other versions of copilot that includes other code under other terms, like pure MIT or PD code where the original author already explicitly granted usage with no terms, or paid commercial code where github paid the authors to be able to include code to be used in this way and maybe with terms where the end user does not have to re-share.
    - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
      The "link" necessary here would be a link to the full source code of the software developed with the use of copilot, distributed with every copy of said software

sj4nz 4y ago

This isn't my experience with Co-pilot's suggestions. I've literally been able to have Co-pilot suggest a complete unit test based on a novel structure I hand-coded myself and a few words describing the unit test. The constants are often wrong, but it saves minutes of fidgeting with the syntax for unit tests and assertions. These are not quotations from other people's code but something about the deep structures of language and programming language semantics. However, I suspect if you knew enough of a snippet from other source you could coax Co-pilot to suggest code learned from that source, but it would likely be washed over by other code in the corpus where it coincided with meanings.

CuriousCosmic 4y ago
Worth noting with models like copilot is that if you deliberately give it an input similar to the training contents, odds are it'll near verbatim reiterate it. The main issue is that while you can use copilot to create "new"/transformative code, it's also trivial to get it to pump out licensed works in a form where you could claim "I didn't know it was taken from x project with y license because the tool made it for me". I personally have no problem with copilot in concept however to do it (or any other AI model based text/graphics tool) without infringing on people's copyrights is practically an unsolved problem (excluding just per-licensing the training data ahead of time).
- withinboredom 4y ago
  I mean, you can prompt me (or any other engineer) to spit out copyrighted code. FizzBuzz comes to mind… as do a number of algorithms I’ve written in the past which belongs to my past employers… I really think we are entering some interesting territory that will likely be an interesting can of worms.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    There is somehow something different if you knew the entire code to quickbooks from memory, and had an api where I could request any 10-line chunk of it I wanted, as many times as I wanted.

scatterhead 4y ago

> The code is not transformative because the quoted code is not used for some other purpose like as part of an article discussing whatever the code does, it is used to do exactly it's original job. Hmm.. > The printing press is not transformative because the printed text is not used for some other purpose, it is used to do exactly it's original job. See the error in your logic? The potentially transformative part is not the code itself. It's the impact to the process of creating the code.

ericpauley 4y ago
For copyright purposes the printing press is not transformative. No contradiction here.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

williamcotton 4y ago

Well lucky for us paragraphs of prose are artistic expression and the snippets of code returned by Copilot are utilitarian. The only things covered by copyright are creative choices. In software, as established by Whelan v. Jaslow [0] this is the structure, sequence and organization [1]. The district court ruling in the Whelan case drew on the established doctrine that even when the component parts of a work cannot be copyrightable, the structure and organization of a work may be. The court also drew support from the 1985 SAS Inst. Inc. v. S&H Computer Sys. Inc. in which it had been found that copyright protected organizational and structural details, not just specific lines of code. Structure, sequence and organization (SSO) in this case was defined as "the manner in which the program operates, controls and regulates the computer in receiving, assembling, calculating, retaining, correlating, and producing useful information." SSO refers to non-literal elements of computer programs that include "data input formats, file structures, design, organization and flow of the code, screen outputs or user interfaces, and the flow and sequencing of the screens." However: The Whelan decision initiated a period of excessively tight protection, suppressing innovation, since almost everything other than the broad purpose of a software work would be protected. The only exception was where the functionality could only be achieved in a very small number of ways. In these cases there could be no protection due to the merger doctrine, which applies when the expression and the idea are inextricably merged. Later the same year, in Broderbund v. Unison the court cited Whelan when finding that the overall structure, sequencing, and arrangement of screens, or the "total concept and feel", could be protected by copyright. For a brief overview of the merger doctrine: https://www.lucysnyder.com/index.php/copyright-law-merger-doctrine/ https://www.lucysnyder.com/index.php/copyright-law-merger-do... So this excessively tight protection was rectified in CAI Inc v Altai [2], which established the legal doctrine of Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison [3] which says "As we have already noted, a computer program's ultimate function or purpose is the composite result of interacting subroutines. Since each Subroutine is itself a program, and thus, may be said to have its own 'idea,' Whelan's general formulation that a program's overall Purpose equates with the program's idea is descriptively inadequate." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whelan_v._Jaslow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whelan_v._Jaslow [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates_International,_Inc._v._Altai,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates_Internatio.... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari...

yellowapple 4y ago

> If you wrote a book by quoting choice paragraphs from other books, without crediting any of them, presenting the new book as simply your pile of deep insights This is quite literally how most of the Old and New Testaments came into existence. The authors of Matthew and Luke certainly didn't bother mentioning that they copied a bunch of stuff from Mark and whatever the Q source is (my bet is on either the Gospel of Thomas or some source thereof). Nor did the authors of Leviticus and such mention how they ripped large swaths of what's now known as Mosaic Law straight from Hittite laws and the Code of Hammurabi. These works are nonetheless considered pretty transformative.

wizzwizz4 4y ago
> This is quite literally how most of the Old and New Testaments came into existence. That happened a few (thousand) weeks before copyright law was invented. > The authors of Matthew and Luke certainly didn't bother mentioning that they copied a bunch of stuff from Mark and whatever the Q source is (my bet is on either the Gospel of Thomas or some source thereof). Nor did the authors of Leviticus and such mention how they ripped large swaths of what's now known as Mosaic Law straight from Hittite laws and the Code of Hammurabi. The Q source (two-source hypothesis and four-source hypothesis both) is speculative, and there are several reasons to criticise the theory – such as lack of corroborating historical evidence that the Q source ever existed as a separate document. That aside, Leviticus likely got its Hittite and Hammurabi influences via Mosaic Law, not (primarily) the other way around. (Legal systems influence other legal systems? Who knew‽) Merely saying the same thing isn't protected by modern copyright; facts are not copyrightable. (There is such a thing as "database rights", but that doesn't really come into play, here.) > These works are nonetheless considered pretty transformative. The merits of our current copyright regime aren't terribly relevant, here. If you want to change the law, change the law; don't try to have the existing law interpreted differently in select cases, especially if you're only doing that where it benefits already-powerful entities like Disney or Microsoft.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > don't try to have the existing law interpreted differently in select cases, especially if you're only doing that where it benefits already-powerful entities like Disney or Microsoft. Who says it only benefits the already-powerful entities, or that it even benefits them at all in the long run? As evident from my other comments on this topic, my hope (and indeed expectation) is that they'll shoot themselves in the foot and be hoisted by their own copyright-infringing petard. It wasn't that long ago when copyright enforcement wasn't a thing, and that lack of enforcement didn't seem to stop people from creating all sorts of artistic and literary and musical works, great in quantity and quality alike. The more the megacorporations backtrack on their copyright absolutism and admit that ignoring copyright expedites creative work, the more ammunition the rest of us have against their continued insistence on copyright absolutism. Put simply: Copilot sets a precedent that I suspect will lead to the downfall of intellectual property law entirely. Probably not alone, but very likely one of several dominoes toppling toward that end result.

World177 4y ago

I think your opinion is bad while also misrepresenting machine learning. > It's not transformative at all, nor quoted for study/discussion, and that's exactly what makes it a problem. This model works in the same way as GPT-3. It's just predicting what the next most likely word will be given the previous words. It does this by creating a generalizaiton over the content that was used to train it. This generalization should be similar (or close to the same) to if it had a completely different set of training data. In the same way that you could create 60,000 new training images comparable to the MNIST dataset, and get a model that works at an equivalent level, you could do the same with source code. It doesn't matter where the original data is from because the end result should be very similar when models reach higher levels of accuracy. > but as it is right now github are simply outlaw and with no excuse at all. This is an insane view on machine learning. When you read content, neural weights are adjusted in your brain to keep it as a memory. Is that copyright infringement too? Do you now owe Disney royalties because you stored their movie in your memories? It's also an incredibly harmful view. Machine learning is dependent on data. Services like search, translation, recommendations, etc. are all dependent on training data. And, you're making the case, that since you don't like that it was trained on source code, it should all be illegal.

hakre 4y ago
Incrediblest full of all the harmfulsts! Not only Machine learning: "Watching ditigal Walt Disney Movies is dependent on data." It is illegal as the attribution is missing. Also copyright applies etc. see the lawsuit. Its less a technical thing, more a legal one.
- World177 4y ago
  > Incrediblest full of all the harmfulsts! Not only Machine learning: I do not agree that it's a good idea to make using copyrighted data for training illegal. The people who are upset that GPL code was used for training should be happy that a large corporation believes that training on copyrighted works is fair use. It's a more democratized position. > It is illegal as the attribution is missing. Also copyright applies etc. see the lawsuit. Its less a technical thing, more a legal one. I think in reality, this is just a lawyer or group of lawyers who realized they had a case and a reactionary audience to possibly make them millions of dollars.

CuriouslyC 4y ago

If you wrote a book by clipping small bits of others' work and assembling it into something cohesive that would most definitely be fair use.

Brian_K_White 4y ago
Incorrect, if you did what I actually said, which mimics what copilot does.