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Using for training doesn't mean its reproduced. Consider a junior dev who writes a range check function while working for a company (so they own the copyright)

Using for training doesn't mean its reproduced. Consider a junior dev who writes a range check function while working for a company (so they own the copyright) then goes to a different company and writes the same range function because that's just how he writes code. Has copyright been infringed?

Swenrekcah 4y ago
That programmer definitely reproduced the code, so if copilot does the same that’s definitely reproduction. Then the legalities can be argued, but an individual is in any case not remotely comparable to a service like copilot.
- seadan83 4y ago
  > Then the legalities can be argued, but an individual is in any case not remotely comparable to a service like copilot. Why is this? Copilot in some ways is an automated way to search code & stack overflow. There is a very annoying website that does nothing more than show relevant code samples of various google search terms. If the manual version of something is okay (eg: googling for code, finding it, fitting for a new and specific purpose that is similar), why would an automated version of that be any different?
  - okamiueru 4y ago
    Because of the license the code is under?
  - Swenrekcah 4y ago
    For a similar reason that camera surveillance can be forbidden in places where people are still allowed to keep their eyes open. Or sending millions of messages in an automated way can be illegal but millions of people sending a message is not.
    - seadan83 4y ago
      I'm confused by the forbidden surveillance example. Generally surveillance camera's are legal for any place where there is no expectation of privacy. The expectation of privacy is largely only ones home, outside of that you can be video taped all day long by anyone. I'm not sure how this is analgous.. The million messages example is interesting. Though, what examples are there? In what cases is something legal to do it once, but there is some threshold where you cannot do it many times? The "sending millions of messages" is only perhaps illegal because it breaks terms of service. Or, the one message is perhaps also illegal but nobody cares to pursue litigation for one instance of an infraction. The point remains though, if an individual does something once that is legal - it makes that activity legal, period and full stop. No?
      - Swenrekcah 4y ago
        I was thinking about things like spam and also social media. Note that my main objection is to equating a person doing something with an automated process. Sometimes it may be legal or other times illegal but it just clearly isn’t the same. For the last point, I think the answer to that is a definite no in most jurisdictions. Laws and judicial conventions often allow differing circumstances to affect the legality of things.
        seadan83 4y ago
        > For the last point, I think the answer to that is a definite no in most jurisdictions. Laws and judicial conventions often allow differing circumstances to affect the legality of things. Curious, any concrete examples? I can't really think of any where one instance is okay but many is not. I can think of examples where one instance is ignored and many instances are harder to ignore (and so is prosecuted), but overall - I can't really think of anything that is okay to do once but not many times.
        Swenrekcah 4y ago
        Don’t forget the automation part, that’s the key issue. Unsolicited robocalls are illegal in many places where human callers may not be.
  - belorn 4y ago
    Playing a movie for a few friends who visits is fine, but start to demand tickets and suddenly it will look like a cinema which is not fine. The reason is always the same. Courts and judges will look at the situation and make a decision about what seems fair and what does not. It is them that need to be convinced that a specific use of a copyrighted work is permitted either through fair use or by a license.
    - seadan83 4y ago
      > Playing a movie for a few friends who visits is fine, but start to demand tickets and suddenly it will look like a cinema which is not fine. Interesting analogy. "Ripping" something off an only using it for your personal project sounds like the "playing a movie for a few friends". Doing so for the benefit of corporation that then has thousands of daily visitors sounds like the "movie cinema" example. Though, in both cases it was an individual googling and finding how to implement a specific function. "fair use" in copyright is pretty specific in that it refers to things like "you can play portions of a clip in order to comment on it." Or as another example, you can use clips/portions for the purposes of a review commentary. "Form and function" is perhaps a very important crux here. Some things you can only do a certain way. For example, quick-sort, there are is only really one way to implement quick sort (or otherwise it is not at all quick sort!). Personally I feel the copyright line is higher than a function, the copyright is on the collection of functions who together create a specific software. The individual functions IMHO are as copyright'able as-is a cog on a bike cassette, or the chain on a motorcycle.
      - belorn 4y ago
        I think there are quite few things in programming that can only be implemented one way. I see it as similar to music in that almost every song have notes going up or down the scale. Obviously there can't be that many variations, but then the important distinctions is often in the details. Applying copyright on a single function is like applying copyright on a single riff. Sometimes the legal system will accept it, but it should be the exception rather than the norm. Fair use seem to had a change in scope. Historically it seems to be mostly about things like "play a clip in order to comment on it.", but now we have things like google making a copy of all books ever written in order for people to search through them. Similar arguments has been made over copying news articles from news sites in order to put a portion of it in search results. A stack overflow-like search engine that trawled proprietary code bases would likely be sued, but in theory they could argue fair use just like google.
- jitix 4y ago
  IMO it’s the same thing because I fundamentally see LLMs in the same role as calculators that helps reduce cognitive load by offloading repetitive work. Practically with an LLM the programmer can focus on the creative part (handler function, react component, etc) while the LLM generates the necessary boilerplate for the ever changing frameworks and infra configurations. The programmer (and QA) would still review and test everything but would save time writing boilerplate and ship features faster.
lallysingh 4y ago
Yup. They just copied manually.
blibble 4y ago
> Has copyright been infringed? yes now if he had written a specification as to what the function should be, then passed it to someone else that had never seen the function and worked from the spec then he'd be ok see: IBM BIOS
- antonvs 4y ago
  > yes It's not nearly that simple. No real copyright case is going to hinge on what a single range check function looks like. This is human law, it's not a programming situation where you can just apply some simple rule and get a deterministic answer. Context plays a huge part, among other things.
  - blibble 4y ago
    > No real copyright case is going to hinge on what a single range check function looks like. you realise this exact extremely famous function was the focus of a billion dollar supreme court copyright battle that went on for years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.#First_phase:_API_copyrightability_and_patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_... (the entire basis of GPs joke)
    - antonvs 4y ago
      I should have said that no successful copyright case is going to hinge on that. Oracle's position on that was legally incorrect, for the reason I was alluding to: the relevant standard requires that illegal copying involve the core of the creative expression of the original work, which a generic range check function clearly doesn't do.
- seadan83 4y ago
  As the copyright holder of "throw new", the Junior dev infringed my copyright! Let alone them infringing copyright of the company they crafted that code for. On a more serious note, there is a question whether algorithms and code blocks can be copyrighted, or if it is the _software_ that is copyrighted. Let's say I use websockets and you crib my usage of websockets for your own application. My opinion is that unless you rebuild the same thing I did, then "cribbing" is the long held art of "let me google how to do that". The artistic creation is the end software product, not really some measly embedded function that is boiler plate (form and function) for anything to work. The 'form and function' clause of copyright almost certainly makes a range check function not a copyright infringement.
cyanydeez 4y ago
They have clean room implementation for just this problem. The _only_ escape clause is some random function that says how arbitrary a code block is. Or nontrivial. A person or AI can absolutely be violating copyright via your example.
ml-anon 4y ago
It literally means reproduced in some capacity. Just because its called "training" it doesn't mean it has any reasonable analogy to how humans learn or how expert humans train in a skill. GPT-style models literally aim to reproduce the input character by character (token by token).

Swenrekcah 4y ago

That programmer definitely reproduced the code, so if copilot does the same that’s definitely reproduction. Then the legalities can be argued, but an individual is in any case not remotely comparable to a service like copilot.

seadan83 4y ago
> Then the legalities can be argued, but an individual is in any case not remotely comparable to a service like copilot. Why is this? Copilot in some ways is an automated way to search code & stack overflow. There is a very annoying website that does nothing more than show relevant code samples of various google search terms. If the manual version of something is okay (eg: googling for code, finding it, fitting for a new and specific purpose that is similar), why would an automated version of that be any different?
- okamiueru 4y ago
  Because of the license the code is under?
- Swenrekcah 4y ago
  For a similar reason that camera surveillance can be forbidden in places where people are still allowed to keep their eyes open. Or sending millions of messages in an automated way can be illegal but millions of people sending a message is not.
  - seadan83 4y ago
    I'm confused by the forbidden surveillance example. Generally surveillance camera's are legal for any place where there is no expectation of privacy. The expectation of privacy is largely only ones home, outside of that you can be video taped all day long by anyone. I'm not sure how this is analgous.. The million messages example is interesting. Though, what examples are there? In what cases is something legal to do it once, but there is some threshold where you cannot do it many times? The "sending millions of messages" is only perhaps illegal because it breaks terms of service. Or, the one message is perhaps also illegal but nobody cares to pursue litigation for one instance of an infraction. The point remains though, if an individual does something once that is legal - it makes that activity legal, period and full stop. No?
    - Swenrekcah 4y ago
      I was thinking about things like spam and also social media. Note that my main objection is to equating a person doing something with an automated process. Sometimes it may be legal or other times illegal but it just clearly isn’t the same. For the last point, I think the answer to that is a definite no in most jurisdictions. Laws and judicial conventions often allow differing circumstances to affect the legality of things.
      - seadan83 4y ago
        > For the last point, I think the answer to that is a definite no in most jurisdictions. Laws and judicial conventions often allow differing circumstances to affect the legality of things. Curious, any concrete examples? I can't really think of any where one instance is okay but many is not. I can think of examples where one instance is ignored and many instances are harder to ignore (and so is prosecuted), but overall - I can't really think of anything that is okay to do once but not many times.
        Swenrekcah 4y ago
        Don’t forget the automation part, that’s the key issue. Unsolicited robocalls are illegal in many places where human callers may not be.
- belorn 4y ago
  Playing a movie for a few friends who visits is fine, but start to demand tickets and suddenly it will look like a cinema which is not fine. The reason is always the same. Courts and judges will look at the situation and make a decision about what seems fair and what does not. It is them that need to be convinced that a specific use of a copyrighted work is permitted either through fair use or by a license.
  - seadan83 4y ago
    > Playing a movie for a few friends who visits is fine, but start to demand tickets and suddenly it will look like a cinema which is not fine. Interesting analogy. "Ripping" something off an only using it for your personal project sounds like the "playing a movie for a few friends". Doing so for the benefit of corporation that then has thousands of daily visitors sounds like the "movie cinema" example. Though, in both cases it was an individual googling and finding how to implement a specific function. "fair use" in copyright is pretty specific in that it refers to things like "you can play portions of a clip in order to comment on it." Or as another example, you can use clips/portions for the purposes of a review commentary. "Form and function" is perhaps a very important crux here. Some things you can only do a certain way. For example, quick-sort, there are is only really one way to implement quick sort (or otherwise it is not at all quick sort!). Personally I feel the copyright line is higher than a function, the copyright is on the collection of functions who together create a specific software. The individual functions IMHO are as copyright'able as-is a cog on a bike cassette, or the chain on a motorcycle.
    - belorn 4y ago
      I think there are quite few things in programming that can only be implemented one way. I see it as similar to music in that almost every song have notes going up or down the scale. Obviously there can't be that many variations, but then the important distinctions is often in the details. Applying copyright on a single function is like applying copyright on a single riff. Sometimes the legal system will accept it, but it should be the exception rather than the norm. Fair use seem to had a change in scope. Historically it seems to be mostly about things like "play a clip in order to comment on it.", but now we have things like google making a copy of all books ever written in order for people to search through them. Similar arguments has been made over copying news articles from news sites in order to put a portion of it in search results. A stack overflow-like search engine that trawled proprietary code bases would likely be sued, but in theory they could argue fair use just like google.
jitix 4y ago
IMO it’s the same thing because I fundamentally see LLMs in the same role as calculators that helps reduce cognitive load by offloading repetitive work. Practically with an LLM the programmer can focus on the creative part (handler function, react component, etc) while the LLM generates the necessary boilerplate for the ever changing frameworks and infra configurations. The programmer (and QA) would still review and test everything but would save time writing boilerplate and ship features faster.

lallysingh 4y ago

Yup. They just copied manually.

blibble 4y ago

> Has copyright been infringed? yes now if he had written a specification as to what the function should be, then passed it to someone else that had never seen the function and worked from the spec then he'd be ok see: IBM BIOS

antonvs 4y ago
> yes It's not nearly that simple. No real copyright case is going to hinge on what a single range check function looks like. This is human law, it's not a programming situation where you can just apply some simple rule and get a deterministic answer. Context plays a huge part, among other things.
- blibble 4y ago
  > No real copyright case is going to hinge on what a single range check function looks like. you realise this exact extremely famous function was the focus of a billion dollar supreme court copyright battle that went on for years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.#First_phase:_API_copyrightability_and_patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_... (the entire basis of GPs joke)
  - antonvs 4y ago
    I should have said that no successful copyright case is going to hinge on that. Oracle's position on that was legally incorrect, for the reason I was alluding to: the relevant standard requires that illegal copying involve the core of the creative expression of the original work, which a generic range check function clearly doesn't do.
seadan83 4y ago
As the copyright holder of "throw new", the Junior dev infringed my copyright! Let alone them infringing copyright of the company they crafted that code for. On a more serious note, there is a question whether algorithms and code blocks can be copyrighted, or if it is the _software_ that is copyrighted. Let's say I use websockets and you crib my usage of websockets for your own application. My opinion is that unless you rebuild the same thing I did, then "cribbing" is the long held art of "let me google how to do that". The artistic creation is the end software product, not really some measly embedded function that is boiler plate (form and function) for anything to work. The 'form and function' clause of copyright almost certainly makes a range check function not a copyright infringement.

cyanydeez 4y ago

They have clean room implementation for just this problem. The _only_ escape clause is some random function that says how arbitrary a code block is. Or nontrivial. A person or AI can absolutely be violating copyright via your example.

ml-anon 4y ago

It literally means reproduced in some capacity. Just because its called "training" it doesn't mean it has any reasonable analogy to how humans learn or how expert humans train in a skill. GPT-style models literally aim to reproduce the input character by character (token by token).