6 ms·
Huh. There have definitely been well publicized examples of this happening, like the quake inverse square root
by whimsicalism 2y ago
Huh. There have definitely been well publicized examples of this happening, like the quake inverse square root
- polishTar 2y agoFast inverse square root is now part of the public domain. Also, even if this weren’t the case you can’t sue for damages to other people (they’d need to bring their own suit)
- anonymoushn 2y agoIs the particular implementation that the model spits out 70+ years old?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- voxic11 2y agoBut copilot distributed it (allegedly) without complying with the GPL license (which requires any distribution to be accompanied by the license) so it still would be an instance of copyright infringement. https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674
- immibis 2y agoHas it really already been 70 years since John Carmack died?
- polishTar 2y agoAh, you're right. I was wrong to say "public domain". It would be more correct to say Quake III Arena was released to the public as free software under the GPLv2 license.
- KnightHawk3 2y agoThere is a large gap between public domain and GPL. For starters if Copilot is emitting GPL code for closed source projects... that's copyright infringement.
- FireBeyond 2y agoThat would be license infringement, not copyright infringement.
- immibis 2y agoCopyright infringement is emitting the code. The license gives you permission to emit the code, under certain conditions. If you don't meet the conditions, it's still copyright infringement like before.
- FireBeyond 2y agoNo. Copyright infringement could be emitting the code in a manner that exceeds fair use. The license gives you permission to utilize the code in a certain way. If Copilot gives you GPLed code that you then put into your closed source project, you have infringed the license, not Copilot. > If you don't meet the conditions, it's still copyright infringement like before. Licensing and copyright are two separate things. Neither has anything to do with the other. You can be in compliance with copyright, but out of license compliance, you can be the reverse. But nothing about copyright infringement here is tied to licensing. To be clear: I am a person who trashed his Reddit account when they said they were going to license that text for training (trashed in the sense of "ran a script that scrubbed each of my comments first with nonsense edits, then deleted them"). I am a photographer who has significant concerns with training other models on people's creative output. I have similar concerns about Copilot. But confusing licensing and copyright here only muddies waters.
- account42 2y agoWithout adhering to the conditions of the GPL you have no license to redistribute the code and are therefore infringing the copyright of the author.
- voxic11 2y agoYou can't copyright a mathematical operation. Only a particular implementation of it, and even then it may not be copyrightable if its a straightforward and obvious implementation. That said the implementation doesn't appear to be totally trivial and copilot apparently even copies the comments which are almost certainly copyrightable in themselves. https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/dbe4ddb10315479fc00086f08e25d968b4b43c49/code/game/q_math.c#L552 https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/dbe4ddb1... However a twitter post on its own isn't evidence a court will accept. You would need the original poster to testify that what is seen in the post is actually what he got from copilot and not just a meme or joke that he made. Also the plaintiffs in this case don't include id-Software and there is some evidence that id-Software actually stole the fast inverse sqrt code from 3dfx so they might not want to bring a claim here anyways.
- beeboobaa3 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
- whimsicalism 2y agoNot sure where you thought I said you could copyright a mathematical operation, I was clearly referring to the implementation due to the mention of “quake”. When it was reported, I was able to reproduce it myself.
- TechDebtDevin 2y agoWeren't people getting it to spit out valid windows keys also?
- pas 2y agoGPT4 regurgitated almost full NYT articles verbatim. It's strange that this lawsuit seems to be so amateurish that they failed to properly demonstrate the reproduction. Though of course it might require a lot of legal technicalities that we naively think are trivial but they might be not.
- wongarsu 2y agoIt reads like the judge required them to show it happened to their code, not to any code in general. That's a much higher bar. There are thousands of instances of fast inverse square root in the training data but only one copy of your random github repositories. Getting to model to reproduce your code verbatim might be possible for all we know, but it isn't trivial.
- whimsicalism 2y agoof course for standing. but it seems like with the right plaintiffs this could have gone forward
- Dylan16807 2y agoIf it only copies code that has been widely stolen already then that's a lot weaker of a case and is something they can do a lot to prevent on a technical level.
- account42 2y agoCode that has been copied widely != code that has been widely stolen. Open source licenses allow sharing under certain conditions.
- brookst 2y agoBut that’s like saying my lawsuit alleging Taylor Swift copied my song could have gone forward with a plaintiff who had, years ago, written a song similar to what Ms. Swift recorded recently. That”s true, but perhaps the lesson here is that damages that hinge on statistically rare victims should not extrapolated out to provide windfalls for people who have not been harmed.
- whimsicalism 2y agoi think that is a weak analogy and also unnecessary bc it is already clear what i am saying
- 2y ago
- daedrdev 2y agoThe article mentions that GitHub copilot has been trained to avoid directly copying specific cases it knows, and that although you can get it to spit out copyright code by prefixing the copyrighted code as a starting point, in normal us cases its quite rare.
- dathinab 2y agoyes, but you need to show that it happened _in your case_, not that it can happen in general.