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Legally? No. In spirit? ... Probably? Unlike most LLMs, Github copilot can trivially solve their copyright problem by just using only code they have the right

Legally? No. In spirit? ... Probably? Unlike most LLMs, Github copilot can trivially solve their copyright problem by just using only code they have the right to reproduce. They have a giant corpus of code tagged with license, SELECT BY license MIT/Equivalent and you're done, problem solved because those licenses explicitly grant permission for this kind of reuse. (It's still not very cash money to take open source work for commercial gain without paying the original authors, and there's a humorous question if MIT-copilot would need to come with a multi-gigabyte attribution file, but everyone widely agrees it's legal and permitted.) The only reason you'd hack a filter on top rather than doing the above is if you'd want to hide the copyright problem. It's an objectively worse solution.

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Spivak 2y ago
> Unlike most LLMs, Github copilot can trivially solve their copyright problem by just using only code they have the right to reproduce. Absolutely not trivial, in fact completely impossible by computer alone. You can't determine if you have the right to reproduce a piece of code just by looking at the code and tags themselves. *Taps the color-of-your-bits sign.* * I can fork a GPL project on Github and replace the license file with MIT. Okay to reproduce? * If I license my project as MIT but it includes code I copied inappropriately and don't have the right to reproduce myself, can Github? (No) This one is why indemnity clauses exist on contracted works. * I create a git repo for work and select the MIT license but I don't actually own the copyright on that code and so that license is worthless.
gkbrk 2y ago
There is no difference when it comes to MIT and GPL here. If your model outputs my MIT licensed code, you still need to provide attribution in the form of a copyright notice as required by the MIT license.
sleepybrett 2y ago
Have the copyleft people, or anyone else, produced some boilerplate licenses that explicitly deny use in training models?

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Spivak 2y ago

> Unlike most LLMs, Github copilot can trivially solve their copyright problem by just using only code they have the right to reproduce. Absolutely not trivial, in fact completely impossible by computer alone. You can't determine if you have the right to reproduce a piece of code just by looking at the code and tags themselves. *Taps the color-of-your-bits sign.* * I can fork a GPL project on Github and replace the license file with MIT. Okay to reproduce? * If I license my project as MIT but it includes code I copied inappropriately and don't have the right to reproduce myself, can Github? (No) This one is why indemnity clauses exist on contracted works. * I create a git repo for work and select the MIT license but I don't actually own the copyright on that code and so that license is worthless.

gkbrk 2y ago

There is no difference when it comes to MIT and GPL here. If your model outputs my MIT licensed code, you still need to provide attribution in the form of a copyright notice as required by the MIT license.

sleepybrett 2y ago

Have the copyleft people, or anyone else, produced some boilerplate licenses that explicitly deny use in training models?