[HN Gopher] Papers on GitHub Copilot, copyright law, and ownersh...
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Papers on GitHub Copilot, copyright law, and ownership for AI-
generated code
Author : jrepinc
Score : 117 points
Date : 2022-06-25 10:45 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fsf.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fsf.org)
| blackoil wrote:
| I think copyright issues are getting blown out of proportion.
|
| Ethically it is not very different from myself reading books,
| blogs and other available source codes, and then writing my own
| program based on whatever I learned.
|
| Legally, IANAL but either the code generated would be novel,
| common enough or otherwise easily searchable to original source.
| For case 3, developer can take the call to keep it or not.
| heurisko wrote:
| > Ethically it is not very different from myself reading books,
| blogs and other available source codes, and then writing my own
| program based on whatever I learned.
|
| I don't think that's the same. It's more similar to copying and
| adapting snippets of code, in which case I would have to check
| the licence.
|
| Also, it's not an ethical, but a legal consideration. It's not
| particularly ethical that the Mouse keeps on having its
| copyright extended but it is legal.
| cdrini wrote:
| In my experience using copilot, I believe it's more similar
| to the former than to copying and adapting. Copilot
| _generates_ code snippets that are transformative and derived
| from multiple code sources--like Dalle does with images. I
| think making the AI algorithms more transparent is what needs
| to happen. The AI needs to be able to say that this five line
| code snippet was generated based on learning from these 2000
| repos. That would not only directly provide input on whether
| copying is happening, but would also just generally be an
| amazingly useful tool. But the tech isn 't there yet.
|
| Most legal issues are ethical issues. The reason copyright
| law exists is because an ethical argument has been made that
| artists should be able to profit/make a living from their
| creations for a reasonable amount of time. Another
| contradictory ethical argument is that art should enter the
| public domain so that it is available to all. Copyright sits
| in limbo between these two conflicting ethical requirements.
| kromem wrote:
| They are, because the armchair critics are focusing on the edge
| case scenario of populating a mostly blank file in a blank
| project.
|
| Yes, demoing it in that setup, which the FAQ explicitly said
| not to do, will result in unusable IP infringement.
|
| But when using it in a mature codebase that flavors the output
| to match the existing code, what you get pretty much doesn't
| ever match the training data vs reflecting a fusion of the
| training with your existing code.
|
| So you have 90% of the conversation occurring by people who
| appear not even to have used the thing in any considerable way
| but saw demos of the edge case fail condition, which probably
| occurs less than 1% of the time in actual usage.
|
| It's a good idea to have serious discussion and debate about
| the intersection of IP and AI.
|
| But it'd be refreshing if that conversation orbited the reality
| of the intersection and not a largely fictional bogeyman.
| mtkhaos wrote:
| If you strip out the magic of AI or different machine learning
| models strung together. The question for copyright is thr type
| of model. If it is a diffusion based model that competes
| against human written code. There is no conflict.
|
| But since release people have found code snippets of their own
| making. Therefore a layer in there is just an advanced indexing
| algorithm called AI.
|
| Like other posters pointed out, the fundamental issue is the
| mismatch of license and purchasing of github. Retroactive
| change of terms of service, etc...
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Ethically it is also not very different from copying other
| people's code, removing/ignoring all copyright notices and then
| changing some parts slightly to try to hide this.
| l-lousy wrote:
| So half of stack overflows users
| [deleted]
| simion314 wrote:
| The analogy is wrong, AI does not at all look similar to a
| human mind, it is a more complex algorithm , a obfuscated
| script that if done wrong will output the exact input you used
| it for training. This can happen probably very often withy
| original stuff and less often with trivial stuff.
| cdrini wrote:
| AI is not similar to a human mind in the general case (ie
| general AI), but in the context of reading and learning and
| generating code there are similarities. And I would argue
| that humans are also very susceptible to "output the exact
| input used for training".
| naet wrote:
| When humans make a direct copy of something it can be
| considered plagiarism or copyright violation, and any work
| produced in this manner is potentially subject to serious
| litigation and consequence.
|
| There are different levels of learning and reproducing. I
| think you could easily make a "neural net" trained
| exclusively on a copyright work, that reproduces the work
| exactly on request. Simply because the data entered and
| then subsequently exited a black box of a system doesn't
| mean it was transformed in any way.
|
| If you have a movie camera and you use it to record a
| copyright movie at a movie theater and upload your
| recording, you used a creative tool but in a way that
| directly violates copyright. I don't see why using a tool
| like Copilot to reproduce a copyright work is any
| different.
| cdrini wrote:
| The parent comment seemed to me to be implying that
| humans aren't capable of copying. In my experience I've
| had more issues with human developers plagiarising than
| with copilot plagiarising.
|
| You could create such a system. I agree that Copilot
| operates at a very different level of learning :) the
| question is a little murky actually, but I think some
| people are arguing that everything Copilot produces isn't
| sufficiently transformative and hence violates GPL of
| code in its training set. Some people are arguing it
| sometimes generates direct copies and hence violates GPL.
| Some people are arguing that it is sufficiently
| transformative and at little to no risk of violating
| copyright. It's a big question!
| simion314 wrote:
| How is similar in generating code? From my case I don't
| create code by combining previous seen code, for example I
| can write a Lua/Haskell script now even in my memory I have
| no Lua/Haskell code stored. I can do it because I create a
| model of the problem, then I create structures of data and
| operations on those data, only the final step is to look up
| the syntax and standard libraries to generate the code.
|
| Can someone prove that it at least managed to understand
| trivial algorithms, like this is a
| find.sort,reverse,filter,map operation and it can say map
| an algorithm from one language to other?
|
| Thinking at it , bad students when learning programming are
| doing this kind of stuff, they start writing stuff from
| memory that looks like valid code , one student wrote
| something like if(int i =0; i < n; i++) , clearly this
| student did not understand the lesson so Copilot will do a
| similar mistake just one level higher
| cdrini wrote:
| I definitely agree copilot isn't understanding the
| problem space of your code. But I also don't believe it's
| simply remixing code samples from its training set. It's
| somewhere in between. I don't know the internals, but it
| looks to me like it's operating at a few layers of
| abstraction over literal code and syntax. It find
| patterns in the relationships between symbols and
| references. Not to mention since it's GPT-3 based, it's
| cross referencing the "meaning" in these abstract
| relationships with the meaning of plain English text
| written in comments, too. These pieces are similar to
| humans. Just like a human, copilot doesn't have a ton of
| exact literal code in its model. It's seen lots of code
| and has patterns and relationships in its model. That's
| why just like a human, it can translate ideas between
| different coding languages -- my guess would be it can
| write an algorithm its seen in C in F# even if its never
| seen that algorithm in F#; but that's hard to prove. Just
| like a human though, it might have some literal snippets,
| though. It can definitely translate between languages ;
| I've done that a few times. (It can even translate human
| languages eg English to French! I've done that sometimes
| for fun) I would highly recommend giving the trial
| version a go, if only to better understand how it works.
| Whether it "understands" eg a map operation... That's
| hard to prove. Can you think of any experiments? I think
| it understand the relationship between the English word
| map and the code patterns often associated with that
| word.
|
| I think your example is close. Copilot is a lot like an
| inexperienced developer. It doesn't (usually) make syntax
| errors, but because it doesn't understand your problem
| space, and because it doesn't have as many layers of
| abstraction as a human does, it does sometimes make silly
| mistakes. I definitely wouldn't trust it to write an
| entire program on its own! But with a human in the loop
| doing the more complicated abstract pieces of coding, it
| handles the more simple menial pieces pretty well!
| simion314 wrote:
| If you have access to it maybe experiment with using
| snippets from Windows code, like find Wine or Windows
| code on GitHub and copy the start of a function that is
| pretty unique , see if it completes it as the original or
| not.
|
| Other experiment maybe test if it just repeats text that
| iot seen and has realy no idea about stiuff. I would use
| missleading variables, like
|
| int namesLis; int[] counter; string i ="test";
|
| add some comments or unrelated stuff here like print
| heelo world 12 times
|
| then start with for( int ... and see it it just completes
| it correctly or will do something stupid and have 3 or
| more error) If it is a bit smart it will know what
| variable is the list because it associated the [] with a
| list
| cdrini wrote:
| Oh as of this week copilot is open to the public:
| https://github.com/features/copilot/ . You can get a
| trial, or it is free for students and open source
| maintainers.
| ghaff wrote:
| >AI does not at all look similar to a human mind
|
| That is a matter of some debate among neurophysiologists and
| others. There are clearly differences but there also seem to
| be similarities that go beyond mere analogy.
| simion314 wrote:
| That depends on how you define similarities. This ANN AIs
| are a complex version of a polynomial interpolation , you
| have some points from a measurements and you build a
| function to fit those points, so in the end you have a
| function with a giant matrix of data as a "knowledge"
| database behind.
|
| But even with the human mind, I am 100% sure Microsoft
| would not like it if I read their precious Windows source
| code and then go and work on wine, they might claim that I
| did not learned from their code but memorize secret
| algorithms , or maybe would claim that I did not ask for
| permissions first.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| The leaked Windows source is actually hosted right on
| GitHub. I wouldn't be surprised if it was part of
| Copilot's training set.
| ghaff wrote:
| These days I doubt Microsoft would care much. But to your
| broader point, yes, that's why you do clean room
| implementations of public APIs. If you've never seen an
| implementation, you can't really be accused of copying
| it.
|
| This is really different though in that this code is all
| open source. The argument is that sufficient code is
| being verbatim copies so as to be a derivative work.
| simion314 wrote:
| >This is really different though in that this code is all
| open source.
|
| Open source or proprietary you still have to respect the
| license.
|
| >The argument is that sufficient code is being verbatim
| copies so as to be a derivative work.
|
| Yeah, it also depends what derivative work means, I could
| make a script that inputs MS code and outputs it with
| obfuscation, is it derivative work or will MS complain
| that is not enough and I did not had permission to do
| this,
|
| AFAIK code on GitHub does not have the permssions to be
| used as input for copilot, and not all code there has the
| permissions from all authors to be hosted there.
|
| What MS should do is
|
| 1 use their proprietary repos as input too to show us
| that they think the results are derivative code
|
| 2 use their customer private code too to prove again that
| they are ready to prove in court that this is derivative
| work
|
| 3 open the model with no restrictions, then we could say
| MS is doing it for the advancement of society and sure
| charge for the service
|
| 4 promise to defend any developer in case their AI
| outputs copyrighted content.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Open source or proprietary you still have to respect the
| license.
|
| >they might claim that I did not learned from their code
| but memorize secret algorithms
|
| The difference is that you can't claim open source code
| is a trade secret that contains algorithms that you can't
| reimplement in your own code.
| tuckerman wrote:
| It's possible for there to be patent encumbered
| algorithms in open source code though. A license like
| Apache will contain a free license to use them to
| use/distribute the open source work... which I'm not sure
| would transfer if copilot happens to plop some
| unlicensed, unattributed violating code in your code
| base.
| ghaff wrote:
| At least some lawyers [1] will argue that code under an
| open source license like MIT has an implicit patent grant
| even absent specific verbiage.
|
| [1] https://opensource.com/article/18/3/patent-grant-mit-
| license
| tuckerman wrote:
| It would be interesting to see if this sort of implicit
| grant, or even the explicit ones, extend to using the
| patent outside the context of the original work.
|
| My main concern here is that copilot itself might not be
| illegal but that it is causing otherwise well-meaning
| developers to put themselves at legal risk.
| simion314 wrote:
| >The difference is that you can't claim open source code
| is a trade secret that contains algorithms that you can't
| reimplement in your own code.
|
| You can't use "trade secret" but MS Windows code is also
| no longer secret, they shared the code with third parties
| and was also leaked, so they can claim you do not respect
| the license or TOS,NDAs etc. Not sure if "secret" has
| anything to do with this, proprietary stuff is not
| secret, it could be source availleble or be a scripting
| language stuff or something trivial to find the original
| implementation like C# and Java
| rmbyrro wrote:
| The thing is that you can add original, creative aspects on top
| of other knowledge you acquired.
|
| An AI can't do that by definition.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| As the AI concept that is being used is an analytical
| algorithm, it cannot be a "novel solution".
|
| It is by definition a min/max reduced solution of a direct copy
| of existing code and therefore should have to respect their
| licenses.
| saurik wrote:
| I think what is really going to be interesting is when someone
| finally does this trick for music, as the RIAA is 100% going to
| sue whomever pulls off "give me a song about my ex girlfriend
| that sounds like Taylor Swift singing a hypothetical cover of a
| song in the style of one from Bob Dylan" and we will finally have
| a real test of all of these laws (...likely followed by a ton of
| frantic edits driven by their interests). In contrast,
| photographers and artists have always been in relatively weak
| positions and the only software developers having issues right
| now are almost by definition of the task going to be from the
| open source ecosystem, and so what comes out of these discussions
| is mostly just a lot of frustration rather than a true throwing
| down of the gauntlet, an activity for which the RIAA is always
| ready.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| > I think what is really going to be interesting in when
| someone finally does this trick for music
|
| Already done, although I don't think an actual lawsuit has been
| filed.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw
| trention wrote:
| I won't pretend to know the specifics of the legal decision that
| will follow from this, but it's easy to guess that when those
| tools start causing structural unemployment (and that will happen
| soon enough), there will be a backlash.
|
| Even the most naive takes I see here (it's no different than you
| reading public code = "the AI should be treated the same as a
| human") will be forced to re-evaluate their position once they
| become unemployable because of these AIs.
| cdrini wrote:
| I don't think Copilot is at any risk of causing unemployment
| yet, but Dalle could very likely replace a number of graphic
| design jobs in marketing right now. I think it's an important
| question, but at the same time, replacing jobs didn't stop the
| spinning Jenny from taking the textile industry by storm. In
| fact the exact opposite was true. It was popular specifically
| because it replaced paid jobs with fewer paid jobs. I don't
| know if there was backlash at the time, but jobs get destroyed
| and rebuilt by technology all the time, for better or worse.
|
| Edit: actually I take that back. I think a team that previously
| needed 3 developers might get away with only 1 or 2 developers
| thanks to improved productivity from copilot. So it can replace
| jobs in that way. Dalle can make a team that has one designer
| go to 0 designers.
| DJHenk wrote:
| > Dalle can make a team that has one designer go to 0
| designers.
|
| It is the same as what happened with digital photography. In
| the old days every single publication, no matter how local or
| modest, that wanted to have a photo to accompany the text
| needed a photographer. With the invention of digital
| photography and smartphones, this is no longer the case. Any
| writer or editor can snap a picture themselves and often it
| even looks kind of ok.
|
| However, for a real "professional" look and and quality, you
| still need a skilled expert to take care of the imagery.
| Because part of providing the image are the mechanics of
| producing one, but another part is knowing/deciding what the
| right image is for this occasion. The latter part can only be
| done by humans for the foreseeable future.
|
| The result is that it is much easier to acquire some picture
| for you publication, but also there there still is a need for
| professionals that can do it "proper".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I don't think Copilot is at any risk of causing
| unemployment yet, but Dalle could very likely replace a
| number of graphic design jobs in marketing right now.
|
| Automation tools shift demand from the job automated to the
| jobs producing the automation tools.
|
| That's why all other automation shifts demand to programming.
| Automation of programming, though, just shifts the demand
| within programming to a higher level of abstraction.
| trention wrote:
| Copilot currently is very far from being able to cut 33% of
| the time spend writing code, let alone 33% of the working
| time of the average software engineer.
|
| In 3-4 years - maybe, but not now.
|
| That being said, luddism was a thing for obvious reasons and
| it's not clear to me that we will be able to create any jobs
| at all post automation with this type of AI models. At the
| very least what will happen is that human intelligence will
| be devalued significantly in the job market.
| cdrini wrote:
| Oh yeah those numbers were hogwash, I was just looking for
| a number less than 3 :P I was thinking like small mom and
| pop shop that has like a small Dev team for some reason
| might be able to reduce it down.
|
| Vox hosted a fantastic discussion with artists after
| showing them Dalle, and their thoughts on how it'll affect
| their jobs are very interesting! Would highly recommend.
| https://youtu.be/sFBfrZ-N3G4 it notes a few times in
| history when people have thought a technology would
| dangerously displace jobs (eg photography replacing
| painters), but that in general new, unforseen jobs appear.
|
| I know some argue that UBI is the natural conclusion of AI
| replacing more jobs. Or jobs shifting to be more
| coordinating the AI (the Vox video uses the term "prompt
| engineering" to describe this a bit). It's definitely an
| open question! But I'm honestly a little excited (and
| nervous!) to see where it goes. It could have realty
| positive impacts on humanity if we're careful! I think
| these tools could allow a certain level of individual
| productivity that would allow people to achieve more of
| their goals in our limited lifetimes :) But the future is
| murky and not guaranteed.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I know some argue that UBI is the natural conclusion of
| AI replacing more jobs
|
| UBI is not the natural consequence of automation
| increasing the value of automation and reducing the
| relative value of all other labor, sharply increasing
| inequality and with extraordinary concentrated wealth and
| increasingly broad poverty is.
|
| UBI is a potential intervention to mitigate that natural
| consequence, though.
| V__ wrote:
| > when those tools start causing structural unemployment (and
| that will happen soon enough)
|
| Is this actually happening? Some years ago there were articles
| about neural networks which can find errors/interesting points
| in law documents or find tumors during cancer imaging, but did
| this actually replace any jobs instead of just being an
| additional tool?
| trention wrote:
| There is a capability line that needs to be crossed before we
| start seeing this. Which I think most of those older systems
| didn't cross. For me, one answer to this could be given when
| we're able to compare the number of illustrators employed in
| the US in June 2022 vs in June 2027. + the delta of the
| average salary.
| [deleted]
| akagusu wrote:
| At the end of the day, all decisions related to AI generated
| content, no matter if its code, art, text or something else, will
| favor big corporations.
|
| If I take a dataset of public available images of Disney
| characters, which are obviously copyrighted, and train a model to
| generate new characters, they will sue me until they find a judge
| that rules I infringed their copyright just by using their
| copyrighted work, even if the result does not have any similarity
| with the copyrighted work.
|
| But if a big corporation take a copyrighted public dataset to
| train a model, and this model start to regurgitate exactly copies
| of the copyrighted work, which apparently is the case of Github
| Co-pilot, in the case of a lawsuit, the big corporation will
| spend money until they find a judge that rules their use of the
| copyrighted work as fair use.
|
| So, at the end, any decision will benefit big corporations.
|
| The real question is if people will make big corporations fight
| for their victory or if people will let them win easily.
| visarga wrote:
| It's not just regular people vs big corporations, it's also an
| emerging technology with huge potential. You can't stop it,
| better to find ways to adapt.
| akagusu wrote:
| It's is an emerging technology with huge potential owned by
| big corporations that as any other technology will or will
| not be regulated according big corporations interest, which
| usually goes against the regular people interest.
| ghoward wrote:
| I wrote a paper for this, but it was rejected. It's not
| surprising why; I only had a few days to do it.
|
| Anyway, my paper is at https://gavinhoward.com/2021/10/my-
| whitepaper-about-github-c... .
| jjluoma wrote:
| What about General Data Protection Regulation and anonymization?
| My source code files usually start with copyright notice with my
| name and email address followed by a reference to the license. In
| this case anonymization may be against my interests and rights.
| beebmam wrote:
| To be honest, I don't really care if Copilot is legal. If it
| isn't, it should be legal. Change the laws to make it legal.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| Tangentially related is the similar position of CLIP Guided
| Diffusion models like DALL E (2) (Craiyon mini) & Midjourney.
| There are cases in the NFT world where DCMA take down requests
| are being contested as we speak [1] and there is a reasonable
| discussion today [2] on the present state of law although for
| some reason I got downvoted for pointing out the current position
| from the US Copyright Office is that provable "Human Authorship"
| is required to uphold protections although IANAL either.
|
| [1] https://luckytrader.com/news/x2-y2-to-release-dmca-
| takedown-...
|
| [2] Ask HN: Why do devs feel CoPilot has stolen code but DALL-E
| is praised for ART? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31868837
| siilats wrote:
| Guys Microsoft gives you github for free and copilot makes you a
| better programmer. Isn't the whole point to make singularity not
| worry about mit license
| Satam wrote:
| What I think it really comes down to, is whether copilot-like
| tech becomes a 2x (or even 10x) productivity multiplier.
|
| If it becomes that powerful, we'll ignore these and other
| concerns. Just imagine Chinese or Russian devs moving 2x or 10x
| faster because they have no regard for our privileged concerns.
| Don't even have to go that far, a competitor is using GPT-17 and
| you're not - good luck!
|
| And if it stagnates and never goes far beyond the current
| capabilities, then sure, it might become fashionable to try and
| hunt for copyright infringements caused by Copilot.
| ulucs wrote:
| Unfortunately this argument also makes a case for slavery. I'd
| rather not push ethics aside in favour of productivity
| shikoba wrote:
| Absolutely not. Slavery is an inefficient system, otherwise
| it would still be the actual system.
| trention wrote:
| This is a practical (at most you could call it purely
| utilitarian) argument and not a deontological one.
| Satam wrote:
| I don't think they are making an argument about ethics
| necessarily.
| Satam wrote:
| I don't think mentioning slavery is helpful or relevant to
| this discussion.
|
| ---
|
| Let's take Google as a better example of an overpowering
| technology. Its world-domination has been built on scraping
| everyone else's data, and regurgitating it to users in a very
| useful manner. Had it been less useful, I'm sure you'd have
| everyone constantly complaining about them "stealing" public
| information.
|
| Either way, I wasn't making a judgment of how the world
| should be, merely how it's probably going to work out.
| Copilot in its ideal final form would be: 1) great at writing
| good code 2) if needed, very good at obfuscating any stolen
| code into something that looks brand new.
|
| Good luck fighting this mostly-undectable, productivity-
| boosting technology that has no obvious victims.
| trention wrote:
| "that has no obvious victims"
|
| Come back with that line when the absolute number (not to
| mention the pay) of developer jobs worldwide starts
| decreasing because of this. It will probably happen by the
| end of the next decade.
| visarga wrote:
| > Good luck fighting this mostly undectable, productivity
| boosting technology that has no obvious victims.
|
| This is practically freeing the code. Paradoxically, open
| source people oppose it, but it's going to empower open
| source as well.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| My personal opinion is that the source data does not exist inside
| the model, so the model does not in and off itself comprise of a
| copyright violation.
|
| It is also not a derivative work, as it is not recognizable as
| any of the works it was trained on.
|
| However, if the output it produces is close enough to existing
| copyrighted works, than that output cannot be used without a
| license.
|
| That seems fair, and just like how we would judge a human being.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| This is much clearer cut in UK law AIUI as without Fair Use we
| don't have the rights to train an AI. The model is fed works,
| you can't feed it copyright works without permission, good luck
| training it to make facsimile works that weren't already
| generic (bear in mind the Red Bus Case, however).
|
| What I wonder here is if you train a model with no Disney
| works, then tell it "draw a black mouse with red shorts" and it
| draws a close facsimile of Mickey RTM then what? You created
| the work without copying and provably so; you can derive from
| that work without infringement ... that would seem to break
| copyright in rather wonderful way?!?
| ealexhudson wrote:
| The Mickey issue is more about trade marks than copyright per
| se, and originality is not a defence to trade mark
| infringement.
|
| However, there is certainly a broader spectrum of "copyright
| infringement" than simply cutting and pasting text verbatim.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I don't think anyone knows of the source data is encoded
| somehow in the model. Sure it is not explicitely, but it has
| been shown (at least for simpler models but also for copilot)
| that you can with the right prompts get them to output exact
| copies of results (even with possible typos in comments). That
| to me means the models do in fact somehow contain the source.
|
| On the topic of derivative, backpropagation the method of
| training a model relies specifically on calculating the
| gradients or derivatives of your data.
| visarga wrote:
| But those gradients get averaged out, they don't stay
| separate for each input example.
| cycomanic wrote:
| So by averaging you remove it being derivative work?
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| >My personal opinion is that the source data does not exist
| inside the model, so the model does not in and off itself
| comprise of a copyright violation.
|
| The "source data" does not exist in a ZIP file either. Neural
| networks are just a form of data compression like ZIP, though
| more opaque and lossy, but still, a highly compressed abstract
| version of the training corpus is encoded in the weights.
| visarga wrote:
| A zip file is not a good analogy to a language model as the
| zip can reproduce the original exactly with 100% recall,
| language models have very few episodes of verbatim
| reproduction and coverage is spotty. A zip file can only
| reproduce the original, but a language model can be asked to
| write custom, situated code. The language model still works
| if you block all the training data from appearing in its
| output.
| trention wrote:
| Potential output has nothing to do with the question
| whether the training data is "memorized" in the weights or
| not. To me, the answer to the latter question is "obviously
| yes".
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Like I said, it's a _lossy_ form of compression.
| samwillis wrote:
| The trouble is that these models are very specialised, and have
| an enormous corpus of data they have trained on. No human has
| read every line of open source code on GitHub, comparing what
| these "AI" models do to human intelligence conflates two very
| different arguments.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Considering the opinions here [1] and the fact that Microsoft's
| lawyers even signed off on something as seemingly risky as
| Copilot, it seems very likely that courts will not find Copilot
| to infringe on copyright.
|
| I encourage you to read the linked article and respond to the
| authors instead of making me argue their case for them!
|
| [1] https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-
| implications...
| lta wrote:
| I am very happy to see the starting to think about and gather the
| community around this novel issue. This sheds a new light on
| existing IP laws.
|
| It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus,
| such tool would not have been possible, hence the (IMHO)
| justified derivative work question. Companies and individuals
| have spent decades building this open corpus and in exchange they
| deserve to have their will (aka license) respected. For a
| significant fraction of those, it means sharing the derivative
| works under the same license.
|
| It's pretty sad, though not surprising to many of us, to see that
| Microsoft isn't really playing openly and nicely with the FOSS
| community about those issues.
|
| When people started saying Microsoft had changed and was a fair
| player now, I had my doubts, and this doesn't help.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus,
| such tool would not have been possible
|
| How is that obvious? I am relatively certain that MS committing
| their entire code base as training material would do the trick,
| if that's what it took. Or, additionally, maybe licensing some
| other huge high quality code bases (restricted to just training
| the ai) for a few million bucks? It's not like it would be an
| issue to find vendors happy to remonetize their already written
| code.
|
| Given what's at stake here and who sits at the helm, I don't
| see how Copilot would not or could not be moved forwards
| regardless.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| > I am relatively certain that MS committing their entire
| code base as training material would do the trick, if that's
| what it took
|
| I am more than relatively certain that it would provide far
| worse quality, if not be unusable by developers on average.
| abirch wrote:
| To be honest, I wish that better code repositories we're
| given more weight. Microsoft's should be given more weight,
| especially considering the security issues that is
| autosuggested by copilot.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09293
| rmbyrro wrote:
| That's absurd. One company, even the size of Microsoft,
| cannot possibly cover all nuances, programming languages,
| patterns, architectures that the entire OSS is providing.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Nor do they have to. The goal of Copilot is not to simulate
| the maximum number of OSS contributors and idiosyncrasies.
| californical wrote:
| If that would've worked, then they should've done that
| instead though! Why create such huge possibility for legal
| battles for themselves (and their users)? I would feel much
| more comfortable with the idea of using copilot if I was sure
| that I wouldn't generate copyright infringing code, which
| Microsoft could guarantee if they had licensed the training
| data.
|
| There would be huge benefits to going that route, but they
| didn't. That's what makes me think that it's impossible
| because they needed a huge volume of data, and the only way
| to get enough was to take it without consent of the license
| owners.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > Why create such huge possibility for legal battles for
| themselves (and their users)?
|
| Simple: They disagree with you on the risk of that
| happening and the potential cost if it did.
| lta wrote:
| I wish they were as careful of other's people's code IP
| as they're with their own.
|
| If this is _not_ derivative work, how come they didn 't
| use their own codebase instead of taking the opensource
| ones ? Either their codebase is low quality, either they
| think it would leak their IP, meaning it's derivative
| work. Neither solution sounds great for them
| wrycoder wrote:
| MS may well have something similar internally, they are
| just never going to expose it publicly. They get the best
| of both worlds.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > how come they didn't use their own codebase instead of
| taking the opensource ones?
|
| Convenience probably.
|
| Using their own code would have required them to
| coordinate inhouse, and carefully and expensively
| sanitise everything, because committing their code, which
| was largely never written to be open sourced, to run the
| wild Copilot experiment (which it still is at this point)
| probably seemed a little riskier than they liked,
| potentially creating some kind of security disaster. So
| just use the stuff that is already in the open and thus
| better be secure enough as is, at what they apparently
| deem the relatively small risk and costs of lawsuits
| happening.
|
| I could also see them wanting to test the water on how
| the license thing flies.
| lobocinza wrote:
| The old "embrace, extend, extinguish".
| tzs wrote:
| > It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus,
| such tool would not have been possible, hence the (IMHO)
| justified derivative work question.
|
| Note though that a work not being possible without your work is
| not sufficient to make that work a derivative work of your
| work. It just suggests that you need to take a closer look at
| the relationship between your work and the other work.
|
| For example Windows applications, even ones that make intimate
| use of the behavior of Windows and would take significant
| rewrites to port elsewhere or to run under current Windows
| compatible operating systems like ReactOS or under things like
| Wine, are not automatically derivative works of Windows.
|
| To be a derivative work the work has to include copyrighted
| elements from your work in a way that is not covered by fair
| use. That's why clean room reverse engineering works--by making
| sure the coders do not have access to the work being reverse
| engineered they cannot copy any copyrighted elements from it
| and so cannot produce a derivative work.
|
| I suspect that under current copyright law it is possible to do
| something like Copilot without the output violating copyright
| but it may need to be more sophisticated than the current
| Copilot.
|
| From the few examples of Copilot output I've seen it seems to
| output stuff that would probably either be covered by fair use
| or that doesn't have enough creativity to be copyrighted. But
| from what people have said it occasionally spits out longer
| things that seem likely to be copyrighted and not covered by
| fair use.
|
| What may be necessary for systems like this is to couple them
| with a second AI that can recognize when the first AI is making
| a suggestion that goes beyond fair use and stops it. I don't
| know if it is currently possible to make such an AI. Where
| would you get a good set of training data?
|
| The above was about the output of Copilot. Another question is
| whether Copilot itself is legal. When you train an AI on some
| data is there a copy of that data in the AI? If there is then
| Copilot may be an infringement of the copying right.
|
| In the US copyright law defines copies in 17 USC 101, where
| they are defined as
|
| > [...] material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a
| work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and
| from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise
| communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or
| device. The term "copies" includes the material object, other
| than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed.
|
| Is a collection of neural net weights something from which you
| can perceive, reproduce, or otherwise communicate the
| individual works the net was trained on? Or is it more like
| some kind of hash of the work?
|
| My guess is that both the output of AIs and the AIs themselves
| are sufficiently beyond what anyone was contemplating the last
| time there was a major update of copyright to deal with new
| technology that to fit AI in we are probably going to need a
| major update to the law.
| lta wrote:
| The points you are making are excellent. I don't have much to
| add, but I wanted to thank you. The second one is
| particularly interesting and brings load of very interesting
| questions. Like, is it truly learning or just reciting ? From
| my limited knowledge about copilot, the latter might be more
| likely, so the copyright law might be triggered ?
| fartcannon wrote:
| Especially when it barfs out niche code with only a few samples
| verbatim.
| mirntyfirty wrote:
| Copilot, I'm looking to build an email client....
|
| "How about Outlook366?"
| Eliah_Lakhin wrote:
| Informally speaking, the idea of the free software movement and
| the copyleft specifically was born as a response to fundamental
| conflict between a business environment that in its ultimate goal
| wants to have a full control over the software and independent
| individual creators who just want to be free in creativity and
| are fine to share their work with anyone who also follows these
| principals in some way.
|
| The members of the movement are also quite often criticizing
| Copyright laws. While I agree that the law is not ideal, to my
| vision the Berne Convention foundations are on the individual
| creators side. Fighting against Copyright, in my opinion, is a
| shooting yourself in the foot.
|
| I'm not a big fan of the FSF and other similar movements rhetoric
| because of this(even though, I agree with some points). If
| creators just want to share their work with other people, and
| they don't care about the business "plutocracy", they can offer a
| License contract that would simply restrict the work usage by
| individuals only. It could still be a free of charge License that
| would allow even commercial use of the work, but the License
| should grant permissions to individuals only who are not
| representing a 3rd party interests(a business in particular).
| Such License is not a FOSS License in common sense, but in my
| opinion it could solve the initial goals laying behind the FOSS
| movements true intentions.
| enriquto wrote:
| > the idea of the free software movement (...) was born as a
| response to fundamental conflict between a business environment
| (...) and independent individual creators
|
| This is a skewed and very narrow view. The main contrast is not
| between "businesses" and "individual creators", but between
| people who control and people who use software. For example,
| between governments that hire programmers to write software,
| and citizens that get to use this software. The idea of the
| free software movement is that users of any software should
| have the right to know exactly what the software does, and to
| change it as they see fit. This has really nothing to do with
| business.
|
| > The members of the movement are also quite often criticizing
| Copyright laws.
|
| Do you have a reference for that? My impression is that the FSF
| is quite respectful of copyright laws, and acknowledges their
| importance. This is an orthogonal issue to that of software
| freedom.
| Eliah_Lakhin wrote:
| Thank you for your comment, Enriquto!
|
| > Do you have a reference for that?
|
| I didn't talk just about FSF, but about the free software
| movement in general. Of course individual members may have
| different points of view.
|
| For reference example. In the chapter "On Copyleft Maximalism
| and Unilateral Capitulation" of the first Article in the
| Thread's link:
|
| """
|
| Draconian copyright law generally horrifies software freedom
| activists for good reason. Nearly all copyleft activists
| would prefer a true, multilateral rewriting of copyright
| rules that prioritized the interest of the general public and
| software rights. Copyleft exists primarily because of the
| long-standing political non-viability of a copyright law
| reboot. Nothing has changed in this regard; if anything,
| changing legislation has become an even more expensive
| lobbying proposition than it was at copyleft's advent.
| Copyleft activists should expect, indefinitely, for
| proprietary software companies and media oligarchs to control
| copyright legislation.
|
| """
|
| Source: https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/if-software-is-
| my-copi...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I don't yet have any strong opinions, just thoughts.
|
| One thought is that in construction you will learn to do things
| through others teaching you. And then you'll do them at future
| sites, and they'll be nearly identical. There's only so many ways
| to build walls or run electrical, etc. to code.
|
| I think coding is often similar. Let's not fool ourselves: a lot
| of what we write isn't novel or interesting or challenging. It's
| the total end product that is.
| Varqu wrote:
| And copilot is doing exactly this - it's a tool, like a plumber
| box.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well the way electrical is run isn't copyrighted and is, in
| fact, constrained by building codes.
|
| That said, to my non-legal mind, I don't see Copilot as being
| that much different from taking a code block from a book or
| Stack Overflow or wherever to implement some function. Clearly
| there are _some_ limits; Copilot probably couldn 't lift an
| entire grammar checker or whatever. But people reuse function
| templates and the like _all the time_ and no one generally
| cares. And I doubt most people upset about Copilot really want
| the copyright police scrutinizing every single line of code.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| > Well the way electrical is run isn't copyrighted
|
| I think that's another item I keep thinking about. Why should
| code be copyrightable? Especially when so much of it is just,
| like plumbing, just plumbing.
|
| I think I might share your thoughts. Isn't copilot just a
| template/boilerplate generator but on steroids?
|
| If anything, I think Copilot is forcing the industry to
| recognize: a lot of the code people write is not the valuable
| or interesting part. The real value is in figuring out what
| to write and in what way it should all be connected together
| and interacted with.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Why should code be copyrightable?
|
| This was an open question for a long time. Is it just a set
| of functional instructions about how to do something (which
| wouldn't typically be copyrightable) or is it a creative
| work?
|
| It wasn't even an interesting question in the early part of
| the computer industry because software was mostly something
| created so that companies could sell hardware. Or it was
| written for internal use.
|
| However, in 1974 the Commission on New Technological Uses
| of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) was established in the US and
| decided computer programs were in general copyrightable.
| Congress added this to copyright law in 1980.
| wrycoder wrote:
| I'd be interested in Eben Moglen's views on the matter. And
| Stallman's.
| samwillis wrote:
| This extends so much further than just GitHub and open source.
| Almost all "AI" based generative tools are trained on public
| datasets, in some cases they have licensed these datasets, but my
| understanding is that they are often just trained on the "public"
| internet. There is currently clear legal protection of scraping,
| however you can't "republish" that data, only significant
| derivative work. I don't know if these tools fall into that
| category - IANAL - but that's the billion dollar question. The
| text/language and image generation are all capable of outputting
| results that are clearly based on particular input imagery.
|
| This is such an important debate to have and my fear is that the
| companies investing in this tech have deep pockets, the lobbying
| around it could result in a unbalanced outcome. This isn't really
| an area where "move fast and break things" is necessarily the
| right process.
|
| Exciting though to see where this technology could lead, co-pilot
| blows my mind at times.
| leereeves wrote:
| At some point image generation tools will be good enough to
| create recognizable images of Disney and Marvel characters, and
| the legal question will become very important in Washington.
|
| But what we mere citizens have to say about it, I fear, won't
| matter much.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| >At some point image generation tools will be good enough to
| create recognizable images of Disney and Marvel characters
|
| They already are. Even Dall-E mini does a respectable job at
| cartoon characters (it struggles a lot with people,
| especially faces, but handles cartoons quite well).
| cdrini wrote:
| Some examples of Dallee generating characters of Homer
| Simpson:
| https://twitter.com/Dalle2Pics/status/1534718838377529344
| fartcannon wrote:
| So which licence will prevent use by copilot? I do not wish to
| feed the beast.
|
| First and foremost anyone who cares should remove their code from
| github.
| collaborative wrote:
| I never made my repos public and now it appears my aversion was
| justified
|
| Anyway, time to move back to bitbucket
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