[HN Gopher] GitHub Copilot stealing other people's copyright com...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       GitHub Copilot stealing other people's copyright comment blocks
        
       Author : thecupisblue
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2023-04-10 20:17 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | teruakohatu wrote:
       | There is a GZ on Github who tends to write the following in the
       | header [1], which is different to what copilot generated:
       | 
       | /*
       | 
       | * Copyright (C) 2019 GZ
       | 
       | */
       | 
       | It is unlikely that copilot copy and pasted a comment block
       | verbatim. In my experience copilot might do something that
       | resembles this if the code is very common across many projects
       | and there is probably only one logical way to implement it. eg. a
       | function to calculate the area of a circle.
       | 
       | Edit: I replaced the person's name with "GZ" because I didn't
       | feel they needed be spammed on search engines because a LLM
       | randomly produced their name.
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://github.com/gziolle/promptastic/blob/master/app/src/m...
        
       | jeroenhd wrote:
       | Finally, copilot does attribution!
       | 
       | I suppose adding your name to every comment will help prevent
       | Github from copying your code without attribution, maybe it's
       | time to start doing that.
        
       | turtleyacht wrote:
       | Maybe it weights the beginning of new projects as having a new
       | license or copyright notice.
       | 
       | If the model has been updated, it would be interesting to
       | correlate with an uptick in files being created with copyright
       | notices up to that moment.
       | 
       | I remember `npm init` defaults to ISC, so it's surprising to see
       | a named copyright. Maybe author's most-used languages favor repos
       | with proprietary notices.
        
         | thecupisblue wrote:
         | Wasn't even a new project, just a new file in the project,
         | completely unrelated to the person mentioned in the comment or
         | their projects (checked their github projects to see if there
         | was anything remotely similar). While this is a blatant example
         | since it's a "made by" comment, what happens when actual
         | copyrighted code gets written?
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-04-10 23:02 UTC)