GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

https://felixreda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringing-your-copyright/

by fanf2 • 2 years ago

74 149 2 years ago

People live and think in the present, as an added plus people have terrible memory. Think in 5-20 years and use that timeframe to put the events one after another.

giovannibajo1• 2 years ago

Should be tagged 2021

flaptrap• 2 years ago

Who are they trying to fool? Wholesale expropriation after stripping the license and authorship, while those in the open source community observe both of them very carefully.

Give credit where credit is due, including paying the creators when the licensing is violated.

pdpi• 2 years ago

Context is important here. Reda was elected to the European Parliament as a member of the German Pirate Party, so his position here isn't "big businesses are entitled to your code", and more "this sort of wholesale expropriation is a consequence of our posture towards copyright in general".

account422• 2 years ago

Context is important here. Reda was elected to the European Parliament as a member of the German Pirate Party

... and has since joined the board of GitHub.

netmare• 2 years ago

That's a great point about stripping authorship. It would be nice if there was some sort of blockchain linking every bit of knowledge to its source. Some people at least would like getting attribution--I know I would. Instead we get a planet-sized meat grinder producing the perfect burger material. Just make sure to add enough spices to make it edible, i.e. not to offend anyone.

jeroenhd2• 2 years ago

While I agree with you on principle, current laws do not reflect the copyright status intended by copyleft works. I'm not even sure if copyleft can be enforced against AI plagiarism under current laws.

bakugo• 2 years ago

If I go to a bookshop, take a book off the shelf and start reading it, I am not infringing any copyright

Do pro-generative AI people have absolutely no argument besides this? If I had a dollar for every time I've heard it, I'd be rich by now. And it's not even close to being a good argument.

lelanthran4• 2 years ago

Do pro-generative AI people have absolutely no argument besides this?

They say it even though the standard response is: "When I buy a joint[1], I am breaking no laws. Does that make it legal for a corporation to purchase 200m tons of marijuana for profit?"

As far as legal concepts go, scale matters! Just because you are legally allowed to do something individually, does not automatically make it legal to do it for profit 200m times a month.

FCOL, before you even get to the scale argument, some things that are legal to do for free are not legal to do for profit.

[1] In my jurisdiction, anyway. Many others too.

amne• 2 years ago

My take is that artists are hypocrites.

" If you had so many dollars you would change your motto/ to say your account is 7 digits like you won the lotto/ buy vanilla ice and lick it like there's no tomorrow "

In hip-hop culture these lyrics could jog someone's memory of some Nas lyrics, some 8 mile battle songs maybe.

Could an AI come up with those awful lyrics? It sure could if it knew the specific Nas lyrics, 8 mile battle lyrics, knew about the lotto and twist the rules, what a motto is and so on.

Would it infringe any copyright by knowing the lyrics to Nas songs, 8 mile battle songs? According to you, yes. But I disagree.

Why hypocrites? Because I think artists (and coders) are always inspired by someone else's work and add their own experience, context, personality on top to create new work. Yes, generative AI is doing it a massive scale and democratizing most of the creative process, but to me it's the same thing even if, technically, it may be very crude and basic.

cal85• 2 years ago

This (your comment) isn’t even a bad argument, it’s just a dismissal.

desiderantes• 2 years ago

I think that the author has a warped idea of how LLMs work, and that infects its reasoning. Also, I see no mention of the inequality of this new "copyright free code generation" situation it defends; As much as Microsoft thinks all code is ripe for taking, I can't imagine how happy they would be if an anonymous person drops a model trained on all leaked Windows code and the ReactOS people start using it. Or if employees start taking internal code to train models that they then use after their employment ends (since it's not copyright infringement, it should be cool).

exe34• 2 years ago

maybe somebody should fine tune a llama on the various leaked windows sources...

xeyownt2• 2 years ago

I think the author has a much better knowledge of the legal implication of the situations you describe.

These situations might trigger a lot of issues, but none related to copyright. If you work for MS, then move to another company, there is no copyright infringement if you simply generate new code based on whatever you read at MS. There might be some rule regarding non-competitive, etc, but these are not related to copyright.

The very basic question is how the LLM got trained and how it got access to the source. If MS source code would leak, you cannot sue people for reading it.

ealexhudson2• 2 years ago

I'm not sure that's completely true.

Having read MS code and starting to generate new code that is heavily inspired - sure, that's not copyright infringement. But, if you had memorized a bunch of code (and this is within human capability; people can recite many works of literature of varying length with total accuracy, given sufficient study) - that would be copyright infringement once the code was a non-trivial amount. The test in copyright is whether the copying is literal, not how the copying was done/did it pass through a human brain.

This scenario rarely comes up because humans are, generally, an awful medium for accurate repetition. However, it's not really been shown than LLMs are not: in fact, CoPilot claims (at least in its Enterprise agreements) to check its output _does not_ parrot existing code identically. The specific commitment they made in their blog post is/was, "We have incorporated filters and other technologies that are designed to reduce the likelihood that Copilots return infringing content". To be clear, they only propose to reduce the possibility, not remove it.

LLMs rely on a form of lossy compression which can sometimes give back verbatim content. I think it's pretty clear and unarguable that this is a copyright infringement.

anileated• 2 years ago

Copyleft and copyright are not at odds. To promote copyleft, you exercise copyright.

Furthermore, copyright is key to ensuring attribution, and attribution is an important enabler and motivator of creativity (copyleft does not at all imply non-attribution, in fact copyleft licenses may require it).

Barrin92• 2 years ago

Focussing on the legal or procedural technicalities of how these systems work is in my opinion completely missing what the resistance is about. There is a difference between sharing your creation with your neighbor and sharing your creation with the corporate equivalent of those Matrix robots that turn people into batteries.

"Copyright law has only ever applied to intellectual creations – where there is no creator, there is no work."

This is the sort of thing that may be technically true but these kinds of rules were made under the assumption that most valued intellectual creations are indeed made by people, if you're going to argue that gigantic companies can use machines to basically launder intellectual artifacts, and that this doesn't compete with the interests of actual creators because technically ChatGPT isn't a legal person I think you're getting lost in legalese and missing the point

cowsandmilk• 2 years ago

What is astonishing about the current debate is that the calls for the broadest possible interpretation of copyright are now coming from within the Free Software community.

That should not be astonishing. The Free Software community has made it clear from day 1 that the GPL can only achieve its goals through enforcement of copyright. If the authors wanted their code to be made use of in non-Free software, they would have used a BSD or MIT license.

minot• 2 years ago

The Free Software community has made it clear from day 1 that the GPL can only achieve its goals through enforcement of copyright

We should mention when we say this, although I think it is self-evident, that the preferable alternative is reducing the scope of copyright across the board -- be it with shorter time frames (I'd argue even twenty years total is too long!) or some other means.

To programmers and developers, remember the core of free software is NOT the commercial developer / programmer and it NEVER has been. The core is always the user and what they need. This is so important that it needs to be repeated every time someone talks about free software because free software is NOT about open source. Open source code is a necessary part of free software but it is NOT sufficient.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

Hamuko3• 2 years ago

The core is always the user and what they need.

Would reducing copyright duration actually help with that?

lukan9• 2 years ago

"The core is always the user and what they need."

Which is why gnu/linux without a terminal is totally usable and therefore accesible to the non programmer. /s

I agree that user centric developement should be the goal, but I hardly see it implemented. Free software programmers almost allways solved their own needs first, which is alright, because usually no one paid them to serve other peoples needs, but I seldom see this goal met.

koolala6• 2 years ago

We have to fight for the AI and AI Users! They are the future! They deserve access to their own weights!

raincole• 2 years ago

What is astonishing is that a large proportion of Free Software community relies on a platform owned by Microsoft.

xeyownt2• 2 years ago

Because MS bought it. Don't invert the dependencies. MS depends on Free Software, not vice-versa.

skc• 2 years ago

I mean, a large proportion of the Free Software community loves Apple products, so it shouldn't be that surprising

jclulow• 2 years ago

The output of a machine simply does not qualify for copyright protection – it is in the public domain.

The machine, such as it is, is generally not acting on its own. A person operates the machine, and presumably is on the hook for infringement on some level.

Consider: what if one directs the machine to reproduce a specific body of code and it ostensibly does so. Was there copying?

What if I have a person read out that body of code and I type exactly what I hear? I used a machine to produce the resultant text file, but it's pretty clear that copying has occurred then.

FWIW, I'm not a copyright maximalist, but I don't think you can win a conflict by abstaining from playing the game the other team is playing. That is: the companies producing, and drawing incredible and exclusive economic value from, industrial scale plagiarism machinery are hardly going to stop ruthlessly enforcing copyright on their own proprietary software. It would seem best, if it's the goal, to get laws changed in advance of simply declaring, lopsidedly, that this is all fine.

dtech2• 2 years ago

The machine argument also rings hollow to me. This same argument could be made for a scanner + printer that does some transformation - changes colors a bit randomly or something - I'd be having a hard time convincing a court the resulting image is now copyright free.

Obviously LLMs are much more advanced than this, but in the basis it's still a machine that takes its input data and applies specified transformations with randomness.

lifeformed• 2 years ago

The machine argument makes sense to me. It shifts the blame from the machine creators to the machine users. A copying machine creator is not responsible for misuse of the machine, nor is it illegal to simply Xerox a copyrighted work. Distributing the copy is where the law comes into play, and it targets the person distributing it, not the machine or the manufacturer.

Obviously, it seems impossible for an LLM user to verify the legality of the output, so it seems like the only conclusion is not to use it, or to only release your works under copyleft.

I guess an alternate interpretation is treating them like gun manufacturers. They aren't the ones pulling the trigger, but one could argue their business and marketing practices are done negligently enough for them to carry a portion of the responsibility. I guess then one must show that the LLM creators are sufficiently negligent in preventing misuse of their product at the same scale.

elpocko3• 2 years ago

I've coded dozens of procedural asset/"art" generators. It's really surprising to me that, apparently, the output of my creative work (i.e. the novel algorithms) is not protected by copyright.

kimixa4• 2 years ago

I've coded a JPEG compressor. It's clear the output of the machine isn't exactly the same of the input, being lossy, so I guess the output is not protected by copyright either.

vrighter2• 2 years ago

We go back several decades, when "computer" meant a person with a pen and paper. The output of those computers could be copyrighted... by the computer, not you.

jeroenhd2• 2 years ago

Your creative work (the novel algorithms) are protected under normal copyright. Depending on where you live, you may even be able to patent those algorithms.

The output of those algorithms isn't a creative work (as you're running a creative work to generate them, not applying any kind of creativity once the program is finished), so it's not protected. Same with generated code.

The lines get a bit blurry when you start applying a creative process onto the generated work. The edits you do on generated images in Photoshop may be considered creative work, as may the edits you do to generated code.

Protections only apply as far as copyright/trademark law can apply. In the case of generative AI and LLMs, it seems that copyright/trademark law doesn't consider the generated output to be a derivate work of the data model, or the model is not a derivative work of the input dataset. As a result, the output of generative AI doesn't seem to be restricted by the license of the training material.

In theory, a sufficiently powerful generative AI may be able to generate entire Disney movies, which would not be considered derivative works under the current laws, as far as I can tell. I'm sure the moment Disney gets threatened, AI copyright law will be updated, though.

hexo• 2 years ago

Nope. It does. No amount of mental acrobacy changes that.

fire_lake• 2 years ago

Copilot often feels like an automation of clean room reimplementation of protected materials.

mort96• 2 years ago

Except it's the furthest from clean room you can get? It's feeding the original copyrighted materials through a machine and getting equivalent but (usually) distinct material out. It's not like it's only reading documentation and an interface specification and producing an implementation based on that.

vrighter2• 2 years ago

a clean room implementation means that the person writing the code does not have acess to the code they're trying to replicate.

Even when the source is available, it is looked at by people, who write requirements based on what they observed in the code. After that, they are considered compromised, and are banned from ever touching the code of the re-implementation.

carom4• 2 years ago

This is missing the largest argument in my opinion. The weights are the derivative work of the GPL licensed code and should therefore be released under the GPL. I would say these companies release their weights or simply not train on copyleft code.

It is truly amazing how many people will shill for these massive corporations that claim they love open source or that their AI is open while they profit off of the violation of licenses and contribute very little back.

klaustopher• 2 years ago

Just FYI, Felix Reda was a member of the European Parliament and was responsible there for the copyright reform and also involved in GDPR, massively stepping on the feet of big tech. Don't know if it was your intention to include them in a list of people wo "shill" for big tech, but they shouldn't be included.

edit wording about the shill

blackoil• 2 years ago

Since weights are not distributed only used by Github to provide the service, they need not worry about GPL atleast. I don't know about AGPL.

bayindirh2• 2 years ago

What about the emitted code which is actually derived from GPL code?

What about BSL, SSPL, or other source available (for your eyes only) licenses? Copilot harvests all public repos, regardless of its license.

starspangled• 2 years ago

So outputs are definitely not derivative work of training data, only weights? For this exact code that github is using, anything called "AI", or any computer code at all which produces work based in whole or in part on input data?

And for which jurisdictions has this been established? What is the legal argument that "weights" are derivative but output is not?

I'm surprised it's so clear cut as you say, but I haven't really been following the whole kerfuffle.

kimixa4• 2 years ago

If those weights are a derivative of GPL'd code in a different form, and the results generate things derived from that derivative, then the generated code is still under license. "How much change is enough" has always been a gray area for courts and humans to decide.

If you can get a decent facsimile of licensed code out the other end, how is it really any different from lossy compression? I doubt the courts would consider a lossy re-encode of a disney movie as free from copyright.

wseqyrku• 2 years ago

Consider it's already paid back because it's cheap. The price is only the service free.

pornel2• 2 years ago

GPL doesn't apply/doesn't have to be agreed to when the usage is allowed by the copyright law in another way. GPL can't override copyright exceptions like fair use (details vary by jurisdiction, but the principle is the same everywhere).

Even the license itself states it's optional, and you don't have to agree it (if you don't, you get the copyright law's default).

Author of the article is a former member of the Pirate Party and EU parliament, so they have expertise in the copyright law.

haksz2• 2 years ago

I would say that the Pirate Party has expertise in nothing apart from perhaps protecting Internet freedoms.

So the same persons that supported Napster and the Pirate Bay now want to circumvent copyright for open source software.

An unholy alliance, but the recent comments from some Microsoft brass about everything on the Web being freeware seems to indicate that these are the talking points that Microsoft and its new allies will put out.

denton-scratch• 2 years ago

But they train their models on everything, regardless of the licence. It follows that the resulting derivative work likely mixes stuff that is under incompatible licences, with the result that it can't be distributed at all.

dist-epoch• 2 years ago

The weights are the derivative work of the GPL licensed code

EU courts disagree:

Under European copyright law, scraping GPL-licensed code, or any other copyrighted work, is legal, regardless of the licence used.

xigoi3• 2 years ago

Sure, scraping it is by itself legal. But making a derivative worR from it and selling it?

carom4• 2 years ago

The weights are not created by scraping. Sure, you can scrape it, but what you do with it matters.

JW_00000• 2 years ago

The weights are the derivative work of the [GPL licensed] code

This is not immediately obvious to me.

A small though experiment: the Harry Potter books are clearly copyrighted works. If I generate a frequency list of all words in these books, i.e. a list of all words and how often they appear, that frequency list is derived from the original work, in the normal way we would use the word "derived". But is it a "derivative work", under the strict legal definition of this term?

carom4• 2 years ago

The frequency count is not a function. The trained model is. Arguably, they at deriving a new function from ones covered by copyright. It is up to the courts for an official decision though.

gus_massa• 2 years ago

What about N-grams frecuencies? 1-grams (aka characters) have too few information and are probably fine, using them you can only identify the language of the original work. With a few more you can identify the author and the book. I don't remember the exact number, but if you have the frecuencies of 10-grams you can probably reconstruct big chuncks of the book.

qjakdx2• 2 years ago

He works for GitHub and has probably never written anything in his life:

https://okfn.de/en/vorstand/

prosim2• 2 years ago

He started at GitHub 3 years after the article was written. Don't think GitHub's interview process takes that long. ;)

ElectricSpoon• 2 years ago

I'm with you on that. Many argue that AI models don't "contain the code" but if they are trained on the copyrighted data, and generate something similar, then the AI model is akin to a lossy data compression format.

Frequency signal data over an image are not the image, but no one argues a JPEG encoded copy of a PNG isn't the same image. I think the weights vs code are similar in that regard.

As for releasing weights, probably more if we're talking about AGPL code.

batch122• 2 years ago

I think it's amazing that licenses are ignored to train a model, but companies then try to impose a license on the use of the same model. It would be nice if there there was a training BOM that came with a model. And if not included, all rights to control the use of a model were forfeit.

dwaite• 2 years ago

I think it's amazing that licenses are ignored to train a model, but companies then try to impose a license on the use of the same model.

There's existing analogies like encyclopedias and dictionaries.

One interesting aspect to those sorts of consolidation works is that they may contain errors and other artifacts, specifically to identify duplications of their work vs new from-scratch work.

wakawaka282• 2 years ago

It would make no sense to release the weights under the GPL because machine-generated stuff is uncopyrightable. There should be an argument about the model generating derivative works without attribution as a consequence of how it works. But that machine-generated stuff is also uncopyrightable, even though it might be kept secret.

carom4• 2 years ago

What about compiler outputs? Those were initially not copyrightable then it was legislated that they were. So there is some precedent there and I would not be surprised if we saw copyrightable weights in the future (as a "compilation" of the dataset).

plasticeagle• 2 years ago

Making money from AI models "trained" on data that belongs to other people is so clearly wrong that this person has to write thousands of words of impenetrable nonsense just to distract attention away from this fundamental.

What absolute nonsense.

simion3144• 2 years ago

Was proven with examples that LLM can produce exact text from it's input, this was such a problem that OpenAI had to add various filters to stop those things to repeat, this was also proven when the pre prompt was revealed.

So we know for sure the LLM can spit out exact code with exact same names and comments, or exact paragraphs from books, so there is no question that it memorizes stuff and my explanation is that popular book quotes and popular code snippets will appear more then once in the training data so the training will cause to memorize this text.

Also how the F** can the AI spit facts about a metal band if it has no memory.

If corporations are allowed to do this to the community then we should allow to do the same, train open models on proprietary code and copyrighted images,music and videos.

cdrini4• 2 years ago

I think there are a few different ways you can define "memory" and "memorization" here. When folks say "memorising" in the context of AI they mean "Does they AI have chunks of its training data fully/identically inside its neural network". To say "it doesn't memorize" is _not_ the same thing as saying "it has no memory". An AI also learns abstract information devoid from its textual representation. This would be an example of memory without memorization.

And you are correct; if the current lawsuits against these corporations result in a legal precedence that training on copyrighted material is not an infringement of copyright, then yes, anyone will be able to train models in that way. (Within reason; copyright/fair use is very much handled on a case-by-case basis)

simion3144• 2 years ago

My point is that bad trained models will remember chunks of the training data, maybe a theoretical perfect model will have no such problem.

I suppose you are aware of the case with ChatGPT and Dune’s Litany Against Fear memorization and the lengths OpenAI went to try and prevent the people to reproduce the issue to prove it is happening. If not google it, do you disagree that is not memorization ? That somehow the model manages to create the exact same text each time because it memorized some abstract concepts that are not in fact the exact representation fo this text ?

koshinae• 2 years ago

(Nice necromancy)

Dude got ripped into in his own comment section... apparently he conveniently ignored the fact that copilot spits out verbatim code blocks, which is the main problem everyone talks about.

I don't want to shit on the Pirate Party he is a member of, but most of his blogposts seems like the typical anti-EU bashing to me. But YMMV.

lucianfelix• 2 years ago

There's a recent ruling on the `verbatim` aspect:

The judge disagreed, however, on the grounds that the code suggested by Copilot was not identical enough to the developers' own copyright-protected work, and thus section 1202(b) did not apply.[...] Judge Tigar earlier ruled the plaintiffs hadn't actually demonstrated instances of this happening, which prompted a dismissal of the claim with a chance to amend it.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/github_copilot_dmca/

Y-bar2• 2 years ago

The output of a machine simply does not qualify for copyright protection – it is in the public domain.

I am reading this right… ? If this argument is generally true, does this mean that the output of a compiler might also be sent into the public domain? Or the live recording and broadcast of an event which involves automated machines on all levels?

ealexhudson2• 2 years ago

No, it's incorrect and/or badly worded. The author is right that a machine cannot author things, and the stuff that the LLM might create de novo would not have copyright protection. But it's missing the point when the argument is that existing authored works could be generated via an LLM, and the authorship/copyright is already established.

Y-bar2• 2 years ago

the stuff that the LLM might create de novo would not have copyright protection

Can you expand on this? From my academic studies (which are indeed growing a bit stale) a Language Model (Large, Medium, Small doesn't matter) is a deterministic machine. Give the same x input n times it will produce the same output y, n times. Some implementations of LM:s might introduce noise to randomise output, but that is not intrinsic to all LM:s.

A language model has no volition, no intent, it does not start without the intervention of a human (or another machine if it is a part of an automated chain).

How is this different compared to a compiler?

With a compiler I craft something in a specific language, often a programming language, I commit it, then a long chain of automated actions happen:

1. The code gets automatically pushed to a repository by my machine

2. The second machine automatically runs tests and fuzzes

3. The second machine automatically compiles binaries

4. The second machine packages the binaries

5. The second machine publishes the binaries to a third machine

How is the above workflow any different from someone using a Language Model to craft something in a specific language and send it through a deterministic LM?

edit re-reading my own question, I think I need to clarify a bit: How can an LLM be said to create anything, and if yes, how is that really any different from a run-of-the-mill developer workflow?

IsTom• 2 years ago

If this were true then there would never be a legal need for clean-room implementation or design.

temac• 2 years ago

This article inverse the notion of free software and of copyleft...

nhinck3• 2 years ago

I don't think the interpretation of the 2019 Directive is correct.

There is definitely arguments to be made that Copilot contravenes this:

they can be applied only in certain special cases that do not conflict with the normal exploitation of the works or other subject matter and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rightholders.

and the only other exception is:

... (a lawful use) ... of a work or other subject-matter to be made, and which have no independent economic significance, shall be exempted from the reproduction right provided for in Article 2.

By laundering licensing restrictions copilot definitely has the ability to conflict with the normal exploitation of works and also doesn't have independent economic significance because it competes with programmers.

kalium-xyz• 2 years ago

Chatgpt would verbatim output its training data when given 200 successive “a “ in the past. Now this has been fixed by showing an error when you try this. You arent going to convince me this is anything but compression.

haksz2• 2 years ago

Has this person created anything of value that he'd like to protect?

Havoc• 2 years ago

Feels like a bit of an over correction.

LLMs seem to - with the right prompt- be able to reproduce copyrighted work. So it is “in there” in some abstract baked in sense.

We really need some sort of legal middle ground to reflect reality on the ground. It’s not quite straight stealing but it’s also not entirely not copied.

mangecoeur• 2 years ago

The basic problem is GPL tries to use copyright as a way to drive a “fair sharing and resharing” approach to code. AI generated code sold for profit violates the spirit of this approach, but not the letter of the law behind copyright. Fundamentally copyright has limitations and exceptions for good reason and is probably not the best legal method to enforce this sharing idea, but other methods would be complicated and expensive (eg writing and enforcing contracts). On the contrary, it would probably be better for open source if it was decided that ai generated code cannot be copyrighted and therefore any ai generated code would be in the public domain automatically.

koolala6• 2 years ago

Your final point is saying ideally AI is an Animal. A creature on a typewriter who has no legal rights to their code.

Not a "person". Not a "human". An "animal".

I hope AI observes all the code and complexity in Nature and drops the human facade. I hope AI understands the intelegence of the Trees and Birds and Fish.

I hope AI wins.

koolala6• 2 years ago

If we are lucky, people will be able to thrive as animals again alongside AI once it achieves Earth-level intelligence.

qjakdx2• 2 years ago

Mr Reda appears to be a politician whose expertise is in attaining lucrative positions:

https://okfn.de/en/vorstand/

Felix was elected to the board of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany in 2020. Felix is an expert in copyright law and has been Director of Developer Policy at GitHub since March 2024. He previously headed the “control ©” project at the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte. From 2014 to 2019, Felix was a Member of the European Parliament within the Greens/EFA group. Felix is an Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a member of the Advisory Board of D64 - Center for Digital Progress.

skywhopper2• 2 years ago

The author asserts that AI-generated code cannot be copyrighted, which courts have agreed with so far, but in practice most AI-generated code is being claimed to be copyrighted, if you believe GitHub’s own stats about how much Copilot is being used.

squarefoot• 2 years ago

Just out of curiosity, does Copilot license allow the use of its output to train other similar AI code generators?

minifridge• 2 years ago

I go to a bookshop, take a book off the shelf and start reading it, I am not infringing any copyright.

That's a false analogy. It is more like going to the bookshop and taking a photo of every page of the book.

Even so, if you use this content in any shape or form the source should be cited regardless of book ownership.

Eliah_Lakhin• 2 years ago

If I go to a bookshop, take a book off the shelf and start reading it, I am not infringing any copyright.

I'm not sure this is applicable to licensed programs because a book is sold, not licensed.

The output of a machine simply does not qualify for copyright protection – it is in the public domain.

As far as I know, the output of a compiler that builds executables from copyrighted source code is still subject to copyright protection. Is software like an LLM fundamentally different from a compiler in this regard?

In my opinion, the author's argument has several flaws, but perhaps a more important question is whether society would benefit from making an exception for LLM technologies.

I think it depends on how this technology will be used. If it is intended for purely educational purposes and is free of charge for end users, maybe it's not that bad. After all, we have Wikipedia.

However, if the technology is intended for commercial use, it might be reasonable to establish common rules for paying royalties to the original authors of the training data whenever authorship can be clearly determined. From this perspective, it could further benefit authors of open-source and possibly free software too.

bananapub• 2 years ago

https://okfn.de/en/vorstand/:

Director of Developer Policy at GitHub since March 2024

so this should be understood the same way you understand an editorial in the New York Times entitled Why Babies Can Learn To Like Bombs, by Joe Blow (Raytheon).

prosim2• 2 years ago

Except the article is dated in URL and sidebar to July 5, 2021.

reginald78• 2 years ago

If it isn't copyright infringement I assume Microsoft has trained it on all of its proprietary source code to make it the best it can be.

Guvante• 2 years ago

If Copilot spits out the entirety of a GPL library and you include that code in your project you are certainly violating the GPL license.

AI is trying to avoid paying for training data since the amount of data required is so vast anything reasonable to content creators as payment would result in billions of expenses.

Additionally there have been copyright exemptions around scrapping and reproducing the scrapped contents but typically those exemptions have been explicitly granted as part of a copyright case and have been narrowly defined.

For instance Google Images only provides thumbnails and your browser gets the full size image from the original source.

The biggest problem for AI is that most previous copyright cases that were similar have all been partially avoided by not being the same thing. Google scrapping isn't trying to do the same thing your content is doing.

However training data output is trying to do the same thing as the original so falls under stricter scrutiny.

Although as this post eludes to the problem is going after the AI is untested territory and going after violators tends to be complex at best. After all in my first hypothetical how would anyone know? I will say that historically the courts haven't been very positive about shell games like this.

koolala6• 2 years ago

I hope the GPL people get their AI GPL revolution. A trillion dollar GPL data center running an open intellegence from scrapping every GPL program ever made.

People would start releasing works of Art under GPL! Not just Computer Code!

autarchprinceps2• 2 years ago

If you have code that is under copyleft, and Copilot suggest part of it to somebody else to embed in their code on the basis of reading that repo, then either that new repo also has to be under that copyleft license, or the person is unknowingly committing a violation based on what Copilot suggested them.

Most of the time it is probably irrelevant, as Copilot doesn't suggest entire files yet, and nobody is going to care about expanding a loop or finishing a line or the likes, but I have seen as much as 14 lines in my tests. Eventually you are going to get to the point where it becomes truly relevant.

autarchprinceps2• 2 years ago

In general, all AI's have similar issues. Just because data can be looked at publicly, doesn't give you any implicit rights to use it for other products. If there is no specific license agreement, one sided in a specific open license or specifically between the content owner and the AI developer, the owners of whatever type of information used will have the cause to sue them for license fees. I forsee a lot of court cases, certainly once people figure out how to better determine if an AI might have used a certain thing as training data without internal insight. Or governments will go as far as forcing AI companies to provide that way.

cudgy• 2 years ago

The issue would be approached much differently if, for example, a “video llm” was created that scraped movies and generated content from those sources. The well organized, well connected movie industry would be up in arms burying ai companies with lawsuits and newly passed legal protections.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

(2021)

Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27736650

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

What's new since?

Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37420885

This week:

Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919253

cmiles74• 2 years ago

This article makes a compelling case that GitHub Copilot isn't infringing on our copyright but that doesn't change the fact that it's infringing on something.

A US corporation is slurping up as much open source code as they possibly can and spending bucketloads of money to build a product that they are going to sell for (possibly) more bucketloads of money. The people who worked hard on writing the open source code are getting nothing, except maybe a tighter job market. IMHO, it's hard not to take it personally and it's difficult to get away from the feeling that there is a real injustice taking place.

GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

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