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Comment by agilob | Hacker News Reader

This means that also all illegally leaked codes from Apple, CDPR, Intel, NSA and Microsoft leaks are used in the models? iBoot, Witcher 3? Gwent? NSA backdoors?

Does the copilot still learn from new repos? Can I post github enterprise code publicly to let it learn from it?

Serious answers only please

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IANAL but the serious answer -- i think -- is that you always use things at your own risk, even purchased tools, and are protected via indemnity agreements. If there is no indemnity agreement (is is the case here), you assume the risk.

That said, if enough people are bitten by this, i'm not sure what happens -- does anyone know of a relevant case. One somewhat relevant case that caused mass pain was the SCO Linux Dispute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes

If you're thinking about the liability waiver found in many licenses and contracts and EULA and other, they are often void, depends on the jurisdiction.

The official answer from Github that they take all input on purpose doesn't play in their favor.

I'm speaking specifically about the indemnity agreement that you get as part of a purchased license. It is the opposite of the liability waiver -- it is saying that the software publisher will take on responsibility in certain cases and with certain limits.

For example, if I purchase certain corporate Linux licenses, i'm protected against being sued if something in the distribution ends up having misappropriated code.

Check out the SCO Linux Dispute for how bad things can get for corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes

Having an indemnity clause doesn't mean that a company will automatically defend you or cover your expenses. You may have to sue them to enforce the contract and agree on the costs.

The answer to what will happen when companies are bitten, is that there will be series of lawsuits involving various parties (including GitHub), dragging on for a while and costing a fortune. The court will decide everything in the end (who's responsible for what, who cover the fees, who own the IP, etc...).

The SCO case was rather frivolous, I don't think there is much to take from it, except that if a US company is determined to sue and they have a billion dollar to go on forever, there's nothing stopping them to and it's a lot of troubles.

Which is relevant I suppose. It's only a matter of time until there's a major case putting GitHub Copilot in the spotlight and an aggressive company with deep pocket (think Oracle and the likes). We will certainly be reading about it everywhere the day it starts.

I assume that this is a yes to most of those ?

Of course using code generated by Copilot from those would still be illegal.

See also : Napster (and other p2p), the bitcoin blockchain allegedly containing illegal numbers...

So copyright doesn't apply unless copyright applies.

Has Microsoft just killed source code copyright? That would definitely be a win.

it would be a win for Microsoft that don't distribute their source code

whereas for open source it's a disaster

There's nothing to stop the employees from distributing it at that point and even with copyright it gets distributed anyway, it's just not allowed to be used for anything serious.

Which seems very much align with what has Microsoft been trying to do for decades now.

Interesting idea considering Microsofts copyright-dependence has reached an all-time low point since they move as much as they can into their SaaS and PaaS offerings. Nothing left to copy, except for employees, but you don't need copyright to bash their heads in, legally speaking.

It would be quite impressive if this was a long-time planned "Embrace, extend, extinguish" move against Copyleft, with a casual acquisition of Github to make it work.

Finally, it beat the "cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches" after all those years, with its own tools!

Now it's safe to touch.

But who says the code has to be available to anyone but Microsoft?

Remember that Amazon won off the back of open source. Now all the open source servers and databases are Amazon products.

Why would you think letting copilot scan the code would absolve you of liability for posting it?

I'm not asking about legality of posting the code, but reuse of this by the AI and users of the AI. "All public repositories" is a wide net full of surprises.

No, it's not trained on all public code as the title suggests, it's trained on all GitHub public code (so public repos hosted on GH), none of the things you enumerate are hosted on GH.

There have been leaks of copyrighted code that were hosted on Github before they were taken down. There is also a lot of public code on Github without any license at all, which is not public domain but actually unlicensed for all purposes.

Just found Intel leaks and Gwent on github without any effort. Intel has a few repositories in different formats, plain copy of .svn directory or converted to git. TF2/Portal leak is there as well. All but 2 I found were made by throwaway accounts.

Now, was the leaked nt kernel source ever published on github?

https://github.com/PubDom/Windows-Server-2003 Second result on DDG.

I wonder if co-pilot will cough up stuff like these useful macros? Seems like a reasonable hack...

https://github.com/PubDom/Windows-Server-2003/blob/master/co...

  #ifdef _MAC
  # include <string.h>
  # pragma segment ClipBrd

  // On the Macintosh, the clipboard is always open.  We define a macro for
  // OpenClipboard that returns TRUE.  When this is used for error checking,
  // the compiler should optimize away any code that depends on testing this,
  // since it is a constant.
  # define OpenClipboard(x) TRUE

  // On the Macintosh, the clipboard is not closed.  To make all code behave
  // as if everything is OK, we define a macro for CloseClipboard that returns
  // TRUE.  When this is used for error checking, the compiler should optimize
  // away any code that depends on testing this, since it is a constant.
  # define CloseClipboard() TRUE

  #endif // _MAC

Just the kind of trick co-pilot should help us with?

>it's trained on all GitHub public code (so public repos hosted on GH)

This is exactly what I meant.

>none of the things you enumerate are hosted on GH.

Plenty of them on GH, if not src then magnet links

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