Copilot has announced their plans to become a paid service.
So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company.
Generally, when you (for example) use GANs to learn from (copyrighted) images and generate new images, I see no reason why those new images should inherit any copyrights from the original image if the resulting images look sufficiently different. (Obviously, if you just train on 1000 images of Mickey Mouse, you'll get mostly Mickey Mouse, and you wouldn't get the copyright.)
Humans work the same way -- artists train on existing images or subjects/etc., and unless they produce something that looks similar to an existing image, they get the copyright.
In other words, I don't think training on copyrighted code violates copyright (UNLESS the license explicitly disallows that; maybe there will be licenses for that soon). However, if generated code is too similar to existing code, then that could be a copyright violation. In other words, the user is responsible to make sure they aren't violating any copyrights from their usage of Copilot. It may be useful to build plagiarism checkers for this purpose. (Or maybe they already exist.)
If you use Copilot, I recommend keeping track of things that were generated automatically, just so you can go back to change those components if necessary.
> In other words, I don't think using of an algorithm on copyrighted code violates copyright
It does.
If I were a master artist, my existence wouldn’t violate copyright, but I would certainly be violating it every time I chose to reproduce a copyrighted work for a client.
If you own the copyright to a work, you need to be aware that you also have rights to derivative works. If you're considering incorporating someone else's work into your new work, you need to be aware that you may be violating the copyright to the original work.»
https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-are-derivative-works...
This is the fundamental issue. They don't.
You can't sneak a camera into a cinema saying "don't worry, it works just like human eyes".
Neural nets aren't neurons.
This is the what copilot does as far as I understand
In my view, artists work the same way. If you ask them to draw Mickey Mouse, they (maybe) will. It wouldn't be fair to say that they are infringing on Disney's copyright by storing images of Mickey Mouse in their brain. But their version of Mickey Mouse won't be copyrightable (unless they add parody/significant creativity etc.).
If we perform an _exact_ simulation of a human brain such that it believes it is a human, how will copyright law work? (Maybe it will own the copyright and turning the simulation off would be robocide. Okay, enough sci-fi.) If we remove consciousness and all that from the simulation, will the copyright go to its creator?
I saw in a couple other comments saying that machine learning is "just an algorithm"... But is machine learning sufficiently different from the way some parts of the human brain work to warrant being held to different standards?
My opinion is that it's reasonably similar and should have the same privileges that humans enjoy -- learning from whatever's in sight that is not explicitly marked as "for authorized personnel only".
But I think eventually we are at level of what is the minimum required duplicate to define something as duplicate. (I think this is more of a problem of music, similar songs etc)
I think main problem is we are not yet there (exact simulation of human brain), we are more like 'convince people to you are exact simulation of brain' stage.
Also another problem here is 'self trained/directed' vs 'trained/directed by someone'. Imagine I have a human artist (never seen Mickey Mouse), and in front of me some Mickey Mouse art, if I am giving directions to draw a mouse, then saying make in cartoon style, then saying make ears bigger, etc. Till I get the Mickey Mouse reasonably similar, even maybe exactly to the pixel in front of me, is it copyright violation, I wouldn't maybe 100% yes, but I am very closer to that.
It might not be illegal, but for a lot of us it feels unethical. IMO licenses should list what they allow versus what they forbid. In other words, if something isn’t explicitly allowed it should be assumed to be forbidden.
We need similar protections for personal data too. Tech companies have gotten too used to ingesting data and profiting from it without asking for consent. I’m willing to bet that had GitHub asked repo owners whether GH could use their work to train a new product, most would have said no, much like what happened when Apple asked iOS users if they were ok with Facebook tracking them.
If the copilot would have been trained on open source software e.g. to discover bugs, bad code style, or other things "learned" by analyzing existing code and using the results of this analysis as a metric for judging code, it wouldn't be a copyright problem. But creating new code based on what it "learned" is a much more difficult field, especially, if it is "quoting" so literally.
This was discussed on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740001
A new license saying "this license does not permit use in training an AI" won't have any effect, because the claim by the trainers is that they don't need to license the work in the first place. Unfortunately this is likely to be something that's only settled ad hoc in court.
This is just business as usual for tech companies though. How many Silicon Valley businesses built their products on top of open source projects without contributing much back? Heck.. how many YC companies do that? When you see vital open source projects like OpenSSL struggling to raise more than a few tens of thousands in donations (it only continues through OSF contracting work), and libraries like Svelte barely clearing $30k, when you know they're used by Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc you can't be that surprised when companies do the same thing on a larger scale.
The entire tech industry and all the multi-trillion and multi-billion dollar unicorn businesses that have billionaire founders and millionaire developers working at them fall under the description of "would not be possible without public, open-source code" and "will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data."
We can't reasonably claim there's anything wrong with a company building a product on the back of open source work when literally all of us do that as well. The only difference with Copilot is scale.
The fact that the license allows you to do this is great; the fact that people actually do is not.
Only if the code is distributed. SaaS can be (and is) used to get around this.
It is still quite rude to do that though.
If I copy the code line by line with my eyes and keyboard, then the code briefly doesn't exist, but the instructions to recreate it do. Copying it is then a two-phase process: first I read the code, then I type it in. It is clear that I'm allowed to look at the code, so it's the action of typing it in that violates copyright. In the same way, distributing Copilot doesn't necessarily break copyright, but using it may.
https://twitter.com/stefankarpinski/status/14109710611816816...
Copyright was established (much) after the printing press made copying so easy.
We now need protection against machine learning (learnright?) because the only way to not work for Microsoft for free now is to not release your source code... so not open source. Remember when people said that Microsoft changed its mind on open source?
We cannot (are not allowed to, by law, contracts etc.) open source everything we write. I think the most important contribution is not funding but to contribute in some way or another for most.
Having said that, it is disheartening that important projects lack even basic funding. Is this getting better? There are also success stories that pop up with funding and donations becoming easier.
For companies open source funding can be a major thing to improve their relationship with the wider software community. It is a signal that they are interested in sustainability of software and collaboration. And it is a form of recognition for the authors.
Edit:
I just realized we are talking about GitHub here. They are a major contributor to open and free software as they provide free hosting and tooling. I'm not saying this absolves them of everything they do with Copilot, but I'm very, very happy to have such an amazing service freely available and many others are too.
Edit: I don't really know what things would be like without GitHub. Same with YouTube and Facebook. I don't assume any of these have a net positive impact, though.
They took my work, removed my name and trained an advanced pattern matching technique to try to make code like mine and then sell it. It’s so obviously ethically questionable it’s insane.
Developers are absolutely pissed about this, and rightfully so.
Fairly straight forward solution to your very unique problem.
It’s such a BS argument to say “your license didn’t anticipate the future, it’s your fault.” No, that’s not how law works.
Furthermore, law is not ethics. I said it’s ethically questionable because that’s what matters. Not if a court will find Microsoft guilty of some kind of overreach.
Anybody with even passing knowledge of law knows this, so please, stuff it somewhere.
It literally is though.
You don't get to change your mind on an agreement because something happened that you didn't expect.
The best question to ask yourself is if you would be annoyed as much if a company like Black Duck did a similar training or analysis with their OpenHub (openhub.net)?
I think one could even make a case for training an AI in this manner from the leaked Windows code: copyright law treats these generally as "fair use", though how you gained the copy of the code might still be illegal.
IANAL though :)
Copilot doesn't comply with opensource licenses, so authors of Copilot lost the right to use opensource licensed code permanently, until they settle the case with authors of the code.
It’s also common to see GPL license for non-commercial usage and paid licenses for commercial usage.
If CC-BY-NC prohibits commercial use, it is not an open source or free software license (which have compatible definitions, but differ in motivations).
AFAIK, Creative Commons was set to create a set of licenses in the spirit of open source for creative works, and I wouldn't expect them to be open source at all.
You are likely using the wrong license then.
Rare exceptions are not acceptable in other situations.
If you, on rare exceptions, include copyrighted songs in your YouTube videos you still get strikes.
Citibank couldn't recover 900 million dollars it transferred too soon just because it was a rare mistake.
Microsoft shouldn't get a pass.
If I learn programming from a book that is copyrighted and use a small snippet (for example, how to do a particular kind of sort) from it in my own program, am I violating a copyright?
However, if you copy an example from a book into a code, then very often it's fair use, but if you copy the same example from a book into your own book, then very often it's a copyright infringement, unless explicitly allowed by the book license.
We have a duty as practitioners in the industry to call it out when we see something wrong. If even devs aren't calling bullshit on Copilot, the media won't care, courts won't care, and it will be declared legal, and future theft will be normalized.
Its ridiculous how we all see the big tech companies doing various kinds of terrible shit and then the next new shiny thing comes along and everyone forgets all about it? Are you goldfish? What will it take to get someone to actually give a shit and stop supporting this kind of product/behavior?
Just like you're endorsing being sponsored and effectively stealing GitHub's bandwith? :)
> We have a duty as practitioners in the industry to call it out when we see something wrong.
It's wrong both ways. You accepted the service from GitHub, the free one where you get to open your account, host your code, share it etc.
What exactly did you expect? To be served for free for your entire lifetime?
Please, get off the moral highground. You ate the devil fruit, now you're whining about it. You should be smart enough to know that this kind of whining will get you nowhere. Just quit.
Yes its free, no they did not tell me or ask for my permission before using the code in this way. Free does not give them the right to break existing laws and licenses. Its pretty simple.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...
In my understanding your reading is that users uploading code that they don't own the copyright to, but otherwise have the right to copy through a license, are in violation with the ToS in general.
My reading is that the license grant only applies to "Your Content" as defined in the ToS, and otherwise users are free to upload code with permissive license and it _does not grant_ additional licenses to Github.
> Certainly the GitHub TOS grants them some common-sense ability to copy the code you upload so that they can usefully host it. Can you point to the portion that allows them to use it for Copilot?
> Because I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Section D4:
> > This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service...
> The “Service” refers to the applications, software, products, and services provided by GitHub, including any Beta Previews.
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that the vitriol around Copilot stems from five factors that distinguishes it from Google:
(1) The length of the suggestions alongside some of Copilot's marketing demonstrated that perhaps non-trivial replacement of engineers with AI might not be as far-fetched or far away as most people thought. Google's autocomplete has yet to make me feel replaceable.
(2) The content of the training data had a clearer intrinsic commercial value, making perceived license violations feel more 'real'.
(3) GitHub (historically) didn't have the same reputation as Google for training AI models on data uploaded to its free services. People likely (mis)placed some trust in GitHub when they uploaded code, and this backlash is part of the adjustment process.
(4) The indication that Copilot will eventually be a paid commercial service, effectively building a commercial service off the backs of millions of open source developers. While this is perfectly legal and common across all industries, it doesn't feel good.
(5) Copilot spitting out raw training data really doesn't help its image.
Not that this excuses GitHub/Microsoft in any way, this was an obvious outcome and they're morally and legally responsible.
It doesn't matter whether the code is GPL or MIT or BSD. If Copilot reproduces it in your codebase, you're violating the license anyway - almost all FLOSS licenses carry an attribution requirement, which Copilot does not and can not reproduce[0].
The difference between GPL and MIT is whether you have to release your source code, or just add a blurb in README. It's a big one, but it's downstream from the core problem: with Copilot, you won't even know when you're violating some license - much less what to do about it.
--
[0] - The whole point of a DNN model is to pre-mix the inputs in training, so that responses to queries are cheap and fast. This comes at the cost of making it impossible to reverse-query the model, so the only way for Copilot to give correct attribution would be to take its output and run a search on the training data, which would kill all the costs savings they won by using a neural network.
And as this famous example[0] shows, the GAN is able to reproduce what is unquestionably copyrighted material from those repos.
[0]: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
(And the design of copilot is an attempt to extract only knowledge.)