That said we used copyright traps at Malwarebytes, which is how we found out that iobit was stealing our database.
That said, lets say there's a new model that explicitly excluded closed source and copyleft licenses. Well, the MIT, MPL, Apache, BSD- they all say you can't strip their licensing off.
Okay, so to get to the spirit of your question, lets say Github managed to program a model that worked using only their own code or code that was explicitly put in the public domain. If Github managed to reproduce code that wasn't in the training set, then it can't be accused of copying it. At that point the argument could be made that it independently created it.
At the same time algorithms can't be copyrighted, but implementations of an algorithm can be, so if Github was basically just spitting out an algorithm that just happened to be implemented similarly to how some other code it wasn't trained on implemented it, then I would say there was no copyright violation.
If the comment is something like
//check fromIndex is greater than toIndex
then that is not any more individualistic or different than the actual function. Sadly, many people comment like this, on the other hand if it reproduced a comment with typos or something more complicated like
/* this hack is because Firefox's implementation of SVG z-indexing does not match how Chrome or Safari does it - please read this article ...url...*/
then yeah, then you would have something
https://twitter.com/StefanKarpinski/status/14109710611816816...
So you literally can't make it produce functionally identical but not verbatim identical code. It doesn't understand that the two are equivalent.
Also, such "functionally identical but not violating copyright" transformation is not possible to do, both given the complexity of the problem and the sheer volume of the data.
And training it on some simplistically obfuscated code wouldn't help - all it would learn would be production of obfuscated code. Not useful for the intended use.
it doesn't need to understand the way a human might do the understanding.
The pattern that the LLM managed to extract could include the structure, rather than the pure text. And in reproducing the structure, the LLM can replace the variable names but keep the structure intact.
I am not sure if copilot is able to do this, but chatGPT was somewhat able to (if imperfectly at the moment).
The thing that the LLM need to do is to convince a judge/jury that it has not created a copy, and that it operate differently from a transformation.
But it does - similar but not identical code are closer in the embedding space
That's what patents are for.
Consider a junior dev who writes a range check function while working for a company (so they own the copyright) then goes to a different company and writes the same range function because that's just how he writes code.
Has copyright been infringed?
Then the legalities can be argued, but an individual is in any case not remotely comparable to a service like copilot.
Why is this? Copilot in some ways is an automated way to search code & stack overflow. There is a very annoying website that does nothing more than show relevant code samples of various google search terms.
If the manual version of something is okay (eg: googling for code, finding it, fitting for a new and specific purpose that is similar), why would an automated version of that be any different?
Or sending millions of messages in an automated way can be illegal but millions of people sending a message is not.
The million messages example is interesting. Though, what examples are there? In what cases is something legal to do it once, but there is some threshold where you cannot do it many times?
The "sending millions of messages" is only perhaps illegal because it breaks terms of service. Or, the one message is perhaps also illegal but nobody cares to pursue litigation for one instance of an infraction. The point remains though, if an individual does something once that is legal - it makes that activity legal, period and full stop. No?
Note that my main objection is to equating a person doing something with an automated process. Sometimes it may be legal or other times illegal but it just clearly isn’t the same.
For the last point, I think the answer to that is a definite no in most jurisdictions. Laws and judicial conventions often allow differing circumstances to affect the legality of things.
Curious, any concrete examples? I can't really think of any where one instance is okay but many is not. I can think of examples where one instance is ignored and many instances are harder to ignore (and so is prosecuted), but overall - I can't really think of anything that is okay to do once but not many times.
Unsolicited robocalls are illegal in many places where human callers may not be.
The reason is always the same. Courts and judges will look at the situation and make a decision about what seems fair and what does not. It is them that need to be convinced that a specific use of a copyrighted work is permitted either through fair use or by a license.
Interesting analogy. "Ripping" something off an only using it for your personal project sounds like the "playing a movie for a few friends". Doing so for the benefit of corporation that then has thousands of daily visitors sounds like the "movie cinema" example. Though, in both cases it was an individual googling and finding how to implement a specific function.
"fair use" in copyright is pretty specific in that it refers to things like "you can play portions of a clip in order to comment on it." Or as another example, you can use clips/portions for the purposes of a review commentary.
"Form and function" is perhaps a very important crux here. Some things you can only do a certain way. For example, quick-sort, there are is only really one way to implement quick sort (or otherwise it is not at all quick sort!).
Personally I feel the copyright line is higher than a function, the copyright is on the collection of functions who together create a specific software. The individual functions IMHO are as copyright'able as-is a cog on a bike cassette, or the chain on a motorcycle.
Fair use seem to had a change in scope. Historically it seems to be mostly about things like "play a clip in order to comment on it.", but now we have things like google making a copy of all books ever written in order for people to search through them. Similar arguments has been made over copying news articles from news sites in order to put a portion of it in search results. A stack overflow-like search engine that trawled proprietary code bases would likely be sued, but in theory they could argue fair use just like google.
Practically with an LLM the programmer can focus on the creative part (handler function, react component, etc) while the LLM generates the necessary boilerplate for the ever changing frameworks and infra configurations. The programmer (and QA) would still review and test everything but would save time writing boilerplate and ship features faster.
yes
now if he had written a specification as to what the function should be, then passed it to someone else that had never seen the function and worked from the spec then he'd be ok
see: IBM BIOS
It's not nearly that simple. No real copyright case is going to hinge on what a single range check function looks like.
This is human law, it's not a programming situation where you can just apply some simple rule and get a deterministic answer. Context plays a huge part, among other things.
you realise this exact extremely famous function was the focus of a billion dollar supreme court copyright battle that went on for years?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...
(the entire basis of GPs joke)
Oracle's position on that was legally incorrect, for the reason I was alluding to: the relevant standard requires that illegal copying involve the core of the creative expression of the original work, which a generic range check function clearly doesn't do.
On a more serious note, there is a question whether algorithms and code blocks can be copyrighted, or if it is the _software_ that is copyrighted. Let's say I use websockets and you crib my usage of websockets for your own application. My opinion is that unless you rebuild the same thing I did, then "cribbing" is the long held art of "let me google how to do that". The artistic creation is the end software product, not really some measly embedded function that is boiler plate (form and function) for anything to work.
The 'form and function' clause of copyright almost certainly makes a range check function not a copyright infringement.
The _only_ escape clause is some random function that says how arbitrary a code block is. Or nontrivial.
A person or AI can absolutely be violating copyright via your example.
GPT-style models literally aim to reproduce the input character by character (token by token).