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Comment by blackoil | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>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.

That's not really Microsoft's problem as long as people aren't afraid of using Copilot to generate (potentially GPL'd) code. And from what I've generally seen from genAI discussions at work, people think very little about any legal implications.

If the output is substantially similar to GPL’d training data it may be infringing. Nobody disputes this.

However, copyright isn’t cooties. If the output is not similar, then it is not infringing regardless of how much GPL’d training data was used to generate it.

Indeed, that's why I said

>"How much change is enough" has always been a gray area for courts and humans to decide.

But copilot has been shown to generate chunks of sufficient size and specificity that as a layman it very much feels like "copied GPL code". And my boss agrees too - we have a blanket ban on generative AI tools in our work because it's not considered worth the risk.

> has been shown to generate chunks of sufficient size and specificity

Only when given chinks of copyrighted code as input. I don't think anyone has demonstrated big chunks of copyrighted code in the output when copyrighted code isn't present in the query/context.

In fact, I suspect microsoft specifically filters the output for that.

Suspend all knowledge of copyright law as it exists today for a moment and approach this hypothetical on first principles: a lot of GPL copyleft data is used in the making of an AI tool, that when asked for it, can itself recreate code similar to what was input... also, the creator of that AI tool will reap in all the profits without giving a single penny or even recognition of the value it guzzled from GPL data it was trained on to creators of original copyleft data. Is this fair? What do your scruples tell you?

No, of course not. We should probably revisit copyright law, given that it was written at a time when no-one foresaw modern AI tools, its capabilities, and its effects on creators and societies.

The GPL was never about money, recognition or even abut the creators at all. Copy Left was created “to promote computer user freedom”

Free Software already views all proprietary software as inherently immoral. So there is no need to take a detour of what went into making the software to reach that conclusion from that angle.

Have you used Copilot? It is generally not creating code similar to GPL code, it is creating code similar to the surrounding context file.

Transformers predict the most likely next token, the most likely next token is usually related to the surrounding context.

So yes it can create code similar to GPL code but it can only do that consistently when the GPL code is included in the context. So don’t do that.

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.

IANAL but searched a lot on this, this is very tricky subject legally.

To simplify:

- imagine all code Copilot trained on is GPL licensed. - we have a universal function `isInfringing(code)` that has access to all GPL code, and returns `true` if it is infringing some GPL code.

for a given prompt; if `isInfringing(copilot(prompt))==false` we cannot claim copilot infringing on GPL code, even it is trained on GPLed code.

so the problem starts here; does the piece of code copilot emits, if written by yourself also would be infringing ?

> so the problem starts here; does the piece of code copilot emits, if written by yourself also would be infringing ?

why everyone on discussions tries to bring "if a human made it"? a generative AI operates way faster than anyone ever existed and ever will and probably a person aware of the license & acting respectful towards it, will create something more sensible/plausible to avoid plagiarism

now having dozen/hundreds/thousands of humans substituted by a machine that makes money for some for-profit company is really fair? even if they were a non-profit, as someone pointed up, people who create the content that feeds the weights aren't recieving a penny! they already made money with it, they will make more & that is/will upgrading/e the state of gen. AI

for sure legal battles on people copying code from permissive licenses should exist but it's feels a different discussion

because discussion is around 'legal' and laws only apply to humans. On ethical side of the discussion, I tend to agree with you. But it is also complicated subject; 'fair' in general is complicated, all this, GPL/AGPL stuff born out of this subject. Hosting GPL code as SaaS is legal but not 'fair' for example.

If one was sufficiently inspired by code A when writing code B, then it is a derivate work. This is a core tenet of copyright law.

At what measure is one sufficiently inspired for it to be a derivate work? That is up to courts to decide.

yeah the problem here is there is no 'code A' usually, it is more like: 1000s of GPLed code (A1, A2, ... An )

Technically when you get a piece from each, there is no infringement legally. ( as they have all different copyright holders )

From my understanding of a blog post by GitHub last year, they are planning to launch a tool to find similar code to what emitted by CoPilot, implying that CoPilot does not mix multiple sources for a single function, but derives a code block it found with a similar functionality (or maybe bigger blocks with similar functionality, IDK).

If CoPilot indeed derives a function (or a functional block) from a single source, it might plainly violate the license of the repository where it derives the code from.

There are many questions, and nothing is clear cut. The only thing I know is, I will never use that thing.

EDIT: I remembered that people were able to make CoPilot emit their code almost as-is with the correct prompts: https://x.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554

So it's not we're taking a bit from n different sources, and generate something with that.

> Technically when you get a piece from each, there is no infringement legally.

False in ex-Commonwealth countries and Japan.

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.

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