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Comment by jscheel | Hacker News Reader

I think Github should support some kind of variant of robots.txt in the source code. Maybe a common line in the license file that excludes it from ML training data. That said, if you want to exclude it, that's your right, but you should consider why you are open sourcing in the first place, and what about ML feels different to you than traditional human cognition.

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Github ignored licenses for this project and included code from all publicly-accessible repos. They claim it's not copyright infringement and you can e.g. use code from this AI trained on open-source repos in closed-source projects.

It's not as simple as that...

It's not clear to me how it is copyright infringement if the generated code is truly new. Of course, if some code output is very similar to existing code, then it is obviously copyrighted.

When you read code from an open source GPL repo and are inspired by it to write your own code, it's obviously not copyrighted.

When I read code, I understand it, its intentions, and its output. I'm not simply replicating things that I've read before. I learned about inheritance in java in school. When I go to write python, I need only look up the syntax because I understand the logic.

But what matters is the output, no ?

Also, some people explicitly avoid reading codebases to avoid duplicating by mistake some copyrighted code.

Not sure if this is true but I heard that it used to be forbidden to Microsoft developers to read open source code.

One problem is that copyright is not well-defined. They just have to convince a court that their use is "transformational" and not a "derivative work" and they're home free. Then it doesn't matter what the license says, because Microsoft isn't licensing your work.

No. Opt-out is exactly the wrong approach. Instead consider a flag indicating that "I'm OK with mu source being used for training AI models." i.e. opt-in.

The problem is that defaults are very powerful. I could equally well argue that the Internet Archive shouldn't archive my website unless I give them opt-in permission. Of course, if that were the case, the Internet Archive effectively wouldn't exist.

ADDED: To be clear, it may be fine to say that making certain things opt-in means that other things that many might value can't exist.

The counterpoint here is that the internet archive isn’t a for profit service which is claiming exact reproductions of other people’s content as “new work”

> The problem is that defaults are very powerful

This isn't the problem, it's the whole point.

Things need to be made opt-in because we want there to be a meaningful barrier to companies using data that does not belong to them in order to make money.

Why should the users be forced to do extra work in order for Github to do their commercialization "correctly"?

This is something Github/Microsoft started, something that only really benefits Github/Microsoft and that they were doing lackadaisical from the start by ignoring licenses.

You could say the same thing of people with a website that they don't want to be archived on the Internet Archive or indexed by search engines.

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