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Comment by yepthatsreality | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft GitHub Copilot regardless of legality to me is a direct attack on OSS in an EEE manner. It is an abuse of the platform. It should have been opt-in. It pushed me ahead to remove my repos from GitHub over to Gitlab (love that instant import feature), repos will be private by default. I will be deleting my Microsoft accounts too. Already off Windows.

I also think the software development community should consider poisoning the well, even if it’s already legally poisoned.

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Someone should definitely sue them over this, to determine if the model is a "derived work" within the meaning of the GPL.

Someone should also release a model trained on the leaked Windows source code ..

People have sued over similar stuff in the past, like Google training their language model on copyrighted materials. The legal consensus is that a model trained on a large volume of copyrighted works does not infringe copyright, even if it occasionally vomits up chunks of the input model.

That said, if you trained a model specifically designed to violate copyright I suspect the courts would have a different opinion. They consider intent just as much as (if not more than) what you actually did.

Do you have a reference? Does this cover generative models?

Here is a discussion of the Author's Guild v. Google case: https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-co...

The article says it is unclear if it covers generative models.

This is as good a starting place as any. https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright...

This might sound stupid, and maybe it is, but that’s the state of law right now. It’s possible somebody will drag out a big slam dunk case that overturns much of this or that new laws will be passed… but right now (as far as I can tell) Copilot looks pretty legal.

(Of course, talk to your legal counsel, this may vary be region, etc.)

It's a bit different here. It's just supposed to regurgitate parts of it's input model.

Assuming GitHub isn’t lying, no it isn’t. They claim the vast majority of output is original, much like how GPT3 typically generates original text (although can sometimes output inputs verbatim). If that’s their intent and they haven’t deliberately tried to make their model output it’s inputs verbatim, then they’re good. Remember, there’s a big sampling bias online towards people sharing bits of code that are obvious verbatim inputs - you don’t see all the ones that aren’t.

Moving to Gitlab wouldn't stop them pulling code into the model would it?

I get that it still makes a statement.

It would if the repo is private. But that defeats the purpose of OSS.

Voting with your wallet for extra points.

I personally don't understand the anger. I don't care if a human or an AI use my code. I open sourced it to be used by anyone, big corps included.

What you say only makes sense if your code is licensed under something similar to public domain. Some licenses, like the GPL, require derivative works to use the same license.

Is it derivative work though? I don't think reading GPL code requires me to only write code under the GPL license.

Could the derived work be created without the source?

No, simply reading GPL code doesn't poison you (though it does put you in an awkward position), but copy pasting gpl code straight into your codebase is a copyright violation unless you can prove fair use. And copy pasting GPL code is what Microsoft Copilot has been repeatedly shown to do.

First of all, none of this matters if the resulting code isn't distributed in some manner. For an internal app, for example, none of this matters.

Secondly, it's pretty much obvious that fairly trivial (and, frankly, probably not so trivial) code snippets are reused/reworked from various sources all the time. This makes it hard for me to see Copilot as this new and existentially harmful thing.

People use different licences, because they want different things, e.g. attribution, or that improvements be contributed back, or nothing.

It is harmful to open-source, because if these wishes are not respected, people will stop contributing and stop open-sourcing things.

For the GPL it matters even if it is distributed in binary form. For AGPL it matters if you make a service available.

AGPL projects will benefit from these huge coding models like everyone. This puts all code in an open position.

>> but copy pasting gpl code straight into your codebase is a copyright violation unless you can prove

This is not true. The copied code needs to be distinct and uncommon; a tiny snippet is very unlikely to meet this requirement.

That's true, but some of the copy pasting that Copilot indulges in would absolutely fulfill that requirement. See: copilot copy pasting quake's inverse square root function: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

Copy pasting a one-line snippet may be OK, but copy pasting a full function is already much more of a grey area.

The Quake case is a pretty non-central example, because that particular function has been copied verbatim into many code bases.

This fast inverse square root function is also getting old. If it was a software patent, which are not recognized in many places, it would have expired a few years ago.

We're discussing copyright though, not patents, which for better or worse, have terms of almost a century.

In the US, the copyright lapses 95 years from publication, or 120 years from creation, or 70 years from author death, whichever is shortest.

So the inverse square root function will stay copyrighted until 2100 (the source was published in 2005 I believe).

This is minor, but it's at least a bit older than that. Via Wikipedia I found a link to the code on a Chinese forum in 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20150702180504/http://bbs.csdn.n...

From what I can see it has only been "repeatedly shown to do" it when you explicitly try to force it to do it (e.g. adding those Quake specific comments to bring out the fast inverse square root code). I want to see a serious analysis of Microsoft's claim that it only happens 0.1% of the times. Has it actually been debunked?

Because when you OpenSource and use the BSD license, then they are in violation since they will not provide you credit.

No one should use this, because you could easily be a derivative of something else and you are not in control of your own license.

Making a small quote adapted to your use case and variable names is more like human learning than abusing GPL projects wholesale.

Who said GPL?

If you copy something from a BSD licensed software you should credit them.

It is only an attack on OSS if licenses like the GPL are not respected. If copilot simply copies code it was trained on, it is more of a threat to proprietary software, since any sufficiently large copy from GPL'd software would have to be GPL licensed too.

If GPL is respected, copilot may help many proprietary softwares to be open source re-licensed. That should be seen as a positive outcome from FLOSS supporters.

But it is not easy to predict exactly what will happen and how people and companies will behave.

Softwares? Software is plural.

Actually, they both are correct. "Softwares" has a different and older connotation to it, but both are acceptable in English.

I’m actually wondering why you would release such a product as it seems like a path to software developers unionizing.

If their use of GPL'd code is fair use, then they are probably not required to respect any restrictions the licenses places on the use of that code.

I welcome this attack, to me all code should be free of any restrictions, like WTFPL.

Information want to be free.

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