Tool to convert copyrighted music into fair use
fairuseify.ml
fairuseify.ml
It's just a bunch of a sleep(random()) and visual changes on viewport and you download the exact file you uploaded
I've seen tons of comments here and on Reddit that talk about multiple instances of entire functions being copied verbatim, but the only thing even remotely close to that I've seen is the fast inverse square root, so I must have missed a few tweets or something.
There's been a lot of bikeshedding on this, but GitHub decidedly hasn't given enough information on how it works and what the training dataset is, and the fair use question definitely needs to be answered, maybe even in court - it's just a matter of time.
All non-private repositories on GitHub.
Pretty much says they did also use other sources.
The first is if GitHub had a license to distribute the code they have learned on. This is assuming that the code it produces is a derivative, which I don't think would be much of a stretch. For this I think most of the licenses that are used, GPL MIT etc, allow for someone to distribute in such a way.
The second is the user of copilot. They would be getting and distributing code where they wouldn't know the original license, but that wouldn't be a viable defense of infringement. To actually comply with most licenses they would have to follow the requirements.
In both cases I don't know if a fair use would really apply. Maybe GitHub could stretch the research aspect, but if you just use the code in your product there is no fair use.
I don't think that's easily settled. Is the code I write a derivative work of all prior code that I've learned from? The difference (IMO) is that Copilot has a much more precise memory than I do; I couldn't recall the exact text of a code example that I've encountered repeatedly even if I wanted to.
If you could it would be copyright infringement anyway.
The problem with full snippets of arbitrary obscure repositories being copy+pasted is that there's no realistic way for a user to know if that's happening without putting in more effort than just writing the code themselves, somewhat defeating the point. That's not really case when the first line of the file contains "(C) Someone Else 2003".
You consider a license file to be code?
You said "copilot just regurgitates code snippets", and the example given wasn't a code snippet. Of course it's relevant.
> if copilot is copy+pasting random licenses then it's definitely copy+pasting code as well
Not at all. Copy+pasting licenses is intended behaviour. That's the entire point of having standard licenses. No-one would want Copilot to try to make its own entirely new licenses, therefore it's very trivial to imagine a piece of software designed to allow for licenses to be copied verbatim, but not allow that for any significant chunk of code.
Copilot does not appear to be designed like that, but that doesn't make the logic correct. We only know that it isn't designed like that because we looked for an example of it actually copying arbitrary code.
> I don't see how this could be hard to believe
I don't care about believing it, I care about whether or not it's true. If someone claims to have seen Copilot copy+pasting code, and when asked for evidence their only example is it copy+pasting some license boilerplate, they're just straight-up lying - and worse, potentially drowning out any real examples that exist.
The license/copyright notice (and note that the copyright notice with the names of individuals easily invalidates your assertion regarding boilerplate) issue is that it's clear that no due diligence was done on this product. No one (at least no one with the authority to stop it) spent any time reviewing what this product could produce, because _producing a copyright notice with a random developer's name on it_ is so beyond the pale that even the most cursory review by someone who knew literally anything about the law or copyright would have stopped it in its tracks.
Here's an example from their own docs:
Compare:
https://docs.github.com/assets/images/help/copilot/example_r...
To: https://github.com/nilavghosh/OMSCS/blob/master/AI4Robotics-...
I wouldn't be too surprised either, what surprised me was the large number of people who explicitly said words like "many examples" and then couldn't link more than one.
> Here's an example from their own docs:
Thank you! This is definitely a much stronger example than the Quake one. Looking at the git repository it seems like this is generic startup code for a university assignment, so it probably shows up a significant number of times in the training data.
While it definitely makes sense to interpret a piece of code showing up several hundred times in the exact same format as being okay to straight-up copy+paste (e.g., imports, some boilerplate in more verbose languages, keyboard input switch statements), this does seem to highlight that Copilot can't distinguish between code snippets that are always identical because that's just the correct way to do it, and code snippets that are always identical because only one person did that thing, and it just happens to be in hundreds of repositories for one reason or another.
It also says on their website that the AI may generate api keys that look real but it’s actually just a “fake” key that the AI generated as placeholder.
I have had access for one day, spent my entire Saturday playing with while working on an addon for a game. I find it useful and most of the hints come from other code I have in the same files which saves me time or let’s me know when I’m too repetitive :)
Maybe this is what you meant, but that's already been shown to be untrue. https://fossbytes.com/github-copilot-generating-functional-a...
If you have access, link to the maintainers answer: https://github.com/github/copilot-preview/discussions/45#dis...
The answer references the FAQ which is what I referred to: http://copilot.github.com/#faq-does-github-copilot-ever-outp...
It's not important that the examples are really specific, the issue is that it does happens. This tool has the potential to infringe copyright (sure it does seems legal at some place, doesn't make it more right though).
Look at how EA reversed engineered the Genesis in the past [1]. They had 2 teams, one that did the reversing, and another that did the implementation. That made it safe to say that no infringing code was going through. Plenty of emulators developers try to avoid source code leaks for similar reason. Co-Pilot can't do that.
The fact that the copyright status of the code is hard to determine, doesn't means it's not copyrighted code nonetheless.
Personally I got nothing against this kind of technology, but I do have a pretty big issue with how it learn. Once people published their code on Github, they didn't know it could have been used to do machine learning and it's bad that it is. If Github asked for the copyright over the code to do Co-Pilot, I wouldn't mind.
> Greg Gillis composed the album using overlapping samples of 372 songs by other artists.
This article goes into it a bit more: "Girl Talk, Fair Use, and Three Hundred Twenty-Two Reasons for Copyright Reform" – https://jipel.law.nyu.edu/ledger-vol-1-no-1-4-pearl/
It splits music videos into small portions ahead of time and then later it reassembles them on the fly according to audio input.
I don't mind that copyright exists, I just wish it was better.
Also there's a power difference between individuals violating the rights of a big company, and a big company violating the rights of many individuals.
If Copilot isn't reined in, it feels like yet another case of "The laws only apply to poor people".
So, given that FOSS---which a large portion of the HN crowd depends on---cannot work without copyright (at least not in its current form), the recent discussions may be less of a surprise.
People write and share code because it is useful to do that, not because licenses require them to.
I think FOSS would do fine with no copyright, and in fact more software might end up open source if we had ZERO copyright... why not make your code open source and get back contributions when your code would end up being shared anyway?
I am positing that if licenses didn't exist, and anyone could do anything they want with any bit of code they see, open source would still prosper.
I am not saying this is the way we want to go, I am just curious about the thought experiment.
Compare this to something like the playstation 4, which used freeBSD as the base of their OS, and contributed nothing back to the project at all.
I think there were likely other factors that made it win out.
But I think that's the main one that allowed Linux to snowball ahead of the other Unix(-likes).
The only big UNIX vendor left was Sun Microsystems, and Solaris indeed dominated the 90s dotcom era. Everybody was running SPARC and SunOS servers.
It wouldn't be until the mid 2000s when Linux started picking up the pieces left behind after Red Hat started their server product and certification program.
For a long time, Linux was strictly a hobbyist OS. It later dominated by simply being the last one standing after everyone else fell.
And "for a long time" was actually a fairly short time. Linux began to approach feature-comparability fast, and ran on PCs, not $10,000 workstations (that were getting beat power-wise by PCs).
The UCBerkeley Computer Science Research Group (if I've got my acronyms right) was one of the recipients and went on to add on many, many features and releasing the result under the BSD license.
Many people built companies like Sun around selling BSD Unix, including many alumni of UCB.
Then AT&T got out from under the consent agreement and began selling its own Unix, System V. By this time, Unix was a major player in the workstation market (a market that has largely disappeared as PCs got more powerful).
By, say, the mid 1980s, there were many, many companies selling many, many varieties of Unix, all descended from the original Unix via BSD or via BSD+System V. Most of them had some unique, valuable features (Irix's graphics, AIX's LVM and journaling file system, etc.) and all of them had modifications to lock customers into their version. This is where the POSIX standards come from (second only to ecmascript market manipulation goofiness), and why things like Autoconf/automake and the much-loved imake (not really) exist. There was much in-fighting; Sun vs everybody else, everybody else vs. IBM, etc.
Then two things happened: PCs got more powerful and began eating into the bottom of the workstation market (PCs ran DOS+Windows, which was and arguably still is, technically inferior to multi-user-by-design systems like Unix[1].) And PCs got more powerful and began to be able to run more advanced OSs (think "memory management").
At this point, the Unix world began to conflict with the Windows world. Unix was technically superior, Windows had more public and developer mind-share. But the Unix world was still more interested in fighting each other and stapled all of their arms and legs to that particular tree.
The end result was that Windows became and remains the most-used operating system[2]. All (almost) of the commercial Unixs died (almost; there's still some animated corpses around)[3]. The two counter-examples are MacOS, which is completely locked to Apple hardware, and Linux.
Linux is the interesting case. Windows and commercial Unix all had a 15- to 20-year head start. But Linux achieved (mostly) feature parity quickly and did not break down into multiple, competing streams. Both of those are due to the GPL; you can fork GPL software all you want, but you cannot add a feature to a fork and expect it not to be back-ported into the original if it's useful. You also have a very hard time locking users into your fork.
The bottom line is that Microsoft won the Unix wars, because the Unix licenses allowed companies to take Unix proprietary.
[1] Modern Windows is kinda-sorta based on VMS, another workstation OS, but not really and then they walked that back, and so on....
[2] I don't really consider Android or iOS to be general-purpose OSs. And they're both rather their own little islands, no matter how much the underlying tech shares with the rest of the universe.
[3] The Free/Net/Open/DragonFly BSDs are, I'm sorry to say, noise. And did you notice that I had to mention four of them?
projects like openwrt would not exist if it weren't for copyright enforcement.
Personally I would be concerned about insert corp here accidentally stealing code from an open source project then years later going after the open source project for copyright infringement regarding the code they in fact stole from the open source project.
Copyright is good in limited quantities. The current multi-decade time horizon is probably what a lot of people are against, and not the concept in general.
And limited time period seems to be consistent through history. From the paper "Copyrights and Creativity: Evidence from Italian Opera in the Napoleonic Age":
> Comparing changes in the creation of new operas across Italian states with and without copyrights, we show that the adoption of basic copyrights encouraged the creation of new work. Moreover, we find that copyrights changed the quality of creative output by encouraging composers to produce more popular and durable works. These results generalize to a broader set of musical compositions and to librettos, as the literary component to the score of operas. Based on these findings, we conclude that the adoption of basic levels of copyright protection – not exceeding the lifetime of the composer – can help to raise both the quantity and the quality of new creative works.
> Importantly, we find that extensions in the length of copyright beyond the composer’s life did not encourage creativity. Performance data reveal that few operas were played after the first 20 years, which suggests that only the most durable creative goods stand to gain from copyright extensions. […]
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2505776
Copyright is a horrible system. Microsoft has been one of the biggest proponents of that system. But now they've clearly violated it. They should either join in abolishing it, or face its consequences.
Especially if you remember the phrase "to promote the progress of science and useful arts".
If you agree with libgen and scihub then you should definitely not see anything wrong with copilot, because what copilot is doing is considerably milder, they are not reproducing anybody's works.
If you disagree with libgen and scihub because they are illegal only then can the argument that copilot is infringing be made.
Yes, if those were the only two things being discussed, it would be.
But almost all of these people think a certain amount of copyright for songs and movies is good too. And I bet a vast majority of them support copyright for books too, or at least most books.
- Music is a vehicle for a common experience. Everyone knows the next notes of some Lady Gaga song. We feel like learning the lyrics will make us able to sing together if we were in a club, and share something with other clubbers. Any AI who would reproduce the voice and instruments would still not make you feel like you are sharing a common moment with the rest of the auditors,
- Hits are hits because we hear them a thousand times. It’s been proven that people don’t necessarily like it the first time. It’s the familiarity with the song which make us like it (or hate it when we’ve heard to too much).
- Even worse: We like some songs even more because we love the author. Be it because they are politically involved, have a cute face, has a nice life story, or seem to hide answers to life in the lyrics of their work - But an AI producing the same exact notes wouldn’t trigger similar affection from us. It’s like hearing our kid singing: Very cute, but we wouldn’t like the same song by another kid. Audiences have a genuine emotional attachment to the authors. It’s especially visible since the MCM revolution: Before MCM, music mattered; Now the image matters way more, bands have a face, a graphic style, a story to tell - and music could be as crap as possible, if we like the band it can still have success. MCM changed music forever, proving that AI can’t replace that feeling.
Can it?
If you knew how manufactured the music industry was, and how nothing of what you see of celebrities is true, it might as well be AI plucking our heart strings, because it isn’t “real” in the sense that I think you mean, authentic human connection over shared experience.
I'm almost tempted to believe that the people at GitHub knew this was going to blow up as much as it did as some kind of a challenge to the status quo of copyright and licensing, if only so that everyone would start talking about the issue. Why did the GitHub representative plainly state that Copilot was trained on all of GitHub's codebase without seeming to care about the pushback on Twitter and HN that was bound to happen as a result?
Guess fonts are still like this.
This would be a lot more interesting if it showed the various GPT-3 experiments at generating music and used that as a point of comparison.
What would those be? I’ve worked at a number of organizations that were (rightfully) paranoid about accidentally incorporating GPL code, but even there I wasn’t aware of automated tooling to prevent it, it was only enforced through developer vigilance.
You must do some CSI level code reviews. Best I'm able to do is figure out if code will work and if something can be done obviously better. Stylistic calls (beyond lint enforceable) are up to authors as far as I'm concerned.
And even then it's trivial to fix up naming schemes and such to march codebase - doubt that gets you out of copyright issues.
Copilot is neat. If you are concerned about it, talk to a lawyer and get their opinion.
In this case it’s not implementing the algorithm, it’s copying a particular famous implementation, down to the comments.
(And FWIW, patent terms should be inversely proportional to the number of patents issued in that category the previous year. This would automatically reduce terms in categories where innovation is rapid, promoting competition and drive to get to market, but preserve maximum protection for inventions in mature categories with a slower pace of innovation.
The Copilot algorithm didn't take this into account though... if it did, we probably couldn't complains about copyright infringement.
I don’t know, GitHub Copilot was an expected result (why would anyone propose to host most of civilization’s open source projects for free? SourceForge did worse with shipping malware into people’s binaries.)
It is a bit disgusting, but we programmers have done it to the rest of the world.
And I'm pretty sure I've done none of those things, so I don't really know where this "programmers are the scum of the earth" generalisation is coming from.
If you use "but there are other horrible things!" as a justification to trivialize one horrible thing, what do you think the outcome is when that strategy is applied to the world at large? Bingo, "nothing matters" and no consequences ever follow malicious behaviour, because there's always something else that's also bad.
Don't do this.
> Who owns the code GitHub Copilot helps me write?
> GitHub Copilot is a tool, like a compiler or a pen. The suggestions GitHub Copilot generates, and the code you write with its help, belong to you, and you are responsible for it. We recommend that you carefully test, review, and vet the code, as you would with any code you write yourself.
> Do I need to credit GitHub Copilot for helping me write code?
> No, the code you create with GitHub Copilot’s help belongs to you. While every friendly robot likes the occasional word of thanks, you are in no way obligated to credit GitHub Copilot. Just like with a compiler, the output of your use of GitHub Copilot belongs to you.
While you may be right, that contradicts what Microsoft has to say.
No, it can't; Copilot isn't a legal entity that can be sued.
Also, “can be sued” proves very little. Any actual or potential legal person can be sued for anything.
“Is actually legally liable” is what you need here, and it is at best speculative that Copilot ever creates actual legal liability.
DMCA takedown requests apply to hosts of user-generated content, which MS/Github doesn't pretend to be with Copilot (instead, Copilot is a first-party work that MS has stated a copyright theory regarding), so DMCA requests are meaningless. What you need, if you feel MS is violating your copyright via Github, is a copyright demand letter backed by a willingness to pursue a lawsuit against Microsoft, who have already stated that there position is that Copilot is completely within the Fair Use exception to copyright.
But this is funny too I guess
Edit: was out of the loop on the joke...
This is most likely a commentary on GitHub co-pilot and how the authors of this joke think that GitHub co-pilot is violating copyright and does not fall under fair-use.
I just confirmed the "processed" file has the same SHA256 sum as the original.
EDIT: I incorrectly labelled at Google co-pilot instead of GitHub co-pilot. Fixed.