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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

I read these kinds of comments on HN and I wonder if the people complaining about copilot have actually used the thing for more than 5 minutes?

Most of the time copilot is giving you one-line completions that are heavily adapted to the surrounding code. It’s not “writing a book by quoting choice paragraphs from other books”. It’s fancy autocomplete.

You can direct copilot to give you anything you ask it for. If you ask it for an entire function, and you don’t give it any context, then you are more likely to get a snippet from inside its memory. But even when this happens you are unlikely to keep the entire snippet unmodified because the chance that it is what you were looking for is low.

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There are countless examples of people just letting Copilot's "autocomplete" run wild and it ends up reproducing many lines of code, often verbatim, and not just single lines of code.

You need to bait Copilot really hard to make it output that. To the point where it would be much easier to locate and copy-paste the code directly from the source yourself. It doesn't happen accidentally and it's not how you normally use Copilot.

A lot of people seem to think changing the variable names makes it new code.

The count is like 5

Considering how easy it is to generate additional examples, I think it's higher than 5. Five big, popular blog posts, maybe; but there are way more than 5 examples just on Twitter.

> you are unlikely to keep the entire snippet unmodified

Does that matter? It's not the end users who are being accused of copyright violation, it's the tool itself.

If the argument is that the tool is facilitating copyright infringement by users then it matters whether or not the users actually keep the supposedly infringing code, yes. If the code gets deleted immediately afterwards by the user then the claim of infringement by the user is farcical.

If the argument is that copilot is infringing because it merely displays an allegedly copyrighted snippet for a few moments, even if the user does not accept the completion, or accepts it but then deletes it, then that is a completely different argument because there is very little identifiable damage to the authors, which bolsters an argument of fair use.

The tool itself is infringing copyright. It possesses and reproduces copyrighted code without it's attribution. Full stop.

If I steal your television, it doesn't matter how much I get for it at the pawn shop.

You can Google and find GPL'ed code. That doesn't mean Google is facilitating license violation even though the Google search index posses and reproduces GPL'ed code.

> It possesses and reproduces copyrighted code without it's attribution.

To be clear - attribution does not fix GPL license violation.

You can Google and find GPL'ed code.

Emphasis mine.

This is different from asking Google and getting code directly from Google without the license - that is, without any indication that this code was taken from somewhere that has a license on all parts of it, not just the parts that Google didn't bother to show you.

Copyright doesn’t go away simply because you edit what was copied, deleting it may work assuming you don’t recreate to much of the original work.

There is a concept in copyright law of derivative work which means simply editing Harry Potter isn’t enough to publish it without paying for the rights to do so. Even highly transformative fanficfion can run into this issue when much of the original work’s characters and setting remain.

Disney gets away with this stuff by copying public domain works, copilot and it’s users don’t have that defense.

The key word is fan fiction. Almost every single word in fiction is a creative expression and thus copyrightable.

But works of non-fictional literature (of which source code is an example) have to work harder to justify their copyright.

Many of the snippets of code generated by copilot contain zero creative expression. They are just mechanical implementations of an algorithm.

You mentioned setting and plot. The source code equivalent is architecture. Copilot generated snippets are usually too short and too algorithmic to have their own architecture.

What makes a derivative work derivative is that it copies creative expressions from the parent work. If you edit them out, then it’s not a derivative work anymore.

Variable names are just as subject to copyright as character names, and specific implications of algorithms can vary quite a bit. Just look at the homework assignments of any introductory programming course.

Which is why even very short snippets of code have been an issue.

But what if not has the algorithm be designed for to extract that creative expression from the original work.

The use is only helping developing the algorithm by adding more value to the product in improving extracting the creative expression.

Copilot is a loose/loose game for developers, regardless on which end they are.

> it matters whether or not the users actually keep the supposedly infringing code

That's not how this works.

If I give you a blob of uniformly random bits and then give you a passphrase you can use with a tool to turn that into a Hollywood movie, and you do so, and then you delete it, that isn't not copyright infringement.

> If I give you a ... Hollywood movie, ... that isn't not copyright infringement.

It is.

I'm no lawyer, but judging how people reacted to DeCSS (09F9 1102 9D74 E35B D841 56C5 6356 88C0, anyone?)… why do you say this isn't copyright infringement?

Pretty much as if you buy a bike and it turns out it was stolen it's still not your bike someone who blindly accepts what turns out to be a chunk of someone else's code can still be unknowingly guilty of copyright violation.

Most of the time I enter a bank I don’t rob it

The authors of these comments have never used it. Their understanding of the issue comes from having seen a tweet where someone coaxed CoPilot into almost-reproducing a piece of code that thousands of people have copy and pasted into their GitHub repos over the years, such as the quake square root code or that matrix multiplication code.

They also usually have a Luddite axe to grind.

If they succeed in getting CoPilot outlawed (obviously they won’t), then I will rent $50 worth of GPU time and train my own, like some kind of cyberpunk outlaw.

>Most of the time copilot is giving you one-line completions that are heavily adapted to the surrounding code.

Keyword being "Most of the time"

Sure. I used it for about twenty minutes before I turned it off because it seemed clear to me that it wasn't much different than copying code from open source repositories.

That is absolutely not my experience at all and wish people would stop with the hysterical hyperbole. The tool typically produces code that would only make sense in my codebase because it uses internal types which only make sense in my code base. That is not and cannot be copyright infringement.

Sure, it's clever enough to swap identifiers correctly, but the shape of the code and techniques it uses were familiar to me from elsewhere, at times.

It's not unlike copying code from stack overflow and swapping the identifiers around.

How did you learn the shape of the code and techniques that you recognized? By looking at other code? Are you violating copyright when you are writing similar code yourself?

> By looking at other code? Are you violating copyright when you are writing similar code yourself?

It's certainly possible. Back when Phoenix reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS using published sources with a restrictive license, they did it by having one team read the sources and write a very detailed specification of everything that happens there, and then another team used that spec to write new code from scratch. They did it that way because if the first team were to write the code themselves, it is quite likely that the result would be legally considered derived work.

> By looking at other code? Are you violating copyright when you are writing similar code yourself?

In that order likely a violation, but it depends on the concrete case, always.

From decades of looking at interesting code.

I take care to attempt to not duplicate code; it's why don't use copilot.

> the shape of the code and techniques it uses were familiar to me from elsewhere.

Isn't this exactly what you'd expect an AI coder to do?

That's precisely the problem with it. AI, as it is, can be considered a lossy compression technique with multiple document recovery, convolution and interpolation ability.

Can't humans be considered a lossy compression technique with multiple document recovery, convolution and interpolation ability?

What is the specific difference?

100% agree. This matches my actual usage of github copilot. All the drama around it seems to just be mostly for headlines to fuel the outrage machine.

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