It also doesn&#x27;t make any sense. Copilot suggesting to me the signature of a function from some library is not actually the same as executing that library. That library still needs to be downloaded onto my computer to be executed. And who will write new features to a library if not for the people who are interested in that?

&gt; Over time, this process will starve these com­mu­ni­ties. User atten­tion and engage­ment will be shifted into the walled gar­den of Copi­lot and away from the open-source projects them­selvesThe author seems to be implying that since Copilot can reproduce the code of open source repository X in certain scenarios there&#x27;d be no reason for programmers to learn&#x2F;use&#x2F;engage with repository X. But this is silly. Maybe some open source repositories could be tab completed with a little prompting but people will presumably choose to add a dependency instead of tab completing the code of express or something.

It&#x27;s just basically a search engine, but the context is the rest of your code.Writing software just auto-completing from CoPilot would be like trying to write a whole novel with the auto-predictive text on your phone. You could do it, but the results would be non-nonsensical and full of semantic errors. I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s any real &#x27;provenance&#x27; at play in either case.This guy is a literal who, who is really over estimating the value of his open source contributions over a general development tool that can reduce the cognitive load of working in some hairy code bases.I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s CoPilot that&#x27;s &#x27;erasing&#x27; his, Racket, community.

Agree, the argument seems pretty threadbare. Millions of programmers use open-source software every day and incorporate it into their own projects without ever engaging the authors of the code upon which they rely.Perhaps the author means that there’s a possibility that the programmer to whom the code was suggested won’t necessarily know its provenance and how to engage the community from whence it came. If so, that’s a stronger argument, but I don’t know that it’s the best one they can make.

I agree with your starting point, but art actually makes the questions clearer I think - having AI art &quot;you can&#x27;t tell apart&quot; is possibly a bad thing for human producers of art (or not, obviously lots of artists don&#x27;t make their art just to get paid, but if you do...), but seems like a great thing for the human consumers of art? Copiliot&#x2F;tabnine etc. could certainly give you terrible suggestions, but my experience is they often help with boring scaffolding-stuff which isn&#x27;t likely to be full of bad ideas, just time savings. Could they mess you up? Oh for sure. But mostly they just seem like an autocorrect that doesn&#x27;t guess wrong every other time.

&quot;It&#x27;s not a problem that it steals code because it doesn&#x27;t work that well right now&quot; is not a valid argument, don&#x27;t pretend that AI doesn&#x27;t advance on a daily basis.Reminds me of people who defend AI art with &quot;you can tell it apart from real art&quot; yeah no, at the rate we&#x27;re moving you won&#x27;t be able to tell at all in a year or two.

You are willfully ignoring thst the article absolutely DID address this point!The license and attribution are stripped from regurgitated copied code snippets from code projects.
If the people don’t known which project the code was taken from, how can they one day contribute to that codebase?
If the code projects on GitHub are not getting the people who use their code at least aware of the project, that project disappears.
Copilot is an interloper who doesn’t even tell you which project the code snippet was ripped off from!!

I’d guess it is basically: you’re making a mural people can look at for free, but a business selling canvas reproduction of it without attribution.If I solve a problem and I say: Sure, use my code if you want, but be sure to contribute any improvement back to the community - I wouldn’t be happy seeing a tool spewing it out everywhere. And it’s not even free. In this case, microsoft is literally making money on the back of millions of programmers. And without approval.

They don&#x27;t really explain in a satisfactory way how Copilot is &quot;stealing communities&quot; even though they themselves complain that Microsoft hasn&#x27;t provided &quot;solid legal references&quot;.Copilot is an AI stunt, an exploration, trying something new and exciting with very mixed and not-so-useful results.This lawsuit, however, is just lawyers doing what they do for fun. I guess the retained Microsoft lawyers love it too. Glad to see lawyers having so much fun and profit. But we would all be better off with out so much lawyering, can&#x27;t they do something more worthwhile?

The community argument is weak but it’s just content marketing, not a thesis. The goal of the article is to generate leads for potential members of a class action lawsuit.

IF they attributed the code snippet to the project they ripped it off from!!But they deliberately don’t tell you thst… it’s just a code snippet floating in space like they invented it

It doesn&#x27;t, it&#x27;s just a very easy to relate to argument.Generating snippets of code has nothing to do with a fully functional software package&#x2F;product&#x2F;service and an organic community around it.One might argue that a community could be more easily formed thanks to co-pilot because it increases developer productivity and lower the effort to contribute so OS projects actually benefit from co-pilot. If this sounds far fetched, then probably the first case is also similar.

The license and attribution are stripped from regurgitated copied code snippets from code projects.If the people don’t known which project the code was taken from, how can they one day contribute to that codebase?If the code projects on GitHub are not getting the people who use their code at least aware of the project, that project disappears.Copilot is an interloper who doesn’t even tell you which project the code snippet was ripped off from!!

Doesn&#x27;t really explain how co-pilot is stealing your community. I&#x27;ve used co-pilot and it works great until you are past boilerplate than it falls apart.

I&#x27;m more worried about the status of freedom in software, open source feels like a mirage to divert the attention away from the original issues from the FSF.

Ok, well that sounds nice. I have little to no insight to how courts works in the states so I was talking about my experience of the court system at home :)

Many courts, especially those in the Northern District of California (where a case would likely end up litigated), are very proficient and literate about software and copyright law. See Judge William Alsup’s cases if you want to see some examples that illustrate the court’s competence. And these judges frequently have technical consultants on staff to assist with technological issues.

Great, I hope it is tried in court. It should be. But unfortunately I have not a big hope that the courts will come to understand the issue well enough.

so what? You can put on a cowboy hat and larp as one, but that does not mean everyone else around you have to take it seriously. Same way with these made up licenses. If it&#x27;s on the internet, it belongs to all. Or else keep it with yourself.

Only if you agree it is &quot;redistributing&quot; anything!Small enough pieces of code can&#x27;t be copyrighted. No one would support an argument that I violated copyright by using the code &quot;else if {&quot; from some GPL library.So the question becomes what is the minimal unit of copyrightable code? What if you wrote a nice big function exactly (or almost exactly) the same way as someone else did? Whose copyright are you violating?

The issue with copilot is that it is not respecting clause 1.

BSD 5-Clause1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and&#x2F;or other materials provided with the distribution.3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:
This product includes software developed by the organization.4. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.5. Use of this source code for the research or training of machine learning models is permitted.

Not all code on GitHub was uploaded by the copyright holder. The entire linux kernel is on GitHub and at least some of those copyright holders have never explicitly granted a license to GitHub beyond the GPL.

Code pushed to GitHub is quite often not pushed by actual copyright holders and there no way to distinguish between it even if there was clause like this in GitHub user agreement.

ToS isn&#x27;t some all-powerful thing, first of all. A lot of it is unenforceable nonsense. And I&#x27;m not sure how it really works with OSS.For instance, what if I self-host an OSS project but someone puts a mirror on GitHub? Or just uses GH as a remote for their fork? Does that random person accepting the ToS now mean GH has carte blanche to do whatever they want with that IP?

There are quite a few projects that didn&#x27;t originate on Github. Some are mirrors of projects hosted elsewhere, some accept patches through other means, some include code that predates github. If get your linux kernel patch accepted by emailing it to the responsible maintainer, it will end up on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;torvalds&#x2F;linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;torvalds&#x2F;linux</a>. But you never agreed to the Github ToS, all you did was agree to publish it under the GPLv2. Linus agreed to the Github ToS, but he can&#x27;t give away rights he doesn&#x27;t have, so he can&#x27;t be giving Github any rights to your patches that go beyond the GPL.

That mentions everything: Parsing the content, showing it to&#x2F;sharing it with other users, using it to improve and provide the service.  GitHub and all of its features are &quot;the service&quot;.

&gt; show it to you and other users...analyze it on our servers...share it with other users...perform itI don&#x27;t know, sounds pretty similar to training on ML programs, even if they don&#x27;t explicitly say &quot;machine learning&quot; in the ToS.

If anyone asked me to define Copilot I&#x27;d refer back to this:&gt; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other usersThat is the most succinct and most accurate definition of Copilot I&#x27;ve ever seen.

The current github terms of service don&#x27;t seem to mention this use when they describe the license granted github.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.github.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;site-policy&#x2F;github-terms&#x2F;github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.github.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;site-policy&#x2F;github-terms&#x2F;github-t...</a>4. License Grant to UsWe need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program.

&gt; As Copi­lot sucks the life from open-source projects, the prox­i­mate effect will be to make Copi­lot ever worse—a spi­ral­ing ouroboros of garbage code.If I was writing this website, I would delete this sentence, because it is actually really idiotic.1. This is an opinionated statement, except that there&#x27;s nothing backing this opinion. This is fearmongering, that GitHub Copilot will get worse unless we sue Microsoft.2. Lawsuits are not about concerns about a product&#x27;s creator potentially damaging their own product. Lawyers suing Microsoft don&#x27;t get a &quot;we&#x27;re protecting Microsoft from Microsoft&#x27;s own bad decisions!&quot;The argument, completely unfounded, is that GitHub Copilot will undermine... GitHub Copilot. So, if you like GitHub Copilot, you should also be on board with suing Microsoft, so that we don&#x27;t damage GitHub Copilot. What??? Good luck proving that line of argument in a court - you&#x27;d get laughed out of the room. Courts don&#x27;t react well to hazy predictions about mayhem, from the suing lawyers, that have no historical facts to base them on.

&gt; If you don&#x27;t like it, you are free to host your code on your own servers.From the article:&gt; “Dude, it’s cool. I took SFC’s advice and moved my code off GitHub.” So did I. Guess what? It doesn’t mat­ter. By claim­ing that AI train­ing is fair use, Microsoft is con­struct­ing a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for train­ing on pub­lic code any­where on the inter­net, not just GitHub.And:&gt; when it comes for their own field, they are suddenly very worriedFrom the article:&gt; First, the objec­tion here is not to AI-assisted cod­ing tools gen­er­ally, but to Microsoft’s spe­cific choices with Copi­lot. We can eas­ily imag­ine a ver­sion of Copi­lot that’s friend­lier to open-source devel­op­ers—for instance, where par­tic­i­pa­tion is vol­un­tary, or where coders are paid to con­tribute to the train­ing cor­pus. Despite its pro­fessed love for open source, Microsoft chose none of these options. Sec­ond, if you find Copi­lot valu­able, it’s largely because of the qual­ity of the under­ly­ing open-source train­ing data. As Copi­lot sucks the life from open-source projects, the prox­i­mate effect will be to make Copi­lot ever worse—a spi­ral­ing ouroboros of garbage code.

How many millions of account were created before Co-pilot existed at all? It certainly wasn&#x27;t in the ToS then except maybe in some extremely vague way.

&gt; Does GitHub not have the right to view and train from your content when you agree to their Terms of Service and upload your code? [...] If you don&#x27;t like it, you are free to host your code on your own servers.I do exactly this, and it does all of bupkis to prevent someone from downloading my code from my gitea, and uploading it to GitHub. In fact, several people have.

Does GitHub not have the right to view and train from your content when you agree to their Terms of Service and upload your code?People are conflating their open source license with the one they give GitHub when making a GitHub account, but they are two entirely separate and parallel licenses. The former is for other people to use your code, the latter is for GitHub to host your code.If you don&#x27;t like it, you are free to host your code on your own servers.And anyway, as noted the other day about AI, it is often funny to see people not care about (or even enjoy) AI in other fields that they don&#x27;t work in, but when it comes for their own field, they are suddenly very worried. See programmers on HN who argue for Stable Diffusion but against Copilot, and vice versa with artists on Twitter. As I commented then, it&#x27;s an act of cowardice to think our own profession should be immune from AI while we enjoy the fruits of AI in other fields [0]:&gt; Yes, many of us will turn into cowards when automation starts to touch our work, but that would not prove this sentiment incorrect - only that we&#x27;re cowards.&gt;&gt; Dude. What the hell kind of anti-life philosophy are you subscribing to that calls &quot;being unhappy about people trying to automate an entire field of human behavior&quot; being a &quot;coward&quot;. Geez.&gt;&gt;&gt; Because automation is generally good, but making an exemption for specific cases of automation that personally inconvenience you is rooted is cowardice&#x2F;selfishness. Similar to NIMBYism.We should want AI. That we then try to use outdated models like copyright to enforce holding back human progress is a true shame. In my view, so what if GitHub uses people&#x27;s code for training data, we are all getting a better product because of that.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33226515#33228948" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33226515#33228948</a>

Even if it does, it may not matter. For example, APIs are not copyrightable (see Google v Oracle), and if there is only one obvious efficient way to make something work, it does not follow that the user must be prohibited from using that way even if someone else did it first.

“Expression” in the creative sense, as opposed to utilitarian in a functional sense.Copyright is meant to protect “useless” things like poetry and music.

Doesn&#x27;t Copilot reproduce the exact expression given the right prompt, though?

Copyright only covers the expressive parts and not the utilitarian parts:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Abstraction-Filtration-Compari...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Idea–expression_distinction" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Idea–expression_distinction</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;h2o.law.harvard.edu&#x2F;cases&#x2F;5004" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;h2o.law.harvard.edu&#x2F;cases&#x2F;5004</a>Most of your code is probably not subject to copyright in the first place, regardless of license.

Fair use is unusually permissive in the US, but most countries have very complex copyright rules to allow e.g. a televised interview in a room with contemporary paintings, without getting permission from the copyright holders of those paintings. It&#x27;d certainly make for interesting cases.

in countries where there is no fair use (most of the world outside the US) it seems quite likely copilot is willful, commercial scale copyright infringement

Fun story: That was my first employee town hall, in 2000. I was concerned for the fellow (and so very glad when he left, Satya has been so so so much better for the company and morale). It was definitely an... interesting introduction to the company.See also this Domo video that turned it into a song. :)
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=f7ZDH45OAt8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=f7ZDH45OAt8</a>

&gt; Steve BallmerThey have some really good blow in Redmond.If anybody could win an award for being coked up and sweaty on stage...<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs</a>

It isn&#x27;t so much a connection as an example of cognitive dissonance from the organisation.On the one hand stating plainly that mixing in copy-left code and similar can be disastrously dangerous because it is a rampant virus. On the other hand not understanding why people think it might be a problem that their tool could encourage mixing in copy-left code.

Linux is open source and Ballmer is displaying Microsoft’s negative attitude towards open source that is demonstrated in the author’s arguments regarding copilot.

The point is not clear, but if I were to guess, it&#x27;s that Github Copilot should come with a California Prop 65 warning, because it can give your code &quot;cancer&quot; (GPL-licensed snippets from sources like Linux codebas).

Microsoft released a product which gives you cancer the moment you use it.According to the opinions about what inclusion of open source code into your projects does, as per the ex-CEO of the company. That seems a bit of a far fetched conclusion, but then, Ballmer did say it.

Could you help me understand the link between the two?

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s right to characterize it as hands off after they had their hands all up in the generated code. It&#x27;s just malfeasant. They&#x27;ve produced a tool that is fundamentally (legally) unsafe to use and said that&#x27;s not their problem.

There are some techniques used mostly to detect when students copy paste code. I&#x27;ve seen some of the tools in that space and they have varying degrees of accuracy. MOSS is a common one[0].There are some vendors in this space too (BlackDuck comes to mind) but they&#x27;re $$$ so only within the scope of large corporations.If anybody has any ideas relating to this type of analysis, I&#x27;d be excited to chat. I am working on a project[1] in this space for &quot;Software Composition Analysis&quot; which could potentially overlap with snippet detection for code like Co-Pilot. (We basically just have a big pipeline of analysis jobs that run on code and store the results. I need to update the docs!)0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yangdanny97.github.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;03&#x2F;MOSS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yangdanny97.github.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;03&#x2F;MOSS</a>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lunasec-io&#x2F;lunasec&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;lunatrace" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lunasec-io&#x2F;lunasec&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;lunatrace</a>

intel­lec­tual prop­erty scan­ningWith &quot;normal&quot; code I can generally see (or figure out) who posted&#x2F;published it and reach out for explicit permission. It&#x27;s not uncommon for me to do this.How is one supposed to do that for the generated stuff? Seems like an awefully hands-off attitude. As challenging as it is, they really ought to be qualifying the input samples of training code before ingesting.

&gt; rig­or­ous test­ing, intel­lec­tual prop­erty scan­ning, and track­ing for secu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­tiesSeems like best practice recommendation that everyone should apply when downloading a torrent.

&gt; Microsoft char­ac­ter­izes the out­put of Copi­lot as a series of code &quot;sug­ges­tions&quot;. Microsoft &quot;does not claim any rights&quot; in these sug­ges­tions. But nei­ther does Microsoft make any guar­an­tees about the cor­rect­ness, secu­rity, or exten­u­at­ing intel­lec­tual-prop­erty entan­gle­ments of the code so pro­duced. Once you accept a Copi­lot sug­ges­tion, all that becomes your prob­lem:&gt; &quot;You are respon­si­ble for ensur­ing the secu­rity and qual­ity of your code. We rec­om­mend you take the same pre­cau­tions when using code gen­er­ated by GitHub Copi­lot that you would when using any code you didn’t write your­self. These pre­cau­tions include rig­or­ous test­ing, intel­lec­tual prop­erty scan­ning, and track­ing for secu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.&quot;I can&#x27;t help but recall:&quot;Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.&quot;- Steve Ballmer, while CEO of Microsoft

&gt; drastically expanding the scope of copyright.I think you need to explain that more. The problem (or at least one problem) being explored here is that by using any code from co-pilot, you are responsible for making sure the licensing is correct. You could unknowingly be using and modifying GPL-licensed code in your non-GPL project, which is a violation if you don&#x27;t publish your modifications.We&#x27;re not talking about expanding copyright, just protecting the existing copyright systems from being trampled by microsoft.

It&#x27;s tragically beautiful how the copyleft crowd is putting so much effort into drastically expanding the scope of copyright.&quot;I used the copyright to destroy the copyright.&quot;That sort of plot never works in practice.

For me it was the &#x27;magazine&#x27; style with proper breaks and editing, formatted for a vertical screen but still reads great on my laptop. The effort in the content, links and emphasis make it feel like journalism I would normally get paywalled on.

Can you elaborate on what makes it so? Changing font sizes, boldness, lines etc...

He wrote the book on it. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;practicaltypography.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;practicaltypography.com&#x2F;</a>

With this site you see about 50-100 words on a large mobile screen. On HN you see 2-4x that.Also, the section breaks and headers and boxes lack obvious rhyme or reason. It scans a tiny bit like a classy version of Time Cube. You keep getting hit with different font sizes and font styles and lines and ribbons and colors and you&#x27;re not quite sure why.

I think it&#x27;s very hard to skim for some reason.

That was my first thought as well. Perfect font sizing, clean &amp; elegant design.

For me I gave up on reading it almost immediately despite being interested in the topic because the damn typography was too exhausting.

Interesting. For me it was so slow to scroll I had to use archive.ph to read it :-&#x2F;This is on a powerful PC with a state-of-the-art graphics card.

Eh, I think the line height is too cramped and the hyphens make reading on the internet harder to read. Hyphens are good if you&#x27;re trying to save ink or pages in a novel, but screen real estate is more than free on the internet.

Everything else aside, the design on this site is among  the best I&#x27;ve ever seen. Amazing typography, great to read on a phone.

FWIW, in this case I was trying to feel out what I think is a good fit for copyright in general. I think the same test could be applied for books, music, art, etc.

_Maybe_ software is fundamentally different to other &quot;creative works&quot; which rely on copyright protection, but it&#x27;s not immediately clear it is, and as far as I know it&#x27;s certainly not a &quot;special edge case&quot; as defined in copyright law in general.So &quot;Can this AI regurgitate the vast majority of the creative aspects of an original&#x2F;novel piece of software&quot; is not the test that, for example, the music industry uses when determining if a sample is infringing. The test there is &quot;is a sample, however small, identifiable as part of a copyright work by a reasonable person trained in the art?&quot;You can&#x27;t own copyright in a composition of a single middle c note. But lawsuits have been won for copyright infringement of melodies of 2 bars (fewer than about 16 consecutinve notes). Men At Work lost a copyright case for the flute melody in Land Downunder which is the same as a 90 year old tune Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gunmtree <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.claytonutz.com&#x2F;knowledge&#x2F;2010&#x2F;february&#x2F;men-at-work-go-down-under-in-kookaburra-copyright-claim" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.claytonutz.com&#x2F;knowledge&#x2F;2010&#x2F;february&#x2F;men-at-wo...</a>Whether that&#x27;s done by a flute player or an AI, really doesn&#x27;t make any difference as far as copyright law sees things.(Whether copyright law is a &quot;good fit&quot; for source code, and whether it makes sense to apply laws meant for books&#x2F;literature&#x2F;music&#x2F;film to software is a different but very good question. I don&#x27;t have much in the way of other ideas which take original author&#x27;s efforts and potential rights to benefit from then though...)

I think the test for whether an AI is infringing or not should be:Can this AI regurgitate the vast majority of the creative aspects of an original&#x2F;novel piece of software with minimal prompting, to the point where the output code looks mostly and directly cloned to a reasonable person trained in the art?

I still release under cc0, being copied verbatim is of no concern. Yet, I don&#x27;t think reproducing somebody else code is &#x27;fair use&#x27;

I really don&#x27;t care if my code gets ingested and regurgitated by Copilot, but it seems rather a stretch to imagine that this is fair use, in part because it separates me from the legal protections afforded by the licenses I released my software under. In my ideal world, Copilot would be legally viable, and releasing my software without restriction wouldn&#x27;t be risky.As a long-time open source software developer, I have favored the 2-clause BSD and MIT licenses because they are the simplest licenses that provide me some liability protection. I would release code into the public domain if that didn&#x27;t increase the likelihood of being sued, whether for liability, or for someone else claiming intellectual rights to code I actually wrote.

I&#x27;m gonna guess that Microsoft GitHub (tm) would shut you down pretty quickly if you tried to clone tens or hundreds of thousands of repos in a short window of time, b&#x2F;c of course that&#x27;s sketchy&#x2F;abusive use of their infrastructure, right?But of course if the data is already sitting in object storage inside your cloud environment and all you have to do is run some MapReduce jobs to get at it...Hence: unfair, anticompetitive, intellectual-property-right-abusing behavior. Microsoft GitHub (tm) can prevent anyone else from running the kinds of analysis they do by simple &quot;operational security&quot;, while running literally any kind of analysis, model training, etc. they want. Don&#x27;t like it? But their commercial services and products so you can run Microsoft GitHub (tm) on your very own Microsoft Azure (tm) infrastructure, using Microsoft Visual Studio Code (tm) and Microsoft GitHub Codespaces (tm) so work on _your_ code privately.Best of all, you can still still take advantage of the huge library of &quot;free&quot; code offered by Microsoft GitHub Copilot (tm) to ensure your private, proprietary codebase still has all of the advantages of Open Source Software, brought to you exclusively by the Microsoft GitHub Platform (tm).

why use the API?  why not just use git to get the code?  All you need the API for is repository discovery

You&#x27;re not supposed to be able to use dominance in one market (git hosting) to gain dominance in another (AI powered code suggestions).

Its anticompetitive and illegal (if the government ever decides to start prosecuting people under those laws again).

Github does plenty of stuff that you can&#x27;t do. e.g. the contributions graph as just one example that comes to mind.That&#x27;s not unfair, and not the basis for a lawsuit, it&#x27;s just business.&gt; Copilot is not only making money off of open-source, they are making money off of open-source in a way others can&#x27;t.Of course! That&#x27;s why MS paid squillions to buy Github.

Yes. But the people who agree to let GitHub host their code are doing so with the expectation that it&#x27;s &quot;open source&quot;, i.e. freely accessible.If we define &quot;open source&quot; as &quot;you can&#x27;t necessarily use this to train an AI&quot;, then Copilot itself is illegal because it&#x27;s using code without permission.If we define &quot;open source&quot; as &quot;you can use this to train an AI&quot;, then Copilot it legal, but GitHub may be illegally misrepresenting itself as a host for &quot;open source&quot;, as the policy it hosts code under isn&#x27;t truly open-source.If we define &quot;open source&quot; as &quot;you can&#x27;t necessarily use this to train an AI&quot; but then GitHub&#x27;s policy explicitly states &quot;by using us as a hosting provider, you give us permission to use your code to train AI&quot; then they are in the clear. But I doubt they have that clause or at least had it when Copilot was first revealed.

No? How much money would it make without using open source?

It’s not making money off of open source, it’s making money off of hosting open source.

There is a distinction between being able to access the source code, and a tool giving it to you without any context of the underlying license it is governed by.

Not a supporter of Copilot, but I think it&#x27;s pretty easy to access the same data through BigQuery:&gt;The Google BigQuery Public Datasets program now offers a full snapshot of the content of more than 2.8 million open source GitHub repositories in BigQuery. Thanks to our new collaboration with GitHub, you&#x27;ll have access to analyze the source code of almost 2 billion files with a simple (or complex) SQL query.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;topics&#x2F;public-datasets&#x2F;github-on-bigquery-analyze-all-the-open-source-code" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;topics&#x2F;public-datasets&#x2F;github-...</a>

Not to be anti-capitalist, but you’re describing capitalism lol

That’s the problem with big tech. When they own all the roads, it makes organic competition almost impossible, as they will always be 2 steps ahead.

Don&#x27;t forget that GitHub is a closed-source proprietary commercial service.Their freemium product is useful to many open-source projects and communities, but you do not have any more rights to use Microsoft&#x27;s GitHub than you have to Microsoft&#x27;s Windows.

I think the very least they could do is dump the list of URLs from which they took the source files. The community will figure out the rest.

It&#x27;s probably the reverse - the data can probably fit in a few commercially available hard drives, the API calls to discover and download all repository without running afoul of the rate limiters and whatever other anti-crawling strategies can take years if you&#x27;re running it single threaded (a single IP can effectively be considered single threaded).

&gt; using GitHub APIs to download the data yourself isn&#x27;t possibleIs it? Data storage would be prohibitive, but I can see ways to download the entirety of Github in a few weeks&#x2F;months (assuming my size estimate is accurate).

competitive advantage is not a monopoly, nor is it unfair.

I pay for Github because I thought it was a nice, reputable service who wouldn&#x27;t go through my stuff without asking me first.

Anyone can start their own GitHub competitor and do whatever they want with the source code that ends up on it. GitHub pays the bills and lets us freely upload whatever we want to their service, so it seems a bit entitled to complain about what features or data they provide or don&#x27;t provide.

One issue I see with Copilot is that they get free access to all open-source data on GitHub, but using GitHub APIs to download the data yourself isn&#x27;t possible (rate limiting). This is an unfair advantage. Copilot is not only making money off of open-source, they are making money off of open-source in a way others can&#x27;t.I would love to see a lawsuit which requires GitHub to provide their full Copilot dataset.

As someone who works at a streaming service: thank you.We are people, we have ambitions and families. We&#x27;re not just a faceless corporation.

&gt; We&#x27;re all happily pirating movies and music but code is for some reason sacred.Speak for yourself. I pay multiple streaming services, music and video, because I prefer creators be able to eat.

FWIW, not all of us &quot;happily pirate movies and music&quot;.I want there to be more good music and movies. I want to support artists who create entertainment I enjoy. I go out of my way to buy physical copies of music from artists, wherever possible from the merch table at their shows or from their own websites. I pay to go see movies on the big screen (partly because I like the big screen cinema experience, but also because I understand &quot;opening week revenue&quot; is a key performance indicator for the success of a movie).I thing copyright is old, outdated, and probably not really fit for purpose for forms of creative work invented in the last 50 years. But I also thing creative workers need to get paid for their effort (juist the same as software developers), and absent a FAANG-style set for companies employing teams of songwriters, musicians, authors, and the like - on FAANG-style salaries, copyright seems to be the option that is working (however badly).I&#x27;ll join your &quot;abolish all copyright&quot; crusade as soon as there&#x27;s an alternative that at least likely to possibly work as well (or better) than the system copyright allows. Just abolishing copyright and erasing the publishing&#x2F;music&#x2F;movie&#x2F;art industries without a transition plan isn&#x27;t a thing I can support. (At least a transition the artists&#x2F;editors&#x2F;producers&#x2F;writers&#x2F;etc. I&#x27;ll admit there&#x27;s a large chunk of management and legal in the fairly abusive parts of the music industry I wouldn&#x27;t shed a tear if they all became homeless and destitute overnight...)

Abolish all copyright. We&#x27;re all happily pirating movies and music but code is for some reason sacred.

It&#x27;s best to treat copilot like an eager intern who can churn out boring code for you. It still needs to be reviewed.

And none of us here have ever worked under incompetent management or engineering leadership...(Hell, I&#x27;ve _been_ that incompetent management and engineering leadership at various times over the last few decades...)

If that code managed to hit production, then the problem is with the management and engineering leadership, not Copilot.

Is there a technique to scan for software that includes copilot suggestions? Or is this just theoretical? Sounds impossible given MS&#x2F;GH&#x27;s monopoly on access to the model input data.

The less overt version of that is to figure out what mistakes copilot already makes (either things that are common in tutorials but not good in production, or things that are outdated, like hashing passwords with md5), and then systematically looking for software that includes such copilot suggestions.

What is easier is to probably sneak in a new dependency that points to a malicious fork. Something like an XML to JSON library that does do the thing that is advertised but also additional things.

This is a bit off-topic, but I wonder if there are people&#x2F;teams right now creating git repos, doing the source code equivalent of &quot;SEO&quot; on it, and embedding backdoors in stupidly overoptimized for the training process code?I wonder when we&#x27;ll hear about the first big hack that gets traced back to production code pushed live after CoPilot &quot;suggested&quot; eval(base64decode({webshell}))

MIT still requires the license text to be included with the source. Copilot, if it is not fair use, violates the license of MIT code it re-emits.

You don&#x27;t need to license it, you can just publish it with a declaration that as the author, you are releasing your work in to the public domain. However, in terms of licensing I believe MIT is the most permissive.

CC0 or unlicense, probably. Although I concede that it&#x27;s hard to do in all jurisdictions globally.

It seems like there&#x27;s no good license that places absolutely no restrictions or requirements on people using your code (such as attribution and respecting patent rights) worldwide.I want my code to be used the way people treated text in the old days. There&#x27;s texts that have been re-written, added to and edited by thousands of people over the centuries and yet they don&#x27;t come with thousands of pages of attribution notices because why would they?

So they turned around and started buying everyone else. GitHub, Nokia, Activision. They&#x27;re back to their old shit.

Yes because it turned out so badly the last time. Microsoft went from being one of the three most valuable companies in the US in 2000 to being one of the three most valuable companies in 2022.Also back then, Microsoft had 90%+ share of the PC operating system market and was bundling IE in its operating system. I’m glad the DOJ forced MS to change its ways.

IMO, It will last. It&#x27;s impossible to roll it back.IMO, if the lawsuit goes to a point where it&#x27;s likely to be won by copyright owners, Open AI could do the following:- Use less sensitive code from big corps they have partnership with for training. I bet MS and other have plenty of such code.- Buy training rights from copyright owners of OSS projects. Many of them have SLAs which allow the owner do much more than the license allows.- Buy rights to train code, and collect generated code with Copilot from a large number of smaller software companies, likely with exclusions for some sensitive parts. MS has a lot of leverage here (discounts, partnerships, etc).

I do have to wonder if Copilot will last. It&#x27;s going to become a legal minefield and I can&#x27;t imagine for a second that Micrsoft will want to be in the crosshair for another antitrust case.

Please look up the license in the source code that Tim Davis points too, it just mentions it&#x27;s LGPL, but doesn&#x27;t include the full license text. And none of the C code mentions a license or Tim Davis.And if you dig further, the whole repo is mixed with BSD and LGPL &quot;licensed&quot; packages together. It&#x27;s probably best that CoPilot does not suggest from code that does not have an explicit license stated.I think originally Tim Davis was complaining about the non public sources for suggestions which Github CoPilot ignored.

A simple search on github reveals that those functions were reposted verbatim thousands of times, most people just copy and paste snippets of code they find useful, ignoring licenses. This highlights how all the power a license promises to hold is completely fictional. Any &quot;in the style of Tim Davis&quot; modifier only shows some kind of unwarranted self-importance complex on the part of the guy, thinking his style is widely known and distinctive (it&#x27;s not). It&#x27;s not the job of Copilot, the team that builds it, or the programmers that use it, to determine where the functions that were reposted thousands of times under all kinds of licenses originated.This is the same case as with copyrighted photos in newspapers, a paper prints a photo somebody allowed them to use, but then it turns out that person did not have the right to use it in the first place. Did not stop newspapers from printing photos at all.Here are the search terms:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;search?q=cs_transpose&amp;type=Code" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;search?q=cs_transpose&amp;type=Code</a>

And would therefore have to follow the license of the code they took it from. That&#x27;s exactly the point. Copilot is reproducing the same code but without the license.

The example given is &quot;sparse matrix trans­pose in the style of Tim Davis&quot;, but someone who wanted something with such specificity would be able to just take it from Github anyway, perhaps with a little more searching.

100% correct takes in the piece, this is just ridiculous&gt;&quot;Tim Davis gave numer­ous exam­ples of large chunks of his code being copied ver­ba­tim by Copi­lot, includ­ing when he prompted Copi­lot with the com­ment &#x2F; sparse matrix trans­pose in the style of Tim Davis &#x2F;.&quot;Copilot regurgitates code and blatantly violates licenses, not even sure what there is to argue about. Not only does it seem straight up illegal and sideline open source communities, I think the next logical step of this is that people who want to avoid having their work vacuumed up and their rights violated simply to move to proprietary software, which would be a huge disaster for open source.

I agree.  Any law that&#x27;s only clear after a court ruling is, de facto, an ex post facto law.  Disgusting.

Here&#x27;s a book you may enjoy:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hup.harvard.edu&#x2F;catalog.php?isbn=9780674012417" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hup.harvard.edu&#x2F;catalog.php?isbn=9780674012417</a>

Agreed, but I also hate how so much of our substantive law basically has to be created by the courts because (a) many of our legislatures, especially at the federal level, have become more and more non-functional, and (b) IMO legislatures are especially bad at implementing technical legislation.I think there is a good, fundamental legal&#x2F;societal question of how copyright should apply to AI output. I just don&#x27;t think our existing copyright structures handle this question well.Note there is currently a very important case before the SCOTUS that is related to this issue, [1] where the original photographer of a Prince photo is suing Andy Warhol&#x27;s estate for copyright infringement. The fundamental question is whether the Warhol series of painting are &quot;transformative&quot; enough of the original photo. While there are always gray lines on what &quot;transformative&quot; means, if there is any chance that Warhol&#x27;s painting are legal and not infringing, I don&#x27;t see how Copilot could be in the wrong. Copilot&#x27;s output, even if it contains a substantial amount of the original source, appears to me much more &quot;transformative&quot; than the Warhol paintings are compared to the original photo.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;10&#x2F;12&#x2F;1127508725&#x2F;prince-andy-warhol-supreme-court-copyright" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;10&#x2F;12&#x2F;1127508725&#x2F;prince-andy-warhol...</a>

And if that&#x27;s the case, the legal ruling shouldn&#x27;t stop at code. It should encompass any images or text that aren&#x27;t in the public domain, don&#x27;t have copyright owned by the training entity, or otherwise permit this use. Which probably throws a massive spanner into a lot of machine learning. Which may well be fine but would probably be a big setback for ML generally.Any higher court ruling might well draw some lines between different domains, but be clear that a ruling against GitHub would almost certainly be a ruling for copyright maximization and against fair use in other respects. So be careful what you wish for.

Bingo, I feel so uneasy at the thought we could risk a lawsuit because a colleague put unlicensed code in our repos.

Correct. He&#x27;s written a great opening argument, as long as you&#x27;re the sort of person who likes speeches. To me it was full of tricks to prime the reader into accepting his premises as axiomatic, from nuanced rhetoric to pull quotes with attractive color gradients. In my view his actual motivation is the typical 30% cut of any class action settlement that goes to the lawyers, and he sees a lucrative opportunity to combine two skillsets.

Butterick sneakily asserts over and over that Copilot is simply retrieving code from Github (&quot;Copilot&#x27;s whizzy code-retrieval methods&quot;, &quot;Copilot is merely a convenient alternative interface to a large corpus of open-source code&quot;, &quot;our work is stashed in a big code library in the sky called Copilot&quot;). This verbiage seems specifically chosen to present a misleading picture of what Copilot is and does.Copilot is a set of trained weight values in a matrix. There is no source code stored in that matrix. The fact that someone can prompt Copilot with specifically chosen text to generate a short sequence of code that matches a corresponding segment of code used to train the model does not mean that it is somehow &quot;just retrieving&quot; that snippet. It is _generating_ that code, guided by the weight matrix, via pattern-matching based on the chosen textual prompt and surrounding context.That distinction is significant because one of the primary defenses against copyright infringement in US law is if the derived work is transformative. Copilot is a work derived in part from Github code, but it has unique capabilities far beyond returning short snippets of input code, and the work itself is clearly an extensive transformation of the input data.This is without even considering whether concrete _outputs_ of the model that happen to match code in a repository used to train it are themselves protected via copyright or not, which is another issue entirely (and not as cut and dried as many folks on here seem to think).

There are lots of comments arguing for or against Copilot on a value judgment, and having an opinion on it being ethical or legal, etc isn&#x27;t going to be the same for everyone. But I think regardless of where you stand, there should be some sort of legal ruling to clarify the gray areas that Butterick breaks down.

Open source? They used everything on github with no regard for license, which would have included plenty of code under conventional copyright. Microsoft is now profiting from that code.

He&#x27;s saying you&#x27;re a luddite for not wanting Copilot to steal all your code and use it for furthering the grand vision of AI generated code (which supposedly represents the forward march of progress)

As far as I can tell it&#x27;s just a more convoluted way of saying &quot;new good, old bad, only old people disagree&quot;

What does this comment even mean?I cannot parse what you are suggesting.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Henry Ford

New tech creates winners and losers, and losers inevitably complain. See looms, VHS, Napster, etc. The more of this complaining I see, the more it falls flat. The only interesting thing is which side different communities end up being on.To be fair, record companies were not in the least bit sympathetic. Open source contributors are easier to identify with, though imo it doesn&#x27;t actually make their concerns more valid

&gt; It would be because it&#x27;s illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus.I wonder how many people on HN would be on the side of the creators if we were talking about content created by Walt Disney and whether pirating was ethical?

&gt; If they re-released Copilot as FOSS, a lot of the valid criticisms would evaporate.That changes nothing at all. A FOSS license is, in a legal sense, no different then a proprietary one. If it’s illegal it’s illegal regardless of whether it’s FOSS.

Why should Copilot engineers, and the company that invests in it, not be rewarded for their incredible product and SaaS offering they spend resources on providing?

&gt; It would be because it&#x27;s illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus.Copilot makes source code much more open, if you think about it. It implements code reuse in a different way than classes and libraries. It offers its skills equally to everyone, skills learned from everyone.As for the cost of the API - it&#x27;s expensive to run large language models, I think the price is justified. But there are free models if you like to run your own.

They should in addition release all code generated as a combo of AGPL, GPL, MIT, etc. and put a comment on every usage. Users would then need to license their code accordingly.For a commercial version, run it on Microsoft&#x27;s internal code, the code they actually own!

&gt; It would be because it&#x27;s illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus.Yeah, the vocal few.Do you think I give a rats ass that Copilot is duplicating my OS code?I have to imagine most people are completely ambivalent. Of course I have no proof, I just can’t imagine anything else.The lines probably fall somewhere along the MIT vs GPL camps.

&gt; It would be because it&#x27;s illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpusI&#x27;m almost entirely certain you&#x27;re wrong about the desires bit. 99% of the developers who wrote that code won&#x27;t mind.

Copilot wouldn&#x27;t be shut down or neutered because &quot;a few vocal people&quot; protested against it.It would be because it&#x27;s illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus.You act like Microsoft is trying to do a public service and people are angry about it. The reality is that they&#x27;re taking billions of hours of work and using it to build a product that only they control.If they re-released Copilot as FOSS, a lot of the valid criticisms would evaporate.

It’s not illegal, it’s at worst a fancy code search tool that Github has the right to show you the results via the license you grant them when you upload and make public code on Github which is way stronger than other search engines like Sourcegraph have to show public code.It doesn’t mean you have the right to use any of the code it generates but Copilot itself isn’t illegal in any meaningful sense.

Is there any evidence that the PostgreSQL or MariaDB solution will though?

I’d claim that it’s more than a “few vocal” protestors. If the system is illegal, it needs to become legal or disappear.If I’m writing code for a query optimizer, the SQL Server solution isn’t going to magically show up.

It&#x27;s particularly useful to the polyglots dealing with multiple codebase, with various languages, to context-switch fast.Saves a lot of &quot;hey how do I do this simple thing again?&quot; memory loss issues.

Perhaps a good compromise is to make it opt-out, if it’s not already. Though even this is just pandering to the developer’s ego. AI writing code is a massive boost in giving users power and thus freedom. Of course, we need to make AI itself FOSS, but I doubt a legal case could be made for that. A more productive path is to clone the model like SD did with Dall-e.

Nah, you&#x27;re definitely the few. Its not a random sample, but an informal survey of my coworkers found no one who would care and generally positive sentiment.The people who comment on something are disproportionately those who care a great deal.

The people protesting aren&#x27;t a &quot;vocal few&quot;; We&#x27;re the people who made copilot possible. We are frustrated that our work is being used to profit a massive corporation without any compensation and in a way that we at best did not intend to allow and at worst is in direct violation of the terms we set.

Correction: even if Google is down, you won’t notice, because DDG works just fine. Last time I went to any of Google websites was 4 years ago.

Careful though, you are trading yours (and their) muscle memory and brainpower to be locked into a proprietary solution.Reread your post. Doesn&#x27;t it sound scary? You are blocked from even thinking and crafting because a specific web service is down.Even if Google is down you can go direct to Stackoverflow and MDN, and have a choice of information sources.Also what is &quot;productivity&quot; ... as in features built &#x2F; month or lines of code &#x2F; month?

And if the code generated by copilot was attached to a license that you had to obey? Suddenly your propriety solution must be released as open source or rewritten, because copilot is effectively laundering open source code?Life&#x27;s a lot easier when you can just copy whoever did the hard work without crediting&#x2F;paying&#x2F;etc for it.

It doesn&#x27;t indicate either of those things. It&#x27;s a great tool when you&#x27;re working on complex code that just reaches the limit of your working memory&#x2F;attention, and has often suggested good and clean improvements for me. You may dislike it but there are people it helps.

&gt; It&#x27;s been a massive productivity improvement to our senior devsI would hate to work at a place where advanced-but-untrustworthy autocomplete would, at all, impact the productivity of a senior engineer.Not only does this indicate that your senior engineers&#x27; productivity is measured poorly (lines of code), but also that your senior engineers are paid to type, rather than to think.

If the tech becomes open (and all indicators point to it being open in the near future) then it will become impossible to shut down. This has already happened with Stable Diffusion and the related model leaks.People&#x27;s expectations have already been set by this technology, and they are only going to want more. Also, AI researchers are still publishing their work out in the open for anyone to reproduce.If there was a Copilot model out in the wild like with Stable Diffusion then this ceases to be a valid question, regardless of the model&#x27;s legality. All it takes is a single leak or decision by another entity to release their own code generation model.

I tried copilot and found it an excellent way to inject subtle bugs into my code. It always had a seemingly plausible guess, that was never correct, and coding turned into a guessing game trying to spot the bugs it had injected and hoping I’d found them all.

My experience is that copilot is shit for anything not super basic.Incorrect suggestions all the time

I&#x27;d be rather saddened if Copilot was shut down or neutered because of a few vocal few protesting against it.It&#x27;s been a massive productivity improvement to our senior devs, and I got so used to it that it&#x27;s an annoyance when Copilot doesn&#x27;t respond.

Humans can reasonably distinguish between when they are plagiarizing and when they are just applying their experience and knowledge. Copilot presumably isn’t able to make that distinction, and, arguably, so aren’t the consumers of Copilot’s output.

I don&#x27;t deny that there are examples that appear to be wholesale copying, and that is definitely an issue to be addressed. No doubt.What I don&#x27;t understand is why the rest of the service (where it doesn&#x27;t appear to be pasting existing code) is being maligned when it behaves like a more powerful version of autocomplete.

&gt;Is there a reason why an AI being trained on the same open source code isn&#x27;t a similar situation?You are a human. You know what&#x27;s right or wrong. You know you can&#x27;t just copy code 1:1 from public repositories without respecting their license. The AI doesn&#x27;t know and doesn&#x27;t care. It&#x27;s a common problem with creative AIs that they will occasionally regurgitate near 1:1 copies of their training data, and I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s an easy problem to solve.&gt;I agree that wholesale pasting of code chunks is an issue, but that hasn&#x27;t been my experience with Copilot.The article provides several examples of it happening. Just because it hasn&#x27;t regularly happened to you doesn&#x27;t mean it doesn&#x27;t happen.

I&#x27;ve been trained on open source code, and there are likely many algorithms that I&#x27;ve internalized that are very similar to the &quot;standard&quot; way of performing an operation.Is there a reason why an AI being trained on the same open source code isn&#x27;t a similar situation? I agree that wholesale pasting of code chunks is an issue, but that hasn&#x27;t been my experience with Copilot.I&#x27;m not arguing for Copilot here...I&#x27;m genuinely curious why this would be considered any different.

I wonder what Dictionary companies thought about Autocomplete...

Google search doesn&#x27;t return random snippets of text without indicating their source.

Honestly, Github Copilot seems fine. It&#x27;s just a tool that you&#x27;re responsible for using responsibly. If I Google something, and copy and paste that, then Google is not responsible for my infringing. It&#x27;s just &quot;intelligent autocomplete&quot;.

&gt; No match for domain &quot;GITHUBCOPILOTCLASSACTIONLAWSUITSETTLEMENT.COM&quot;.&gt; Last update of whois database: 2022-10-17T23:07:12Z &lt;&lt;&lt;Just sayin&#x27;...

You&#x27;re probably stealing other people&#x27;s code daily, willingly or not. Should we run a plagiarism scanner on all your code?

Yes, we’d all find our work easier if we could just steal other people’s work.

Oh man. I want to continue using co-pilot. It has improved my productivity and made me excited to do things that I previously felt like a chore.Also, programmers please do not hinder on other programmers work. If you do, someone higher up in the ladder with eat your cake at every opportunity.

For me, as a (granted very minor) contributor to some open source, I couldn&#x27;t care less about attribution. The ethos of open source is specifically about sharing stuff (probably for free) for the benefit of everyone, take a penny, leave a penny. It&#x27;s more of an interesting question if Copilot is suggesting code verbatim from source-available rather than open source repos though.

This Copilot saga is another good reminder of why nothing is free. Developers have been using Github for free for years - now the chickens have come home to roost. The copyright licenses are just a formality - a form of kayfabe. If you aren&#x27;t hosting your own code (GNU style), you should assume Microsoft owns it, for all intents and purposes.

&gt; People&#x27;s disguste is based on the assimilation of what they thought was a human trait being machine derived from their work.No, people&#x27;s disgust is with Microsoft violating their legal privileges.&gt; The copilot service backed by an army of actual humans wouldn’t be a story at all.Correct, it would be an open-and-shut lawsuit.

If you think most people pay any attention to licenses or respect them you better think again. Snippets get copied verbatim with no regard to their source all the time. Licenses have no power and are routinely ignored.

If the code was purely utilitarian in nature, such as something that was optimized for execution time, there is plenty of precedent stating that the code in question is not covered by copyright.Do an internet search for “copyright utilitarian” and read up on it if you don’t believe me!Copyright is about protecting artistic expression which is held in contrast to the useful nature of a work.

You aren&#x27;t allowed to just read code and regurgitate it in order to claim it as your own. That is, just because you memorized this great new novel you read, it doesn&#x27;t mean you can go and sit down and hammer it out and sell new copies. People go to great lengths to do this sort of things (see: clean room reverse engineering [1]) in order to try and wash themselves of liability.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Clean_room_design" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Clean_room_design</a>

I see your statement as an inversion of consensus reality. What actual coder would use copilot?
A beginner or dabbler.I predict your attempt at tactically “managing” this copilot scandal will not play well on HN to experienced coders, your Microsoft colleagues chiming in next claiming it boosts their productivity notwithstanding.Yes, I do indeed suggest astroturfing afoot.

Caring about licenses, fair use, and copyright has been deeply ingrained in the open source and hacker community for literally decades.

The Luddite reaction to copilot is very hilarious to me. It seem to be a great way to identify low-talent coders, because who else would possibly feel so threatened by an AI?… Watching HN commenters suddenly become ardent defenders of copyright is quite the sight.

I also use Copilot a lot, and while it does suggest large function bodies, I&#x27;m not sure that it&#x27;s &quot;regurgitating&quot; them (though it could be...I don&#x27;t know). I suspect that it&#x27;s seen so many function bodies that are similar that it generates another similar output. Like autocomplete in a word processor has seen so many similar chunks of text that it reproduces them based on past experience. I don&#x27;t know this as a fact, of course. I&#x27;m just reacting to the word &quot;regurgitating.&quot;

It isn&#x27;t really learning, if it&#x27;s just regurgitating whole function bodies. I use Copilot a lot, and definitely see whole functions being spit out, that were presumably written by a person somewhere.

It learns the same way a human does by learning patterns. It is not illegal to comprehend how to accomplish tasks by reading other people&#x27;s source code.The arguments against my point always assume perfect memory of everything this model is consumed. This is the plagiarism position. In reality, some patterns are more common than others and generate a code that looks nearly identical. I can’t speak for the reasons for this, as I’m not familiar with all of the methods. However, I don’t assume that is the current working state or intent of Codex.

&gt; You can&#x27;t just paraphrase someones licensed workYes you can. That&#x27;s exactly why you paraphrased it instead of copying verbatim.At the fringes, your transformation may not be enough to overcome the requirements, but that&#x27;s an exception. Nearly all paraphrasing is legal by default.

&gt; It is learning from it just as a human reader wouldI don&#x27;t see how that invalidates the copyright&#x2F;license argument. So, instead of just a straight up license violation it&#x27;s a license violation via plagiarism.That argument wouldn&#x27;t hold up even if it was a human that caused the violation. You can&#x27;t just paraphrase someones licensed work and then lie about looking at and pretend you made it yourself, which is basically what seems to happen with co-pilot, as it doesn&#x27;t also automatically reproduce the license of the code it reproduces.

My view is the copilot is not stealing open source code. It is learning from it just as a human reader would. People&#x27;s disguste is based on the assimilation of what they thought was a human trait being machine derived from their work.The copilot service backed by an army of actual humans wouldn’t be a story at all. Nor would anyone be angry, if an individual offered coding skills as a service, and had gone through the exercise of learning great amount to open source software to do so.No open source license was written with this in mind. Because previously learning was something only humans could do and no one had issue with sharing that knowledge. Until licenses take machine learning use into account I see no problems with Copilot.Source cannot be open if you restrict any viewing of it.

&quot;[W]e inquired pri­vately with Fried­man and other Microsoft and GitHub rep­re­sen­ta­tives in June 2021, ask­ing for solid legal ref­er­ences for GitHub’s pub­lic legal posi­tions … They pro­vided none.&quot;Well... DUH. Why would they? You want to possibly sue them. Why in the hell would they, or anyone, provide crucial evidence for your lawsuit before you&#x27;ve sued them, regardless of the case and circumstances? Of course they aren&#x27;t going to provide evidence, because you are obviously going to then try to prove hypocrisy, whereas you might not have enough to go on if they don&#x27;t talk. No corporate lawyer in their right mind would ever grant such a request. (Edit: You are quite literally asking what their legal strategy is going to be, before the lawsuit has occurred, and then trying to spin the refusal as a proof of guilt.)That&#x27;s like claiming that an alleged drug dealer who didn&#x27;t talk without a lawyer present is obviously a criminal, because if he wasn&#x27;t he would have talked. What a nothing of a point.

&gt; Let&#x27;s be honest, copy-and-pasting happens all the time. In software, in engineering, in marketing, in everythingIf I copied code without the rights to it into code I have written at any company I would absolutely be fired. It would not be up for debate.&gt; Everyone looks at Stack Overflow all the time. You do it. I do it.I don&#x27;t - it is very infrequently that I would look at SO answers&gt; Nobody reads the licensing terms.Yes, they absolutely do, because again OSS or the GPL is meaningless if people are ignoring the license. More over I would suggest you talk to your employer&#x27;s legal and IP departments to let them know you&#x27;re copying code you don&#x27;t have rights to into their product.&gt; We all produce software with reskinned and taped together functions. A collage is still unique, creative, work despite being glued together with other people&#x27;s art.Wow.Absolutely not.Competent engineers know how to write code themselves, they aren&#x27;t copy-pasting their way to a solution. That&#x27;s why you get paid a lot - if I was happy with copy pasta solutions I would hire a bunch of badly performing uni students.&gt; Most songwriters will write a song with a part like someone else&#x27;s song.If two people write similar songs that does not mean one copied the other. If one person copies part of another person&#x27;s song they will end up in court, and they will lose all the revenue from the entire work.&gt; The products you buy at a store are rip-offs of someone else&#x27;s product.The ripoffs that stay on the market are not made by copying the entire implementation.&gt; Everybody stands on the shoulders of giants before them. Such is learning, such is life.I didn&#x27;t say anything at all to imply that we didn&#x27;t. What I said was you don&#x27;t get to just copy other people&#x27;s work and pass it off as your own.&gt; Get over it.Just because you apparently can&#x27;t actually write new code yourself doesn&#x27;t mean that that applies to other people.Also, you should really get your employer to tell you whether your proposal of ignoring copyright is ok.What you are saying is that if I google some problem, and copy some code from, say, gecko, or linux, or gcc, etc into my proprietary closed source product, that perfectly ok and those silly open source people should keep it to themselves if they don&#x27;t want me doing so.But there&#x27;s also a difference between &quot;I searched for this and copied the code I found&quot; and &quot;I typed some letters

&gt; Another person is trying to solve this problem in some commercial software. They find your code, copy-paste it into their project, then sell their software and don&#x27;t release the source, or even acknowledge you.Let&#x27;s be honest, copy-and-pasting happens all the time. In software, in engineering, in marketing, in everything. Whether people acknowledge it or not.Everyone looks at Stack Overflow all the time. You do it. I do it. Nobody reads the licensing terms. We all produce software with reskinned and taped together functions. A collage is still unique, creative, work despite being glued together with other people&#x27;s art.Most songwriters will write a song with a part like someone else&#x27;s song.The products you buy at a store are rip-offs of someone else&#x27;s product.Everybody stands on the shoulders of giants before them. Such is learning, such is life. Get over it.

I feel &quot;stealing your community&quot; is lawyer hyperbole, but people also seem ok with what MS is doing with copilot, and I am not.If you think what copilot is doing is ok, and there is nothing wrong with it, I&#x27;d love it if you could go through this small thought exercise, and see if it impacts your view at all:Say you write a bunch of code, and release it under GPL. For the sake of argument imagine it is something complicated that you care about.Now say another person is trying to do what your code does, and they find your code, a say &quot;excellent&quot;. They then copy and paste it into their project, and release their code under a BSD license instead.Would you consider this theft of your IP? The law certainly would, and I think most devs would as well.What would you say if they instead release &quot;their&quot; code as public domain?Now we&#x27;ll go a bit further. Another person is trying to solve this problem in some commercial software. They find your code, copy-paste it into their project, then sell their software and don&#x27;t release the source, or even acknowledge you.Would you consider _this_ theft? again the law would.Now, what if instead they found your code through the invalid BSD relicense? or the invalid public domain one?To me every one of these would be theft, and every one would be required to required to release the source of projects that made use of my GPL&#x27;d code, under the GPL. That is literally the whole point of the GPL.But let&#x27;s imagine a different route.A person is writing some code and can&#x27;t work out how to solve a problem, so they ask on StackOverflow. Now another person comes along and answer the question by copy-pasting from your project into SO. The first person says &quot;yay!&quot; and then copies that code, and we repeat the above scenarios.In an even more extreme case, imagine both of the above people work at the same large company - so neither knows or is even aware of the other - how does this impact what is going on? It&#x27;s two people, but fundamentally the company is copying the original GPL code into SO, then copying it from SO into its proprietary code.I get that MS and GitHub try to position it as if copilot is &quot;creating code&quot;, but it is simply doing a statistical code completion that is demonstrably happy to copy and paste from the original source into the recipient code. To my mind all it is doing is providing a mechanism to launder GPL (or whatever) code into your own without the license, by slapping &quot;ML&quot; and &quot;AI&quot; on the process and requiring more than 3 keys to be involved.

No one? They&#x27;d probably stop doing business with the overseas developer and that&#x27;s it.

I wonder what will happen when a company pays some overseas developers $50 for some code, they copy it from Copilot and it copies a bug from a US developer and that company gets hacked for $10 million.Will the lawsuit fall on the overseas developer, US developer or Github?

It seems to me that in principle it should be possible to maintain attributions through the training process, so that Copilot outputs could come with a list of weighted sources, possibly discarding those that fall below a certain weight threshold. Doing so would likely be much more expensive in terms of the computational power needed for training, and probably also in the size of the model. But it would be great to actually be able to see what went into a specific Copilot output.

There must be a line past which copying is no longer &quot;fair use&quot;, otherwise no copyrights in code would be enforceable at all. I suppose it is up to a court to decide, but in the Tim Davis thread from yesterday it looked to me like Copilot was emitting entire, nontrivial functions verbatim.

It could potentially under &quot;fair use,&quot; which completely overrides any and all copyright claims if the conduct is found to be, indeed, &quot;fair use.&quot;Fair use in code is broader than just copying. For example, in Google v Oracle, APIs were found to be not copyrightable. Even if you copied the names of, say, 86,000 different functions in a proprietary library, you did not violate copyright.Then comes the second problem. Let&#x27;s say there is a function, say, `AddTwoNumbers(int a, int b)`. Just because John Fitzgerald in 1999 implemented that as `return a + b;&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean you can&#x27;t too. There&#x27;s a degree where you can copy the code that made a function work, even if that code existed earlier. It&#x27;s fuzzy but it is legally real.Finally, there is your third problem, which is that you risk a &quot;safe harbor&quot;-esque judgement. Just because YouTube has occasional copyright-violating content doesn&#x27;t make YouTube illegal. Similarly, the person suing here risks a finding that GitHub Copilot is legal as long as any occasional long proprietary code regurgitations are removed as needed.If your code falls under the first two conditions, copyright be damned, license be damned, it&#x27;s all irrelevant. See also Linux copying Unix.

Why can&#x27;t Tim Davis (or another software author whose code is emitted verbatim by Copilot) demand that Microsoft take down Copilot, or at least the part of Copilot that contains his code?Microsoft is distributing his software without a license, isn&#x27;t it?

I find it hard to see a scenario where MS doesn’t get absolutely wrecked in court.

Folks really should take their GPL code to a platform with similar ideals and stop propping up Microsoft GitHub.

It might be the case that it is fair use to train the model on public data, but the code which it produces is covered by AGPL. Github limits liability in its TOS.(I am not a lawyer).

The vast majority of GPL violations are not enforced, because those who would want to enforce them are small and their opponents are big.For Copilot to blow up, it&#x27;d need to be licensed code from a big company demonstrably turning up in a product of a competitor, or some similar event.

So suppose you go out and about and a Microsoft representative punches you in the face. Now, the Microsoft representative has a billion dollar corporation backing him, willing to defend him at all cost through every institution, while you&#x27;re just John Doe who went on a trip.If you ever went on a hike but never intended to sue anyone. Why did you go out in the first place?If you did and someone is able to punch you in the face without any lasting damage, without reputation loss, and via a way they have access to the myriad legal defenses you couldn&#x27;t come up with if you tried, after you sued them.How is that game over?Just because someone corporation is, because of its sheer size, over the law (as far as a John Doe is concerned anyways), does that make it a right? We could probably do away with laws at that point and just accept getting punched in the face by Microsoft whenever they feel like it as the new reality.

Microsoft is using agpl code, therefore their code is subject to it. A lack of damages doesn’t give one the right to ignore licenses. If it does, like I mentioned it defeats the entire point.

That&#x27;s a problem of the licensers, not for Microsoft or the CoPilot users.If you released AGPL code but never intended to ever sue anyone. Why did you release it like that?If you did and if someone is able to use your code without any damage to you, without reputation loss, and via a way they have access to the innocent infringer defense after you overcome fair use, after you sue them.How is that game over?

Copilot is trained on and returns AGPL code verbatim. It’s game over. If these licenses are not enforced it defeats the entire purpose.

Technical progress takes precedence over pitiful intelectual property discussions. If you don&#x27;t believe that, I am not sure what you are doing in a community like this.

Being a useful tool doesn&#x27;t make it legal.

Copilot is great and this is a waste of time.

I wonder if it emits stable diffusion samples? ;-)

And the EU will continue to fall farther and farther behind in software development.

If they continue that path, the future will be that OpenAI, Microsoft, Google etc. will pay larger and larger fines at least in the EU, until they are blocked entirely.

What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren&#x27;t fair use for training ML models? Where you have to opt into models or can opt out (and many wind up doing so)?OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield where you must ensure you properly attribute your model outputs, only train on opt-in data, etc, etc. Surely no one really thinks that a court case against Microsoft&#x2F;OpenAI (even if they lose) would stop CoPilot?Most of these complaints seem to be extremely emotional and cherry-picked. &quot;People&#x27;s legal rights are being violated!&quot; (you definitely don&#x27;t know that, no one knows that, the article is 100% right about that), &quot;look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out&quot; (that&#x27;s not how it&#x27;s going to be used in practice).It seems to me that the longer-term implications of the outcome of a lawsuit like this are far more interesting, yet almost all the comments I see are nitpicking and whining about how the world isn&#x27;t the way they want it to be. I wish the conversations around generative AI could be...just better.

GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

GitHub Copilot investigation