[heavyset_go]

Neutral nets can and do encode and compress the information they're trained on, and can regurgitate it given the right inputs. It is very likely that someone's code is in that neural net, encoded/compressed/however you want to look at it, which Copilot doesn't have a license to distribute.

You can easily see this happen, the regurgitation of training data, in an over fitted neural net.

[CuriouslyC]

This is not necessarily true, the function space defined by the hidden layers might not contain an exact duplicate of the original training input for all (or even most) of the training inputs. Things that are very well represented in the training data probably have a point in the function space that is "lossy compression" level close to the original training image though, not so much in terms of fidelity as in changes to minor details.

[heavyset_go]

When I say encoded or compressed, I do not mean verbatim copies. That can happen, but I wouldn't say it's likely for every piece of training data Copilot was trained on.

Pieces of that data are encoded/compressed/transformed, and given the right incantation, a neutral net can put them together to produce a piece of code that is substantially the same as the code it was trained on. Obviously not for every piece of code it was trained on, but there's enough to see this effect in action.

[naikrovek]

> which Copilot doesn't have a license to distribute

when you upload code to a public repository on github.com, you necessarily grant GitHub the right to host that code and serve it to other users. the methods used for serving are not specified. This is above and beyond the license specified by the license you choose for your own code.

you also necessarily grant other GitHub users the right to view this code, if the code is in a public repository.

[eropple]

Host that code. Serve that code to other users. It does not grant the right to create derivative works of that code outside the purview of the code's license. That would be a non-starter in practice; see every repository with GPL code not written by the repository creator.

Whether the results of these programs is somehow Not A Derivative Work is the question at hand here, not "sharing". I think (and I hope) that the answer to that question won't go the way the AI folks want it to go; the amount of circumlocution needed to excuse that the not actually thinking and perceiving program is deriving data changes from its copyright-protected inputs is a tell that the folks pushing it know it's silly.

[naikrovek]

copilot isn't creating derivative works: copilot users are.

the human at the keyboard is responsible for what goes into the source code being written.

to aid copilot users here, they are creating tools to give users more info about the code they are seeing: https://github.blog/2022-11-01-preview-referencing-public-co...

[devmor]

Your argument is essentially the same as the argument that the pirate bay didn't infringe copyright, it only facilitated infringement.

And we all saw how well that went legally.

[account42]

Actually pirate bay was even less of an infringement as they did not dsitribute the copygihted content or derivatives themselves, only indexed where it could be found. With Copilot all the content you're getting goes trough Microsoft.

[AnnasVirtual]

that is not how similar at all that is not how machine learning works OMG

[devmor]

Machine learning is not important to this line of argument. We are talking about the legal responsibility of a tool.

[Filligree]

Pirate Bay couldn't be used to do anything but infringe copyright, practically. That's not true for Copilot.

[devmor]

Nonsense. It tracked millions of legitimate torrents.

[8note]

The page surrounding the code in the GitHub UI is a derivative work, isn't it?

It's an html file containing both the licensed code and some other html

[BenjiWiebe]

It still has attribution.

[vharuck]

The relevant part of GitHub's terms of service:

"4. License Grant to Us

We 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."

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

I don't think these terms allow using content for Copilot.

[heavyset_go]

It's served under the terms of my licenses when viewed on GitHub. Both attribution and licenses are shared.

This is like saying GitHub is free to do whatever they want with copyrighted code that's uploaded to their servers, even use it for profit while violating its licenses. According to this logic, Microsoft can distribute software products based on GPL code to users without making the source available to them in violation of the terms of the GPL. Given that Linux is hosted on GitHub, this logic would say that Microsoft is free to base their next version of Windows on Linux without adhering to the GPL and making their source code available to users, which is clearly a violation of the GPL. Copilot doing the same is no different.

[LtWorf]

Then github should make sure that people only upload stuff they are copyright owner of… which it has never done, warned about or tried to enforce.