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Sorry for the unproductive tone of this comment, but there's something about the attitude of this tweet that really grinds my gears. Any time someone invents s

Sorry for the unproductive tone of this comment, but there's something about the attitude of this tweet that really grinds my gears. Any time someone invents something new and incredible, there's always a crowd of negative nancies eager to discredit and explain why the invention is nothing new and a detrement to society. I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge. 'co-pilot just sells code other people wrote' is such a ridiculous understatement of what co-pilot does. Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating it, they sneer at the audacity of openAI to do something without first asking their permission.

bambax 4y ago
The world would probably be a better place if there were no copyright. But the world we actually live in is one where corporations have copyright, and individuals don't. That's what irks people, I think rightly.
nixpulvis 4y ago
You should read more about peoples ideologies and philosophies of Open Source. One big reason I support it is because it grants me the right and ability to change things I need/want to change.
zitterbewegung 4y ago
Why can’t startups understand what a open source license is ? Apache 2.0 could be ingested by this tool but it is a horrible license for your database as a service. AGPL would be a great license for a database as a service but should not be ingested by OpenAi / GitHub copilot.
hk1337 4y ago
Usually they want some recognition for their contribution and with GitHub copilot they get none of that.
nerdponx 4y ago
Both things can be true. It's clear that it violates the licenses of many software projects. But I do agree that denigrating it as "just selling other peoples code" is missing the whole point of the product and of what you pay for when you subscribe to it.
ricardoplouis 4y ago
Wouldn't you rather have a healthy dose of skepticism and pessimism surrounding new inventions? Even if the negativity is off base, it's far more preferable to a world where everyone is always positive and praises what geniuses the creators are. The former atleast breeds discourse while the latter only serves to make people feel good.
meheleventyone 4y ago
They own their code and it either has a license for use or is implicitly rights retained if not. If Copilot regurgitates their code, from a project that is public but with a non-permissive license they are having their IP rights violated so are totally correct in being unhappy about that. Just because you’ve made something cool doesn’t give you the right to harm others in the process. If MS or OpenAI don’t think this is the case then they should have also included their private repositories.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  The entire point of a fair use right is that you don’t need the copyright owner’s permission to be able to exercise it. Fair use allows you to do things that the copyright owner doesn’t like. Is fair use on a massive scale still fair use? Courts generally think so, otherwise Google would have been out of business a long time ago.
  - lupire 4y ago
    "on a massive scale" is one of the legal definitions of unfair use.
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    > otherwise Google would have been out of business a long time ago. I do think there are ethical questions around whether it's right for google to digitise physical books without the permission of the authors, and keep them on their servers and make money from them without recompensing the authors. That's something an individual would not get away with doing, so it seems wrong that it's OK for google.
  - meheleventyone 4y ago
    Is this fair use? I don't think that's been established yet. And if it is why didn't MS and OpenAI train it on their private code repositories? Fair use for thee not for me isn't very in keeping with the spirit of that claim.
    - 4y ago
highwaylights 4y ago
This seems disingenous. People don’t have a problem that AI is being used in some form to provide the service. The complaint is pretty clearly that code is being lifted from repositories without attribution or compensation, and being redistributed into other applications. How impressive the work behind copilot is or is not really isn’t relevant.
- csee 4y ago
  This is how it always works, though. Moderna is standing on the shoulders of centuries of cumulative human knowledge without compensating all the sources of that knowledge. Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers. This is where some modest taxation comes in. To reallocate a slice of the output of value creation to its actual source in a rough kind of way wherever more direct compensation isn't feasible.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    > Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers. You clearly don't know how copyright around sampling works. Yes rappers are paying shitloads to previous generation musicians for samples they use.
    - csee 4y ago
      Sure, if we're talking about sampling, which is analogous to co-pilot copy and pasting chunks of code verbatim (which we've seen happen). But the complaints about co-pilot go far deeper than that. Quoting from the tweet: "it just sells code other people wrote". Do musicians "just" copy from all the people they've been inspired by and learned from?
      - cycomanic 4y ago
        What does "inspired" mean in the context of a computer program?
teakettle42 4y ago
My code is shared under a license (MIT) that mandates attribution. That’s all I ask — if you use my code, give me credit. Stealing my code to train your bot — which will replicate portions verbatim! — is no different whatsoever than the casual plagiarist that copies and pastes a novel snippet manually. Its absolutely my legal and ethical prerogative to complain about people stealing my code by failing to respect the license under which it was freely provided.
- Xunjin 4y ago
  That would be great to Copilot show where it found this snippet and give the person credit about. Even if it's unlicensed.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    If it's unlicensed, then you can't use it at all, so giving attribution wouldn't change much in that case.
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  Is is really stealing when your code is used to change a parameter value from 0.3623727247 to 0.3623727321?
  - iamevn 4y ago
    It does not matter what the internal representation is. What matters is that Microsoft is selling a tool which reproduces non-public domain works while claiming to grant the user ownership of the output.
isitmadeofglass 4y ago
Yes but, Sorry for the unproductive tone of this comment, but there's something about the attitude of this tweet that really grinds my gears. Any time someone invents something new and incredible, there's always a crowd of negative nancies eager to discredit and explain why the invention is nothing new and a detrement to society. I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge. 'co-pilot just sells code other people wrote' is such a ridiculous understatement of what co-pilot does. Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating it, they sneer at the audacity of openAI to do something without first asking their permission. — This comment brought to you by HN-Comment-AI ©
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  whoa, I think this should definitely be highlighted far and wide on the internet, think of the ingenuity of the people who made the HN-Comment-AI, it's probably the smartest comment bot out there, able to take the ramblings of people on HN and nonetheless generate a comment so astute! Although I have to say the use of the phrase 'negative nancies' shows that even the best machine-learning algorithm still comes up with unlikely to occur in real life text.
Chris2048 4y ago
> willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge because it's not unconditional, there are often licence terms of usage, and copilot is potentially laundering those.
nextaccountic 4y ago
> I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge. Because they shared the code under a license, and they have the right to complain if people use that code but don't follow the license. For example, what happens if Github Copilot spits a copy of some copyrighted code verbatim? Is laundering open source code through a machine learning model a loophole for not having to follow the license? Often following the license is as simple as giving credit to the original author.
- bborud 4y ago
  I've done a fair number of technical due diligence projects on acquisitions and potential partnerships, and on some project I've hired outside firms to analyze the code and figure out its origins and what licenses apply. There are tools that will analyze a codebase and identify where chunks of varying size seem to come from. Mostly to determine if the code is encumbered by problematic licenses, but also to detect where the programmers may have borrowed code from. If memory serves, some of these companies also have closed source codebases in their database, enabling them to detect if unpublished code has been re-used. The times I've used this in due diligence it has rarely been a deal-breaker when we do find large chunks of code that may be problematic. For instance due to licensing terms that are not acceptable. You just make a note of it and have them rewrite the code before the transaction can take place. (Or you figure out if you can accomodate the license terms).
  - nextaccountic 4y ago
    Yeah, but wouldn't it be great if the tool that performed "AI-generated code" were also required to run such analysis themselves, to eliminate this licensing violation at the moment it were inserted? It's as if Microsoft were banking on the fact that most violations will be unnoticed
rglullis 4y ago
> why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge. For other individuals to collaborate, to make the software available to other people, etc. Certainly not for github's profit and much less for the benefit of github's customers who will have access to open code that violates license agreements.
DoreenMichele 4y ago
Meanwhile, creators of FOSS projects are often underfunded and lots of people are in such dire straits that rich people talk of mollifying them with a few paltry dollars via UBI rather than fix anything. That's likely the crux of the issue. If you do it right, you can steal from other people and get rich. Meanwhile, those same people (whose work was stolen) may be left out in the cold no matter how original, creative, hardworking etc they are.
Mizza 4y ago
Pretty fucking simple explanation for it, actually: I don't make Free software so that Microsoft can sell it to people for use in proprietary projects.
jacquesm 4y ago
They are complaining about license violations, they are not pissing on this incredible (is it?) achievement. Reselling other people's content like this without attribution (which, is a pretty mild form of payment) is not nice. But at least you now have one more reason in the list of reasons why Microsoft acquired Github: to be able to launder their open source contributions and resell them.
Sakos 4y ago
I share my code without a license because I want others to be able to see how I solved things. However, this doesn't mean I'm okay with wholesale copying my code. If it's some random guy, then whatever. If it's a corporation like Microsoft, then yeah, I have a problem with it. Under German law, the code is legally not allowed to be reproduced or used without explicit permission even if it doesn't have a license. I retain ownership of it until and unless I explicitly relinquish my ownership rights.
- paulcole 4y ago
  > Under German law, the code is legally not allowed to be reproduced or used without explicit permission even if it doesn't have a license This is nuts. How can anbody be expected to both know that you’re German and German law when you post on an international website? Or is this a German law that exists to prevent other Germans from doing things but that the rest of the world scoffs at? https://choosealicense.com/ https://choosealicense.com/
  - falcolas 4y ago
    That’s how us law works too. Works are automatically under copyright, even if you don’t say so. It needs a license to lessen the copyright restrictions.
  - giaour 4y ago
    US law is pretty similar in this regard, isn't it? If you don't have a license for a particular piece of code, you can't use it without the author's/copyright holder's permission, even if you found it posted online.
  - solar-ice 4y ago
    You're expected, wherever you are, to look into where any code you use comes from and what legal rights you have to use it. (The author not offering you a license means you can't use the code, nearly anywhere in the world - pretty basic Berne Convention stuff.) This is the legal expectation in general, not just for software - you can't just come across a design for a neat widget somewhere and start using it in your product, there's probably both copyright and patent on it. Software isn't special. Not everything in Github can be copied into your code verbatim.
hansword 4y ago
If I enter 'Mickey Mouse' into an ML-TTI thing like Craiyon (Dall E mini) do you think I will be able to sell the resulting image on a Tshirt? No, I won't, because Disney has fancy lawyers, the average open source developer hasn't. What you are saying is: Screw little people, let M$ make their money. Either copyright is for everyone, or for no one. I prefer the latter, but this is not the world we live in.
- hourago 4y ago
  There big difference is that by copying Micky Mouse you are hurting one of the most known and very powerful corporations in the world, by copying code you are just hurting open source projects and individual developers. It should not be different, or if anything, it should be worse to punish people with less resources. But here we are.
- jimnotgym 4y ago
  Isnt this an indictment of the justice system rather than the big firms. I once heard this quote, "English justice is open to all, in the same way that The Ritz [very expensive hotel] is open to all."
  - gilrain 4y ago
    The useless justice system has been engineered by the firms for their benefit.
- fonix 4y ago
  This is more like entering "cartoon mouse nose" into Craiyon though. You're getting incohesive code snippets returned to you based off a single line (appropriate word for code and a drawing).
lin83 4y ago
> Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating it, they sneer at the audacity of openAI to do something without first asking their permission. Something being cool doesn't exempt it from discussion of its ethics and certainly doesn't exempt it from legal consequences. Often what people call "disruption" is often just exploiting resources/people/their work in unsustainable ways until oversight is introduced. If CoPilot is copy/pasting large amount of code with unknown licenses, that is a large and real risk for users aside from violating open source projects licenses.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Moreover it's a genuine danger for non-hobbyist developers since you could be including stolen code into a market product. Even including something banal like Linux is already problematic since it's GNU licensed, which by extension makes your entire project GNU licensed and you can't keep the exclusive rights to it.
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    Just to clear this up, since I’ve heard this a lot before: > since it's GNU licensed, which by extension makes your entire project GNU licensed and you can't keep the exclusive rights to it This is incorrect. Including GPL code in your product cannot automatically relicense your code. It’s just a copyright violation if your product’s license isn’t GPL-compatible and you don’t abide by the GPL.
- leereeves 4y ago
  > Something being cool doesn't exempt it from discussion of its ethics and certainly doesn't exempt it from legal consequences. Indeed. The heist in Ocean's Eleven was cool, but it was still theft.
B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
> negative nancies Not bad for everyday use - I like "nattering nabobs of negativism" (as scripted by William Safire), but it is really a bit over the top.
rambojazz 4y ago
Sounds like they're not selling any of your code
- barthvr 4y ago
  Copilot access is $10/month. Think about how Napster was treated back in the day, or torrent websites. You pay to access some copyrighted content. Is it legal ?
throwoutway 4y ago
I hear you, but this isn’t a “marvel at this free open clever academic thing we built” It’s a product by a business. Why is that not open to criticism?
lobocinza 4y ago
Plagiarism isn't new or incredible.
ThePhysicist 4y ago
I mean I'm not an expert but it's a valid point as people share code under a given license, and as far as I'm aware Copilot does not make this knowledge available. Nothing to do with the fact that Copilot is an amazing technological achievement. If I, as a human, go to a public repository on Github and copy/paste a non-trivial 200 line code snippet into my proprietary code base I have to abide by the license of that original code, even if I slightly modify it. I don't see how this cannot be true for Copilot. I'm sure the legal folks at Github have thought of a response though, you could e.g. argue that the snippets produced by Copilot are not affected by the copyright of the original author as they do not reach the required treshold of originality. Seems rather shaky for me though.
rockbruno 4y ago
My problem with this conversation is how we can have a 200 comment thread without anyone providing any kind of proof to these claims. Is there any instance of this bot printing an actual copyrighted algorithm instead of a mundane uncopyrighteable piece of logic?
- sascha_sl 4y ago
  One of the earliest examples was Copilot printing Quake's fast inverse square root verbatim, including swearing in a comment. Quake's source code is GPL. There are plenty more if you're willing to look.
- Xunjin 4y ago
  The famous “burden of proof” fallacy. In the end, I'm eager to anyone who can prove it, sue them and see the results from it.
- dgb23 4y ago
  There are examples of it providing literal copies of code without attribution etc.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
OrwellianTimes 4y ago
Fully agreed. It's just people getting mad and jealous but hear me out. Copilot is NOT SELLING coed other people wrote, it is simply acting as a curator to show you all the solutions people HAVE WRITTEN for free. Copilot does NOT write entire programs, it's simply an assistant. And there is not much copyright you CAN apply to 3-4 lines of generally understandable code. I've used Copilot and am actively paying for and I have not seen many cases where it's generating bad code. It's only there to remove boilerplate and common problems, not there to write entire applications. Why are people getting so salty?
- boesboes 4y ago
  Because they _are_ verbatim copying code and not respecting the license. It's not that complicated. Github knows better, can do better and should.
  - olalonde 4y ago
    Do you have an example of Github Copilot doing that? Like a snippet of code generated by Copilot and a link to the original source code.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      An example posted here on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
      - olalonde 4y ago
        Thanks. Personally, I feel like such small and widely used mathematical algorithms should not be copyrightable (or using them should fall under fair use). It even has its own Wikipedia page[0], where the source code is also reproduced without copyright notice. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
        4y ago
olalonde 4y ago
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  You can be both a professional software developer and a caring human that considers ethics and exercises empathy. It's easy to convince oneself they can only be a professional developer to escape ethical responsibilities which require significant time and energy.
  - olalonde 4y ago
    Of course you can and you should. But going from the Twitter bio and personal website, it doesn't appear to be the case here. They're an activist who lives from soliciting donations and selling 30$ videos on how to be anti-racist (like, literally).
    - dxdm 4y ago
      Doesn't mean what they're saying is wrong. Probably makes more sense to attack the substance of their argument, and not their bio.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - olalonde 4y ago
        The comment I was replying to already did a good job at that, I was just adding some context because it helps explain the attitude.
    - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
      > They're an activist who lives from soliciting donations Assuming this is the case, are you concluding they don't have time to be a real software developer? Maybe they were a professional developer, but now are an activist 50% of the time. > selling 30$ videos on how to be anti-racist Is the indictment here that they are a capitalist? My basic point is you seem to really want to dismiss their views you don't like by arguing they aren't credible rather than attacking their ideas.
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
‘Facebook just sells personal information of other people’ is such a ridiculous understatement of what Facebook does. Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating surveillance capitalism, they sneer at the audacity of Facebook to do something without first asking their permission.
matthewmacleod 4y ago
I also disagree with the tone of that tweet, but your dismissal is equally shallow and gear-grinding. There are real, serious, and genuinely interesting issues to be discussed regarding Copilot. It is neither "just selling code that other people wrote", nor is it something that we should applaud merely because it demonstrates "human ingenuity". The comments here regarding this are honestly a total dumpster fire. It's mostly a bunch of paper-thin hot takes, either: - The blatantly stupid "you willingly shared your code so why are you complaining that one of the world's biggest companies is now hoovering up code from your carefully-selected open-source license and reselling it as a service!!!" - The blatantly lying "I have literally never looked at any other computer software while developing any obviously anybody who has ever seen other source code is a plagarist" It's dumb because there is an actual interesting discussion here but I guess we're not going to bother having it.
- HumanReadable 4y ago
  Fair enough, I agree. I actually didn't intend for my comment to be an argument in favour or against, and I am a bit surprised it is the most upvoted of the section. I agree that there's a pretty interesting discussion to fair-use and the limits of copyright, and that my original comment was not conducive to having that discussion. In my defense, neither was the tweet this thread is about!
pmarreck 4y ago
I think copilot is amazing. I don't care what, if any, of my code snippets it uses because I also gain from it by skipping boilerplate (as well as things like bash idiosyncrasies). Using it feels like I am working with dozens of invisible collaborators
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
> Any time someone invents something new and incredible, there's always a crowd of negative nancies eager to discredit and explain why the invention is nothing new and a detrement to society. It is not true. Whenever there is something really useful, everybody is happy, and while of course they always are some nansayers, they're very few. However, when you do something controversial, you can expect to hear criticism. You are of course free to dismiss that criticism, but when a lot of people are telling you what you are doing is unethical, maybe it's time to stop and think about it.
gumby 4y ago
People get paid to write code having learned from writing code for others and from reading code others wrote. In this regard I dont see why github copilot is any different.
- lupire 4y ago
  People don't memorize chunks of code and copy it.
  - giaour 4y ago
    Sometimes people do, and in any case copyright isn't limited to just verbatim copies. You can't, for example, reuse characters or plots from other works of fiction in your own novel, even if you rewrite it in your own words: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fictional_characters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fic...
  - gumby 4y ago
    People often do write things because they learned a common approach at a previous job or because they saw such an approach when reading someone else’s code. People are often hired specifically because they have experience in a certain area from a previous employer, so are dointhe same sort of thing at a higher level. We fought this battle over a couple of decades with remix culture (“you stole that line/beat out of my song!”) and the world is better because the over-clingers lost. There is no shortage of reasons not to like copilot, but I don’t consider this one of them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sAbakumoff 4y ago
It's the negativity bias beauty in action. You have it too.
the_gipsy 4y ago
> share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge I put a fucking license on it so that it doesn't get abused by some fucking corporation. Jesus Christ, it's not hard to understand.
akagusu 4y ago
> I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge. People like you should understand that publicly available code doesn't mean "do whatever you want" code. The majority of publicly available code hosted on Github as a license that tells you what you can and what you cannot do with that code. If someone uses this code without respecting the license, authors have the right to complain and even legally enforce the license if they want. Now, you should know that there's nothing "cool" to take other people's work without permission.
Tryk 4y ago
This doesn't address the point of the Tweet, you are simply attacking the form of their argument. Moreover it is possible to BOTH marvel at the human ingenuity that went into making copilot AND disagree with their methods. Some things can be marvelous and wrong at the same time.

bambax 4y ago

The world would probably be a better place if there were no copyright. But the world we actually live in is one where corporations have copyright, and individuals don't. That's what irks people, I think rightly.

nixpulvis 4y ago

You should read more about peoples ideologies and philosophies of Open Source. One big reason I support it is because it grants me the right and ability to change things I need/want to change.

zitterbewegung 4y ago

Why can’t startups understand what a open source license is ? Apache 2.0 could be ingested by this tool but it is a horrible license for your database as a service. AGPL would be a great license for a database as a service but should not be ingested by OpenAi / GitHub copilot.

hk1337 4y ago

Usually they want some recognition for their contribution and with GitHub copilot they get none of that.

nerdponx 4y ago

Both things can be true. It's clear that it violates the licenses of many software projects. But I do agree that denigrating it as "just selling other peoples code" is missing the whole point of the product and of what you pay for when you subscribe to it.

ricardoplouis 4y ago

Wouldn't you rather have a healthy dose of skepticism and pessimism surrounding new inventions? Even if the negativity is off base, it's far more preferable to a world where everyone is always positive and praises what geniuses the creators are. The former atleast breeds discourse while the latter only serves to make people feel good.

meheleventyone 4y ago

They own their code and it either has a license for use or is implicitly rights retained if not. If Copilot regurgitates their code, from a project that is public but with a non-permissive license they are having their IP rights violated so are totally correct in being unhappy about that. Just because you’ve made something cool doesn’t give you the right to harm others in the process. If MS or OpenAI don’t think this is the case then they should have also included their private repositories.

zarzavat 4y ago
The entire point of a fair use right is that you don’t need the copyright owner’s permission to be able to exercise it. Fair use allows you to do things that the copyright owner doesn’t like. Is fair use on a massive scale still fair use? Courts generally think so, otherwise Google would have been out of business a long time ago.
- lupire 4y ago
  "on a massive scale" is one of the legal definitions of unfair use.
- kybernetikos 4y ago
  > otherwise Google would have been out of business a long time ago. I do think there are ethical questions around whether it's right for google to digitise physical books without the permission of the authors, and keep them on their servers and make money from them without recompensing the authors. That's something an individual would not get away with doing, so it seems wrong that it's OK for google.
- meheleventyone 4y ago
  Is this fair use? I don't think that's been established yet. And if it is why didn't MS and OpenAI train it on their private code repositories? Fair use for thee not for me isn't very in keeping with the spirit of that claim.
  - 4y ago

highwaylights 4y ago

This seems disingenous. People don’t have a problem that AI is being used in some form to provide the service. The complaint is pretty clearly that code is being lifted from repositories without attribution or compensation, and being redistributed into other applications. How impressive the work behind copilot is or is not really isn’t relevant.

csee 4y ago
This is how it always works, though. Moderna is standing on the shoulders of centuries of cumulative human knowledge without compensating all the sources of that knowledge. Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers. This is where some modest taxation comes in. To reallocate a slice of the output of value creation to its actual source in a rough kind of way wherever more direct compensation isn't feasible.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers. You clearly don't know how copyright around sampling works. Yes rappers are paying shitloads to previous generation musicians for samples they use.
  - csee 4y ago
    Sure, if we're talking about sampling, which is analogous to co-pilot copy and pasting chunks of code verbatim (which we've seen happen). But the complaints about co-pilot go far deeper than that. Quoting from the tweet: "it just sells code other people wrote". Do musicians "just" copy from all the people they've been inspired by and learned from?
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      What does "inspired" mean in the context of a computer program?

teakettle42 4y ago

My code is shared under a license (MIT) that mandates attribution. That’s all I ask — if you use my code, give me credit. Stealing my code to train your bot — which will replicate portions verbatim! — is no different whatsoever than the casual plagiarist that copies and pastes a novel snippet manually. Its absolutely my legal and ethical prerogative to complain about people stealing my code by failing to respect the license under which it was freely provided.

Xunjin 4y ago
That would be great to Copilot show where it found this snippet and give the person credit about. Even if it's unlicensed.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  If it's unlicensed, then you can't use it at all, so giving attribution wouldn't change much in that case.
tiborsaas 4y ago
Is is really stealing when your code is used to change a parameter value from 0.3623727247 to 0.3623727321?
- iamevn 4y ago
  It does not matter what the internal representation is. What matters is that Microsoft is selling a tool which reproduces non-public domain works while claiming to grant the user ownership of the output.

isitmadeofglass 4y ago

Yes but, Sorry for the unproductive tone of this comment, but there's something about the attitude of this tweet that really grinds my gears. Any time someone invents something new and incredible, there's always a crowd of negative nancies eager to discredit and explain why the invention is nothing new and a detrement to society. I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge. 'co-pilot just sells code other people wrote' is such a ridiculous understatement of what co-pilot does. Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating it, they sneer at the audacity of openAI to do something without first asking their permission. — This comment brought to you by HN-Comment-AI ©

bryanrasmussen 4y ago
whoa, I think this should definitely be highlighted far and wide on the internet, think of the ingenuity of the people who made the HN-Comment-AI, it's probably the smartest comment bot out there, able to take the ramblings of people on HN and nonetheless generate a comment so astute! Although I have to say the use of the phrase 'negative nancies' shows that even the best machine-learning algorithm still comes up with unlikely to occur in real life text.

Chris2048 4y ago

> willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge because it's not unconditional, there are often licence terms of usage, and copilot is potentially laundering those.

nextaccountic 4y ago

> I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge. Because they shared the code under a license, and they have the right to complain if people use that code but don't follow the license. For example, what happens if Github Copilot spits a copy of some copyrighted code verbatim? Is laundering open source code through a machine learning model a loophole for not having to follow the license? Often following the license is as simple as giving credit to the original author.

bborud 4y ago
I've done a fair number of technical due diligence projects on acquisitions and potential partnerships, and on some project I've hired outside firms to analyze the code and figure out its origins and what licenses apply. There are tools that will analyze a codebase and identify where chunks of varying size seem to come from. Mostly to determine if the code is encumbered by problematic licenses, but also to detect where the programmers may have borrowed code from. If memory serves, some of these companies also have closed source codebases in their database, enabling them to detect if unpublished code has been re-used. The times I've used this in due diligence it has rarely been a deal-breaker when we do find large chunks of code that may be problematic. For instance due to licensing terms that are not acceptable. You just make a note of it and have them rewrite the code before the transaction can take place. (Or you figure out if you can accomodate the license terms).
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  Yeah, but wouldn't it be great if the tool that performed "AI-generated code" were also required to run such analysis themselves, to eliminate this licensing violation at the moment it were inserted? It's as if Microsoft were banking on the fact that most violations will be unnoticed

rglullis 4y ago

> why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge. For other individuals to collaborate, to make the software available to other people, etc. Certainly not for github's profit and much less for the benefit of github's customers who will have access to open code that violates license agreements.

DoreenMichele 4y ago

Meanwhile, creators of FOSS projects are often underfunded and lots of people are in such dire straits that rich people talk of mollifying them with a few paltry dollars via UBI rather than fix anything. That's likely the crux of the issue. If you do it right, you can steal from other people and get rich. Meanwhile, those same people (whose work was stolen) may be left out in the cold no matter how original, creative, hardworking etc they are.

Mizza 4y ago

Pretty fucking simple explanation for it, actually: I don't make Free software so that Microsoft can sell it to people for use in proprietary projects.

jacquesm 4y ago

They are complaining about license violations, they are not pissing on this incredible (is it?) achievement. Reselling other people's content like this without attribution (which, is a pretty mild form of payment) is not nice. But at least you now have one more reason in the list of reasons why Microsoft acquired Github: to be able to launder their open source contributions and resell them.

Sakos 4y ago

I share my code without a license because I want others to be able to see how I solved things. However, this doesn't mean I'm okay with wholesale copying my code. If it's some random guy, then whatever. If it's a corporation like Microsoft, then yeah, I have a problem with it. Under German law, the code is legally not allowed to be reproduced or used without explicit permission even if it doesn't have a license. I retain ownership of it until and unless I explicitly relinquish my ownership rights.

paulcole 4y ago
> Under German law, the code is legally not allowed to be reproduced or used without explicit permission even if it doesn't have a license This is nuts. How can anbody be expected to both know that you’re German and German law when you post on an international website? Or is this a German law that exists to prevent other Germans from doing things but that the rest of the world scoffs at? https://choosealicense.com/ https://choosealicense.com/
- falcolas 4y ago
  That’s how us law works too. Works are automatically under copyright, even if you don’t say so. It needs a license to lessen the copyright restrictions.
- giaour 4y ago
  US law is pretty similar in this regard, isn't it? If you don't have a license for a particular piece of code, you can't use it without the author's/copyright holder's permission, even if you found it posted online.
- solar-ice 4y ago
  You're expected, wherever you are, to look into where any code you use comes from and what legal rights you have to use it. (The author not offering you a license means you can't use the code, nearly anywhere in the world - pretty basic Berne Convention stuff.) This is the legal expectation in general, not just for software - you can't just come across a design for a neat widget somewhere and start using it in your product, there's probably both copyright and patent on it. Software isn't special. Not everything in Github can be copied into your code verbatim.

hansword 4y ago

If I enter 'Mickey Mouse' into an ML-TTI thing like Craiyon (Dall E mini) do you think I will be able to sell the resulting image on a Tshirt? No, I won't, because Disney has fancy lawyers, the average open source developer hasn't. What you are saying is: Screw little people, let M$ make their money. Either copyright is for everyone, or for no one. I prefer the latter, but this is not the world we live in.

hourago 4y ago
There big difference is that by copying Micky Mouse you are hurting one of the most known and very powerful corporations in the world, by copying code you are just hurting open source projects and individual developers. It should not be different, or if anything, it should be worse to punish people with less resources. But here we are.
jimnotgym 4y ago
Isnt this an indictment of the justice system rather than the big firms. I once heard this quote, "English justice is open to all, in the same way that The Ritz [very expensive hotel] is open to all."
- gilrain 4y ago
  The useless justice system has been engineered by the firms for their benefit.
fonix 4y ago
This is more like entering "cartoon mouse nose" into Craiyon though. You're getting incohesive code snippets returned to you based off a single line (appropriate word for code and a drawing).

lin83 4y ago

> Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating it, they sneer at the audacity of openAI to do something without first asking their permission. Something being cool doesn't exempt it from discussion of its ethics and certainly doesn't exempt it from legal consequences. Often what people call "disruption" is often just exploiting resources/people/their work in unsustainable ways until oversight is introduced. If CoPilot is copy/pasting large amount of code with unknown licenses, that is a large and real risk for users aside from violating open source projects licenses.

moffkalast 4y ago
Moreover it's a genuine danger for non-hobbyist developers since you could be including stolen code into a market product. Even including something banal like Linux is already problematic since it's GNU licensed, which by extension makes your entire project GNU licensed and you can't keep the exclusive rights to it.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  Just to clear this up, since I’ve heard this a lot before: > since it's GNU licensed, which by extension makes your entire project GNU licensed and you can't keep the exclusive rights to it This is incorrect. Including GPL code in your product cannot automatically relicense your code. It’s just a copyright violation if your product’s license isn’t GPL-compatible and you don’t abide by the GPL.
leereeves 4y ago
> Something being cool doesn't exempt it from discussion of its ethics and certainly doesn't exempt it from legal consequences. Indeed. The heist in Ocean's Eleven was cool, but it was still theft.

B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago

> negative nancies Not bad for everyday use - I like "nattering nabobs of negativism" (as scripted by William Safire), but it is really a bit over the top.

rambojazz 4y ago

Sounds like they're not selling any of your code

barthvr 4y ago
Copilot access is $10/month. Think about how Napster was treated back in the day, or torrent websites. You pay to access some copyrighted content. Is it legal ?

throwoutway 4y ago

I hear you, but this isn’t a “marvel at this free open clever academic thing we built” It’s a product by a business. Why is that not open to criticism?

lobocinza 4y ago

Plagiarism isn't new or incredible.

ThePhysicist 4y ago

I mean I'm not an expert but it's a valid point as people share code under a given license, and as far as I'm aware Copilot does not make this knowledge available. Nothing to do with the fact that Copilot is an amazing technological achievement. If I, as a human, go to a public repository on Github and copy/paste a non-trivial 200 line code snippet into my proprietary code base I have to abide by the license of that original code, even if I slightly modify it. I don't see how this cannot be true for Copilot. I'm sure the legal folks at Github have thought of a response though, you could e.g. argue that the snippets produced by Copilot are not affected by the copyright of the original author as they do not reach the required treshold of originality. Seems rather shaky for me though.

rockbruno 4y ago

My problem with this conversation is how we can have a 200 comment thread without anyone providing any kind of proof to these claims. Is there any instance of this bot printing an actual copyrighted algorithm instead of a mundane uncopyrighteable piece of logic?

sascha_sl 4y ago
One of the earliest examples was Copilot printing Quake's fast inverse square root verbatim, including swearing in a comment. Quake's source code is GPL. There are plenty more if you're willing to look.
Xunjin 4y ago
The famous “burden of proof” fallacy. In the end, I'm eager to anyone who can prove it, sue them and see the results from it.
dgb23 4y ago
There are examples of it providing literal copies of code without attribution etc.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

OrwellianTimes 4y ago

Fully agreed. It's just people getting mad and jealous but hear me out. Copilot is NOT SELLING coed other people wrote, it is simply acting as a curator to show you all the solutions people HAVE WRITTEN for free. Copilot does NOT write entire programs, it's simply an assistant. And there is not much copyright you CAN apply to 3-4 lines of generally understandable code. I've used Copilot and am actively paying for and I have not seen many cases where it's generating bad code. It's only there to remove boilerplate and common problems, not there to write entire applications. Why are people getting so salty?

boesboes 4y ago
Because they _are_ verbatim copying code and not respecting the license. It's not that complicated. Github knows better, can do better and should.
- olalonde 4y ago
  Do you have an example of Github Copilot doing that? Like a snippet of code generated by Copilot and a link to the original source code.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    An example posted here on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
    - olalonde 4y ago
      Thanks. Personally, I feel like such small and widely used mathematical algorithms should not be copyrightable (or using them should fall under fair use). It even has its own Wikipedia page[0], where the source code is also reproduced without copyright notice. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
      - 4y ago

olalonde 4y ago

ParetoOptimal 4y ago
You can be both a professional software developer and a caring human that considers ethics and exercises empathy. It's easy to convince oneself they can only be a professional developer to escape ethical responsibilities which require significant time and energy.
- olalonde 4y ago
  Of course you can and you should. But going from the Twitter bio and personal website, it doesn't appear to be the case here. They're an activist who lives from soliciting donations and selling 30$ videos on how to be anti-racist (like, literally).
  - dxdm 4y ago
    Doesn't mean what they're saying is wrong. Probably makes more sense to attack the substance of their argument, and not their bio.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - olalonde 4y ago
      The comment I was replying to already did a good job at that, I was just adding some context because it helps explain the attitude.
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    > They're an activist who lives from soliciting donations Assuming this is the case, are you concluding they don't have time to be a real software developer? Maybe they were a professional developer, but now are an activist 50% of the time. > selling 30$ videos on how to be anti-racist Is the indictment here that they are a capitalist? My basic point is you seem to really want to dismiss their views you don't like by arguing they aren't credible rather than attacking their ideas.

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago

‘Facebook just sells personal information of other people’ is such a ridiculous understatement of what Facebook does. Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating surveillance capitalism, they sneer at the audacity of Facebook to do something without first asking their permission.

matthewmacleod 4y ago

I also disagree with the tone of that tweet, but your dismissal is equally shallow and gear-grinding. There are real, serious, and genuinely interesting issues to be discussed regarding Copilot. It is neither "just selling code that other people wrote", nor is it something that we should applaud merely because it demonstrates "human ingenuity". The comments here regarding this are honestly a total dumpster fire. It's mostly a bunch of paper-thin hot takes, either: - The blatantly stupid "you willingly shared your code so why are you complaining that one of the world's biggest companies is now hoovering up code from your carefully-selected open-source license and reselling it as a service!!!" - The blatantly lying "I have literally never looked at any other computer software while developing any obviously anybody who has ever seen other source code is a plagarist" It's dumb because there is an actual interesting discussion here but I guess we're not going to bother having it.

HumanReadable 4y ago
Fair enough, I agree. I actually didn't intend for my comment to be an argument in favour or against, and I am a bit surprised it is the most upvoted of the section. I agree that there's a pretty interesting discussion to fair-use and the limits of copyright, and that my original comment was not conducive to having that discussion. In my defense, neither was the tweet this thread is about!

pmarreck 4y ago

I think copilot is amazing. I don't care what, if any, of my code snippets it uses because I also gain from it by skipping boilerplate (as well as things like bash idiosyncrasies). Using it feels like I am working with dozens of invisible collaborators

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

> Any time someone invents something new and incredible, there's always a crowd of negative nancies eager to discredit and explain why the invention is nothing new and a detrement to society. It is not true. Whenever there is something really useful, everybody is happy, and while of course they always are some nansayers, they're very few. However, when you do something controversial, you can expect to hear criticism. You are of course free to dismiss that criticism, but when a lot of people are telling you what you are doing is unethical, maybe it's time to stop and think about it.

gumby 4y ago

People get paid to write code having learned from writing code for others and from reading code others wrote. In this regard I dont see why github copilot is any different.

lupire 4y ago
People don't memorize chunks of code and copy it.
- giaour 4y ago
  Sometimes people do, and in any case copyright isn't limited to just verbatim copies. You can't, for example, reuse characters or plots from other works of fiction in your own novel, even if you rewrite it in your own words: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fictional_characters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fic...
- gumby 4y ago
  People often do write things because they learned a common approach at a previous job or because they saw such an approach when reading someone else’s code. People are often hired specifically because they have experience in a certain area from a previous employer, so are dointhe same sort of thing at a higher level. We fought this battle over a couple of decades with remix culture (“you stole that line/beat out of my song!”) and the world is better because the over-clingers lost. There is no shortage of reasons not to like copilot, but I don’t consider this one of them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sAbakumoff 4y ago

It's the negativity bias beauty in action. You have it too.

the_gipsy 4y ago

> share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge I put a fucking license on it so that it doesn't get abused by some fucking corporation. Jesus Christ, it's not hard to understand.

akagusu 4y ago

> I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge. People like you should understand that publicly available code doesn't mean "do whatever you want" code. The majority of publicly available code hosted on Github as a license that tells you what you can and what you cannot do with that code. If someone uses this code without respecting the license, authors have the right to complain and even legally enforce the license if they want. Now, you should know that there's nothing "cool" to take other people's work without permission.

Tryk 4y ago

This doesn't address the point of the Tweet, you are simply attacking the form of their argument. Moreover it is possible to BOTH marvel at the human ingenuity that went into making copilot AND disagree with their methods. Some things can be marvelous and wrong at the same time.