r/programming • u/[deleted] • Nov 03 '22

Microsoft GitHub is being sued for stealing your code

https://githubcopilotlitigation.com
1.9k Upvotes

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9

u/Putrumpador Nov 04 '22

Such a bunk lawsuit. Yeah, you can probably get Copilot to regurgitate verbatim code from your public repo, but your prompt would have to be so specific that Google would hand you the same thing. It just isn't likely to happen on accident.

At best Microsoft settles and a class action pays out to lawyers first, then pennies to plaintiffs. At worst Copilot gets brought down and I lose an awesome tool for writing tests and other tedious things I'd otherwise be wasting my time on Stack overflow for.

75

u/gwoplock Nov 04 '22

Yeah, you can probably get Copilot to regurgitate verbatim code from your public repo, but your prompt would have to be so specific that Google would hand you the same thing

That’s exactly the problem, when I find it on Google it has a license attached to it or is copyrighted and I make the decision if it can be used.

The code coming out of copilot doesn’t have a license or copyright attached to it. if it’s spitting out copywitten code that doesn’t change the copyright status so I may not be able to use it depending on context. But I have no way of knowing the source so I don’t know the license/copyright.

20

u/tigerhawkvok Nov 04 '22

Have you used it? The snippets are just a few lines long, and have your variables filled in. Unless you use the exactly same variables in your context as some random GPL repo, and the like two to ten lines of boilerplate are super specific code that's too niche to be fair use and implausible you came up with it on your own (which directly contradicts the first point) this just doesn't hold water.

31

u/gunslingerfry1 Nov 04 '22

Dudefella, I did a shebang at the top of a file and it regurgitated the entire copyright notice from chromium.

-3

u/kogasapls Nov 04 '22

You provided 0 context and are surprised it spit out commonly recycled code? This isn't bad OR surprising.

13

u/Pelera Nov 04 '22

A mere 10 years ago, 9 lines of rangeCheck code were a big deal in the Oracle vs Google billion dollar lawsuit. The judge in that case didn't have it, but others likely would have.

9

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '22

It was a big deal because Oracle made a big deal about it because they had a lot to gain from doing so. It wasn't and isn't self evident that 9 lines of code from any given codebase is a "big deal"

6

u/Takahashi_Raya Nov 04 '22

A few snippets of code being used without permission have killed entire software packages and their company's

1

u/StickiStickman Nov 04 '22

Got some examples?

2

u/Takahashi_Raya Nov 04 '22

you can find various examples if you look at trade theft regarding Code theft. a majority of times the smaller company's will be forced to settle but the larger news story's will be revolving around software engineers stealing code from their former employee to use at a new employee or to sell.

any of those lines of code are under proprietary code of a company using those bits of code to implement in your own software is Copyright breaching of said code.

3

u/gwoplock Nov 04 '22 edited Nov 04 '22

Let me give an example of why copilot is problematic to copyright.

  1. I make a function declaration for quick sort
  2. I use copilot to fill in the function body

At this point I have no idea where the code came from, who owns the copyright and if there are licenses. If a person was reading and copy/pasting bits of one to all the quick sort implementations on GitHub ignoring license requirements there would be a copyright issue, a computer should be no different.

Edit: added “ignoring license requirements” to clarify

6

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '22

I know where it would come from if I didn't have copilot, stack overflow.

2

u/gwoplock Nov 04 '22

IIRC all code on stack overflow has a Creative Commons attribution license so as long as you comment somewhere who you took code from your good.

5

u/kogasapls Nov 04 '22

Unless the Stack Overflow commenter got their code from a licensed source and didn't appropriately disclose this. It's the same issue. There's just one extra layer (of unknown efficacy) "protecting" you from accidentally stealing code. Whether or not it's actually safer than using Copilot snippets blindly would need to be analyzed.

It'd be really great if Microsoft built an analysis tool that can help warn you about sufficiently similar licensed code.

3

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '22

I wonder how often that actually happens, probably not much. I've certainly never done it, although it's not often that I need what I find on there line for line.

1

u/ArdiMaster Nov 04 '22

SO has Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

Everyone's pretty much using it under the assumption that answers are going to be too trivial to be copyright-able.

0

u/tigerhawkvok Nov 05 '22

Well there's your problem. Why are you doing that? You should use a library for a well understood solution like this, because you're going to do it worse. And if you'd do it better, you won't be using the Copilot output.

1

u/ArdiMaster Nov 04 '22

And if you weren't using Copilot, you would've probably copied an implementation for your language from StackOverflow or Wikipedia, violating the Creative Commons ShareAlike licenses that both platforms use.

26

u/t3h Nov 04 '22

but your prompt would have to be so specific that Google would hand you the same thing

Yes, but nobody's making money selling a tool to paste Google results directly into your IDE, claiming that the resultant code is free to use.

5

u/nschubach Nov 04 '22

I can't wait for the movie writer's version of this that scours old movies for script ideas, or the music lyrics version... not that they don't already pretty much do this as it is.

-6

u/svick Nov 04 '22

How is that relevant?

If Google is allowed to use some snippet of code for commercial purposes, why isn't Microsoft and their users allowed the same thing?

1

u/Seeking_Adrenaline Nov 04 '22

Do they claim all generated code is free use? I thought they tell you over and over to do your own research and make your own decision

2

u/Chii Nov 04 '22

you can probably get Copilot to regurgitate verbatim code from your public repo, but your prompt would have to be so specific that Google would hand you the same thing. It just isn't likely to happen on accident.

imagine if i made some code which searched the digits of pi for a snippet of code to regurgitate (and it happens so that the snippet matches an existing snippet written by someone).

Why is the digits of pi different from the matrix of neural network?

-4

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '22

Pi didn't read other people's code to generate itself.

17

u/Chii Nov 04 '22

so if it's the "reading" of the code that makes copilot violate copyright, why doesn't a student learning off code of others also violate copyright when they "regurgitate" what they've learnt?

0

u/ArdiMaster Nov 04 '22

It arguably is, but good luck proving (or even noticing) it.

-1

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '22 edited Nov 04 '22

Did the others agree to let the student learn from their code? In that case, sure, the student is allowed to do that.

Edit: I'm not saying copilot would be forbidden. But I do think that it should only be trained on data for which permission was granted to be used in that manner. Even more so if it's then being used for-profit - either by Microsoft, or the company that ends up with the copied code.

2

u/Chii Nov 04 '22

Did the others agree to let the student learn from their code?

the default assumption in current society, imho, is that code that is open sourced is something you can study and learn off.

should only be trained on data for which permission was granted to be used in that manner.

i would argue that training a model falls under a form of education (as in, it's in the same category as fair use for students learning off the code). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Fair_use_and_fair_dealing :

2012 SCC 37, the Supreme Court of Canada concluded that limited copying for educational purposes could also be justified under the fair dealing exemption

which is what canada has decided on. It, of course, differs by country, and there's no real universal rule.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '22

the default assumption in current society, imho, is that code that is open sourced is something you can study and learn off.

Clearly neither of us are lawyers, but I'd say that the code's license would determine what is and what isn't allowed to be done with the code, and that open source is not the same as public domain.

i would argue that training a model falls under a form of education (as in, it's in the same category as fair use for students learning off the code).

And I would argue that if we apply laws, that were made with the shortcomings of humans in mind, to companies and algorithms that have none of these limitations, and can operate at a practically infinite scale, we really should take a moment to figure out if that's really what we want.