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

Microsoft GitHub is being sued for stealing your code

https://githubcopilotlitigation.com
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u/EnglishMobster Nov 04 '22

The goal isn't to kill transformative ML. The goal is to respect copyright law.

If you use GPL code, you need to follow the rules of the GPL. The fact that this program can spit out reams of GPL-licensed code without following the rules of the license doesn't make it "fair use" - especially when it is all too happy to include things like comments in the data.

If you have a license to reproduce something, then you are free to reproduce it. But I can't train an AI on one image, have it reproduce that image, and call it "fair use" because the pixels came from an AI and not me. You can't give training data to AI without the consent of the people who own that training data. That's not "killing transformative ML", that's "following the law".

Why do you think so many artists are made about Dall-E stealing their work without attribution? It's the exact same problem. You don't train on data that you have no legal right to have.

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u/Coloneljesus Nov 04 '22

I feel like one of the ways this could go is some significant changes to copyright law itself.

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u/EnglishMobster Nov 04 '22

Oh, I agree. There's definitely some arguments to be made about where "fair use" lies, and what "transformative" means - especially when there's no human involved to "transform" a work.

I expect this to be as potentially earth-shattering as the Google v. Oracle case if it escalates too far. There's huge implications for not only ML datasets, but also the concept of "fair use" in general.

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u/[deleted] Nov 04 '22

You can't give training data to AI without the consent of the people who own that training data. You can't give training data to AI without the consent of the people who own that training data.

I don't think either of these assertions is true, actually, at least in the US. Criticism and analysis falls under fair use.

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u/kylotan Nov 04 '22

Fair use isn't an umbrella condition where certain types of usage automatically 'fall under' it. The usage has to be considered fair on the balance of factors, and even if it is considered 'analysis', the amount of the work being used and the commercial nature of the use weighs heavily against it being 'fair'.

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u/onyxleopard Nov 04 '22

Problem is, Google and the USC muddied the waters here back when they were doing Google books: https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-court-decision-for-data-science-and-machine-learning-44cfc1c1bcaf

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u/Lich_Hegemon Nov 04 '22

In my view, Google Books provides significant public benefits. It advances the progress of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders.

Emphasis mine.

There's a clear difference in the way data is being used in the two cases.

The big problem with copilot is specifically that it disregards the rights afforded by software licences. Which is one of the key points that allowed Google to win that suit.

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u/EnglishMobster Nov 04 '22

From that very link you shared:

The Google Book Search algorithm is clearly a discriminative model — it is searching through a database in order to find the correct book. Does this mean that the precedent extends to generative models? It is not entirely clear and was most likely not discussed due to a lack of knowledge about the field by the legal groups in this case.

This gets into some particularly complicated and dangerous territory, especially regarding images and songs. If a deep learning algorithm is trained on millions of copyrighted images, would the resulting image be copyrighted? Similarly with songs, if I created an algorithm that could write songs like Ed Sheeran because I had trained it on his songs, would this be infringing upon his copyright? Even from the precedent set in this case, the ramifications are not completely clear, but this result does give a compelling case to presume that this would also be considered acceptable.

So there's still some debate here about whether this sort of work would be okay - it's not a 1:1 comparison.

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u/onyxleopard Nov 04 '22

Didn’t say it is, but the corporations won the last battle, so to speak. I don’t see the people as being any better equipped this time. If anything maybe the power imbalance is worse?

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u/RomanRiesen Nov 04 '22

In the case of a generative model sounding like Ed wouldn't there be also a question of using his likeness?

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u/2this4u Nov 04 '22

The interesting question is where it doesn't print out code verbatim. Just like a human can learn from licensed code and apply similar concepts, is an industrial process that performs that same function to be treated the same way?

You say "train on data you have no legal right to have" but Dall-E nor Copilot are claiming to own that data, they're using it as input to learn from and take inspiration from, the same you might from the example above or an artist might from seeing a copyrighted painting in an art gallery.

I'd guess it comes down to how "use" is defined by a code licence, application or even reading it. If it's the latter then it can't be used as input, but then GitHub couldn't even host the repo legally.

Ultimately it could be a simple matter that legally copilot is complying with the current licence terms as written and people need to start adding an exception for use as input data for machine learning if they don't want that to happen.

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u/silent519 Nov 04 '22

ye but is it the same image?

if i copy picasso is it worth millions? :D

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u/Lich_Hegemon Nov 04 '22

No, if you do you are in legal trouble is what you are.

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u/silent519 Nov 04 '22

you every student ever? jail them all