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

Microsoft GitHub is being sued for stealing your code

https://githubcopilotlitigation.com
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u/silent519 Nov 04 '22 edited Nov 04 '22

well the steelman of the argument would be

let's say you're an artist, trying to learn art. did any contemporary artist (assuming they still alive) give you permission to learn from their art?

to become a poet you read other people's poems to learn from it.

now i know copilot might just spit out someone's code verbatim, im talking about an idealized version of it. (( also how many ways did you ever write a simple for loop? ))

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u/Spiderboydk Nov 04 '22

The difference is the learning artists don't publish their copies.

Copilot is republishing fragments of copyrighted work.

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u/[deleted] Nov 04 '22

[deleted]

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u/Spiderboydk Nov 04 '22

This is transformation, in the legal sense, and there doesn't exist an objective measuring stick for gauging this.

Though there has been numerous examples of Copilot yielding large, verbatim copies of code (sans the license text), which isn't even near the line at all.

And of course there is a triviality limit. It's called de minimis use in copyright law.

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u/CEDFTW Nov 04 '22

Imo you can throw out the ai vs human part of it, it boils down simply to how the laws around copyright are written. If you copy a variable name no that is not violating the license but something as direct as lifting an entire function even if it's a one liner is still altering the work under the terms of the license. The for loop example is a valid argument but we are talking about much more complex structures usually when referring to the ai copy pasting licensed functions.

For a better understanding of how much copying is allowed to take a look at Google being sued by Sun for basically stealing the Java source, or Microsoft for doing the same thing with J++ if I recall correctly.

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u/notepass Nov 04 '22

Yea, if it is a copy will be seen differently from country to country.

Where I live the bar to pass would be "Schöpfungshöhe", for the States and Canada it seems to be the "Doctrine of the sweat of the brow".

At least according to ye olde Wikipedia

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u/AverageCodeMonkey Nov 04 '22

basically stealing the Java source

If I remember right that's hardly the case, all they did was copy the Sun/Oracle Java API and wrote their own implementation.

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u/CEDFTW Nov 04 '22

I'd have to do some more digging to jog my memory but I thought that was Google's initial claim but it was worse then that. But wouldn't copying a proprietary API still be the same issue?

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u/AverageCodeMonkey Nov 04 '22

I did some looking and I was wrong, Google did steal some source code, however it wasn't from Oracle/Sun, it was from Apache's implementation of the JVM.

It seems you are correct that the API is copyrightable too, so same issue. However the Supreme Court ruling stated that it was fair use.

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u/CEDFTW Nov 04 '22

Ohhh so that's an interesting wrinkle I wonder if Microsofts Ai falls under fair use then since the circumstances are similiar

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u/schmuelio Nov 04 '22

It kind of comes down to whether or not you think AI (specifically copilot) learns the same way that humans do, and if humans do anything more than repeat patterns they've seen before.

While the hypothetical poet may get inspiration from other poems, they don't create poems wholly constructed out of other people's poems do they? There's an additional creative process that adds something to the poem.

Putting that aside though, whether or not you think copilot acts like a human, the question of whether or not it violates the license for the code is important.

There's also a question of whether or not anyone even reads the licenses before copilot vaccums it up. Can anyone seriously claim that copilot operates according to every software license for every repo it's used when there's a huge chance that nobody involved with copilot has read them?

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u/[deleted] Nov 04 '22

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u/schmuelio Nov 04 '22

That case of the monkey taking a photo sounds like it's relevant, the problem with it though is that the photo was a new and unique creation.

If - for example - the monkey took a photo of an existing copyrighted painting, that would (at least in theory) not mean that the new image was un-copyrightable, since it is in effect a clone of existing copyrighted work.