natefinch
Born on September 12, 2012•2096 Karma
For people that care to respect copyright, there's a copilot setting to block exact copies of code in the training set (which only happens a tiny percentage of the time, unless you're actually trying to make it happen).
For people that don't care to respect copyright, git clone is a way more efficient way to violate your license.
https://felixreda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringin...
https://fossa.com/blog/analyzing-legal-implications-github-c...
This has some interesting implications – for example, it means I can't mirror somebody else's (open source) code on GitHub without their explicit agreement.
So any code uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder renders someone liable to be sued for copyright infringement, AFAICS. The only question is whom it makes liable -- the uploader, GitHub (=Microsoft!), or both?
I can see arguments either way: The uploader is clearly infringing by giving away a right that isn't theirs to give. But so is GitHub / Microsoft, for using a "right" they haven't been properly given. So I'm provisionally leaning towards "both".
> I can't mirror somebody else's (open source) code on GitHub without their explicit agreement.
Who is doing the "mirroring" -- you, in uploading the code, or GitHub / Microsoft in actually hosting it, keeping it available for download from their "mirror"[1] site?
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[1]: Is that even the correct terminology nowadays, when AIUI for lots of projects GitHub is their primary code repository?
Also, there's no way for anyone to know what portion of code that I commit was hand written vs. generated, so you kind of have to treat it all as written by the committer anyway.
Though this does bring up interesting questions about what happens with things like automated PRs that fix bugs / update dependencies... are those then non-copyrightable? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just as much as a hero riding off into the sunset is not copyrightable in a movie script. However, a hero riding off into the sunset with bananas in the pistol holsters would be.
This is what I would want to hear more about when discussing if Copilot violates copyright.
I guess time will tell how much acquiring companies (my worry) care about Copilot. Given the difficulty hiring good devs, and the productivity level of body-shop devs, I see it getting a whole lot of use very soon, acknowledged or not.
But also.. In that case, when I commission an artist to paint my portrait, surely I can't claim to be the artist.. But I'm no lawyer.
I'm not sure there is a contractual agreement in GitHub's co-pilot that says: "Any code you write here is commissioned work". But honestly I didn't read the T&C's.
So I think you MAY have debunked my analogy, but not the main reason for the analogy.
As software takes a back seat (or at least a "normal" seat) in society, would we see a normalization of income? Could this be hastened by the development and introduction of tools such as copilot?
Potentially, unless there are new / better things that humans can claim they can provide compared to AI tools. This is the point where I think you and I agree, and I think it's your primary argument in any case (unless I'm mistaken).
Compare the visible output of someone writing in assembly vs someone writing on top of a modern web framework. Is assembly harder? Yeah. But the web framework is going to give you a usable product in a fraction of the time with way more features. And that's worth more money to the company you work for.
It's always going to be a knowledge worker's job. It's always going to reward experience and creativity and attention to detail. A lot of programming is looking at the world, seeing a gap in what exists, and figuring out what best fits that gap. An AI can't do that. Programming is making 1000 tiny decisions that can't possibly be specified completely by a product manager and need a human to weigh the tradeoffs.
Thats what everybody in the chess world said: "AI can decide low level stuff. This one move. This small attack on a rook. What it can't do is conceive of how to take a bunch of different tactics and put them together to produce a game of chess."
...Until Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov.
> It can't tell you if you should use postges or mongo.
Yeah, and then came: "It may be able to play chess, but it can't tell you how to play Go."
Look how that went.
So, unless you are a code monkey punching code into autogenerated skaffolding all day, your job is safe.
disclosure: I work for github
(I will not get in a tangent about web3, but that is the one thing that web3 skeptics always fail to acknowledge is how the current web is broken in that regard. We were promised open protocols, and we end up with a handful of companies building their own walled gardens)
The only way that Github would get any modicum of credibility would be if they joined the effort from codeberg/forgefed and integrated with activitypub. As it is now, github will be nothing but a mirror for my repositories that I will be hosting on gitlab and/or my own gitea.
> barrier of entry to contribute to your code > it's a lot harder for others to discover it.Even low barriers of entry can cause a big drop in user engagement.
There's also a setting at https://github.com/settings/copilot (link only works if you've signed up for copilot) that will check any suggestion on the server against hashes of the training set, and block anything that exactly duplicates code in the training set (with a minimum length, so very common code doesn't get completely blocked). Users must choose the value for this setting when they sign up for copilot.
source: I work on copilot at github
GitHub Copilot could not connect to server. Extension activation failed: "User not authorized"
Copilot learns the "shape" of code. Common patterns and algorithms, etc. You can't copyright an algorithm.
If you trace a picture and use it in your work of art, does the copyright of the original picture no longer apply?
If you copy a tune but set it to new instruments, does the copyright of the original tune no longer apply?
Sampling is a legal minefield in music, why would it become less of a minefield in code just because you've automated it? So far the best attempt at an answer about the legal issue of Copilot I've seen was that it's "not technically violating copyright", which honestly is not very reassuring and extremely morally inconsistent for a company built by a guy[0] who is philosophically invested enough in intellectual property as the pillar of human society to write An Open Letter To Hobbyists and use his Foundation to convince entire governments of adhering to IP laws instead of allowing the mass production of vaccines and medicine.
[0]: Yeah, I know that he no longer serves an active role in the company but this was very much a founding ethos and this is at least a fair bit hypocritical.
Copilot isn't sampling. Sampling is literally copying snippets of someone else's music and putting it into your music. Copilot doesn't do that. There's no giant database of text that it just slurps suggestions out of.
Just seeing someone else's code is hazardous from a legal precident point of view
Most projects are 90% BS glue code and 10% actually interesting code. I don't mind only having help with the 90%.
It helps solve the boring simple shit so I can focus on the interesting bit.
Yea, that makes sense, I agree with that. If your use case is skewed more towards "BS glue code" as you say, you'll find more use out Copilot. Then $10/month can be fair, cheap even.