This extends so much further than just GitHub and open source. Almost all “AI” based generative tools are trained on public datasets, in some cases they have licensed these datasets, but my understanding is that they are often just trained on the “public” internet. There is currently clear legal protection of scraping, however you can’t “republish” that data, only significant derivative work. I don’t know if these tools fall into that category - IANAL - but that’s the billion dollar question. The text/language and image generation are all capable of outputting results that are clearly based on particular input imagery.
This is such an important debate to have and my fear is that the companies investing in this tech have deep pockets, the lobbying around it could result in a unbalanced outcome. This isn’t really an area where “move fast and break things” is necessarily the right process.
Exciting though to see where this technology could lead, co-pilot blows my mind at times.
At some point image generation tools will be good enough to create recognizable images of Disney and Marvel characters, and the legal question will become very important in Washington.
But what we mere citizens have to say about it, I fear, won't matter much.
>At some point image generation tools will be good enough to create recognizable images of Disney and Marvel characters
They already are. Even Dall-E mini does a respectable job at cartoon characters (it struggles a lot with people, especially faces, but handles cartoons quite well).
Tangentially related is the similar position of CLIP Guided Diffusion models like DALL E (2) (Craiyon mini) & Midjourney. There are cases in the NFT world where DCMA take down requests are being contested as we speak [1] and there is a reasonable discussion today [2] on the present state of law although for some reason I got downvoted for pointing out the current position from the US Copyright Office is that provable "Human Authorship" is required to uphold protections although IANAL either.
My personal opinion is that the source data does not exist inside the model, so the model does not in and off itself comprise of a copyright violation.
It is also not a derivative work, as it is not recognizable as any of the works it was trained on.
However, if the output it produces is close enough to existing copyrighted works, than that output cannot be used without a license.
That seems fair, and just like how we would judge a human being.
The trouble is that these models are very specialised, and have an enormous corpus of data they have trained on. No human has read every line of open source code on GitHub, comparing what these "AI" models do to human intelligence conflates two very different arguments.
I don't think anyone knows of the source data is encoded somehow in the model. Sure it is not explicitely, but it has been shown (at least for simpler models but also for copilot) that you can with the right prompts get them to output exact copies of results (even with possible typos in comments). That to me means the models do in fact somehow contain the source.
On the topic of derivative, backpropagation the method of training a model relies specifically on calculating the gradients or derivatives of your data.
This is much clearer cut in UK law AIUI as without Fair Use we don't have the rights to train an AI. The model is fed works, you can't feed it copyright works without permission, good luck training it to make facsimile works that weren't already generic (bear in mind the Red Bus Case, however).
What I wonder here is if you train a model with no Disney works, then tell it "draw a black mouse with red shorts" and it draws a close facsimile of Mickey RTM then what? You created the work without copying and provably so; you can derive from that work without infringement ... that would seem to break copyright in rather wonderful way?!?
>My personal opinion is that the source data does not exist inside the model, so the model does not in and off itself comprise of a copyright violation.
The "source data" does not exist in a ZIP file either. Neural networks are just a form of data compression like ZIP, though more opaque and lossy, but still, a highly compressed abstract version of the training corpus is encoded in the weights.
A zip file is not a good analogy to a language model as the zip can reproduce the original exactly with 100% recall, language models have very few episodes of verbatim reproduction and coverage is spotty. A zip file can only reproduce the original, but a language model can be asked to write custom, situated code. The language model still works if you block all the training data from appearing in its output.
Potential output has nothing to do with the question whether the training data is "memorized" in the weights or not. To me, the answer to the latter question is "obviously yes".
I don’t yet have any strong opinions, just thoughts.
One thought is that in construction you will learn to do things through others teaching you. And then you’ll do them at future sites, and they’ll be nearly identical. There’s only so many ways to build walls or run electrical, etc. to code.
I think coding is often similar. Let’s not fool ourselves: a lot of what we write isn’t novel or interesting or challenging. It’s the total end product that is.
Well the way electrical is run isn't copyrighted and is, in fact, constrained by building codes.
That said, to my non-legal mind, I don't see Copilot as being that much different from taking a code block from a book or Stack Overflow or wherever to implement some function. Clearly there are some limits; Copilot probably couldn't lift an entire grammar checker or whatever. But people reuse function templates and the like all the time and no one generally cares. And I doubt most people upset about Copilot really want the copyright police scrutinizing every single line of code.
> Well the way electrical is run isn't copyrighted
I think that’s another item I keep thinking about. Why should code be copyrightable? Especially when so much of it is just, like plumbing, just plumbing.
I think I might share your thoughts. Isn’t copilot just a template/boilerplate generator but on steroids?
If anything, I think Copilot is forcing the industry to recognize: a lot of the code people write is not the valuable or interesting part. The real value is in figuring out what to write and in what way it should all be connected together and interacted with.
This was an open question for a long time. Is it just a set of functional instructions about how to do something (which wouldn't typically be copyrightable) or is it a creative work?
It wasn't even an interesting question in the early part of the computer industry because software was mostly something created so that companies could sell hardware. Or it was written for internal use.
However, in 1974 the Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) was established in the US and decided computer programs were in general copyrightable. Congress added this to copyright law in 1980.
I think copyright issues are getting blown out of proportion.
Ethically it is not very different from myself reading books, blogs and other available source codes, and then writing my own program based on whatever I learned.
Legally, IANAL but either the code generated would be novel, common enough or otherwise easily searchable to original source. For case 3, developer can take the call to keep it or not.
The analogy is wrong, AI does not at all look similar to a human mind, it is a more complex algorithm , a obfuscated script that if done wrong will output the exact input you used it for training. This can happen probably very often withy original stuff and less often with trivial stuff.
That is a matter of some debate among neurophysiologists and others. There are clearly differences but there also seem to be similarities that go beyond mere analogy.
That depends on how you define similarities. This ANN AIs are a complex version of a polynomial interpolation , you have some points from a measurements and you build a function to fit those points, so in the end you have a function with a giant matrix of data as a "knowledge" database behind.
But even with the human mind, I am 100% sure Microsoft would not like it if I read their precious Windows source code and then go and work on wine, they might claim that I did not learned from their code but memorize secret algorithms , or maybe would claim that I did not ask for permissions first.
These days I doubt Microsoft would care much. But to your broader point, yes, that's why you do clean room implementations of public APIs. If you've never seen an implementation, you can't really be accused of copying it.
This is really different though in that this code is all open source. The argument is that sufficient code is being verbatim copies so as to be a derivative work.
>This is really different though in that this code is all open source.
Open source or proprietary you still have to respect the license.
>The argument is that sufficient code is being verbatim copies so as to be a derivative work.
Yeah, it also depends what derivative work means, I could make a script that inputs MS code and outputs it with obfuscation, is it derivative work or will MS complain that is not enough and I did not had permission to do this,
AFAIK code on GitHub does not have the permssions to be used as input for copilot, and not all code there has the permissions from all authors to be hosted there.
What MS should do is
1 use their proprietary repos as input too to show us that they think the results are derivative code
2 use their customer private code too to prove again that they are ready to prove in court that this is derivative work
3 open the model with no restrictions, then we could say MS is doing it for the advancement of society and sure charge for the service
4 promise to defend any developer in case their AI outputs copyrighted content.
>The difference is that you can't claim open source code is a trade secret that contains algorithms that you can't reimplement in your own code.
You can't use "trade secret" but MS Windows code is also no longer secret, they shared the code with third parties and was also leaked, so they can claim you do not respect the license or TOS,NDAs etc. Not sure if "secret" has anything to do with this, proprietary stuff is not secret, it could be source availleble or be a scripting language stuff or something trivial to find the original implementation like C# and Java
It’s possible for there to be patent encumbered algorithms in open source code though. A license like Apache will contain a free license to use them to use/distribute the open source work… which I’m not sure would transfer if copilot happens to plop some unlicensed, unattributed violating code in your code base.
It would be interesting to see if this sort of implicit grant, or even the explicit ones, extend to using the patent outside the context of the original work.
My main concern here is that copilot itself might not be illegal but that it is causing otherwise well-meaning developers to put themselves at legal risk.
AI is not similar to a human mind in the general case (ie general AI), but in the context of reading and learning and generating code there are similarities. And I would argue that humans are also very susceptible to "output the exact input used for training".
How is similar in generating code? From my case I don't create code by combining previous seen code, for example I can write a Lua/Haskell script now even in my memory I have no Lua/Haskell code stored. I can do it because I create a model of the problem, then I create structures of data and operations on those data, only the final step is to look up the syntax and standard libraries to generate the code.
Can someone prove that it at least managed to understand trivial algorithms, like this is a find.sort,reverse,filter,map operation and it can say map an algorithm from one language to other?
Thinking at it , bad students when learning programming are doing this kind of stuff, they start writing stuff from memory that looks like valid code , one student wrote something like if(int i =0; i < n; i++) , clearly this student did not understand the lesson so Copilot will do a similar mistake just one level higher
I definitely agree copilot isn't understanding the problem space of your code. But I also don't believe it's simply remixing code samples from its training set. It's somewhere in between. I don't know the internals, but it looks to me like it's operating at a few layers of abstraction over literal code and syntax. It find patterns in the relationships between symbols and references. Not to mention since it's GPT-3 based, it's cross referencing the "meaning" in these abstract relationships with the meaning of plain English text written in comments, too. These pieces are similar to humans. Just like a human, copilot doesn't have a ton of exact literal code in its model. It's seen lots of code and has patterns and relationships in its model. That's why just like a human, it can translate ideas between different coding languages -- my guess would be it can write an algorithm its seen in C in F# even if its never seen that algorithm in F#; but that's hard to prove. Just like a human though, it might have some literal snippets, though. It can definitely translate between languages ; I've done that a few times. (It can even translate human languages eg English to French! I've done that sometimes for fun) I would highly recommend giving the trial version a go, if only to better understand how it works. Whether it "understands" eg a map operation... That's hard to prove. Can you think of any experiments? I think it understand the relationship between the English word map and the code patterns often associated with that word.
I think your example is close. Copilot is a lot like an inexperienced developer. It doesn't (usually) make syntax errors, but because it doesn't understand your problem space, and because it doesn't have as many layers of abstraction as a human does, it does sometimes make silly mistakes. I definitely wouldn't trust it to write an entire program on its own! But with a human in the loop doing the more complicated abstract pieces of coding, it handles the more simple menial pieces pretty well!
If you have access to it maybe experiment with using snippets from Windows code, like find Wine or Windows code on GitHub and copy the start of a function that is pretty unique , see if it completes it as the original or not.
Other experiment maybe test if it just repeats text that iot seen and has realy no idea about stiuff.
I would use missleading variables, like
int namesLis;
int[] counter;
string i ="test";
add some comments or unrelated stuff here like print heelo world 12 times
then start with
for( int ...
and see it it just completes it correctly or will do something stupid and have 3 or more error) If it is a bit smart it will know what variable is the list because it associated the [] with a list
Oh as of this week copilot is open to the public: https://github.com/features/copilot/ . You can get a trial, or it is free for students and open source maintainers.
When humans make a direct copy of something it can be considered plagiarism or copyright violation, and any work produced in this manner is potentially subject to serious litigation and consequence.
There are different levels of learning and reproducing. I think you could easily make a "neural net" trained exclusively on a copyright work, that reproduces the work exactly on request. Simply because the data entered and then subsequently exited a black box of a system doesn't mean it was transformed in any way.
If you have a movie camera and you use it to record a copyright movie at a movie theater and upload your recording, you used a creative tool but in a way that directly violates copyright. I don't see why using a tool like Copilot to reproduce a copyright work is any different.
The parent comment seemed to me to be implying that humans aren't capable of copying. In my experience I've had more issues with human developers plagiarising than with copilot plagiarising.
You could create such a system. I agree that Copilot operates at a very different level of learning :) the question is a little murky actually, but I think some people are arguing that everything Copilot produces isn't sufficiently transformative and hence violates GPL of code in its training set. Some people are arguing it sometimes generates direct copies and hence violates GPL. Some people are arguing that it is sufficiently transformative and at little to no risk of violating copyright. It's a big question!
> Ethically it is not very different from myself reading books, blogs and other available source codes, and then writing my own program based on whatever I learned.
I don't think that's the same. It's more similar to copying and adapting snippets of code, in which case I would have to check the licence.
Also, it's not an ethical, but a legal consideration. It's not particularly ethical that the Mouse keeps on having its copyright extended but it is legal.
In my experience using copilot, I believe it's more similar to the former than to copying and adapting. Copilot generates code snippets that are transformative and derived from multiple code sources--like Dalle does with images. I think making the AI algorithms more transparent is what needs to happen. The AI needs to be able to say that this five line code snippet was generated based on learning from these 2000 repos. That would not only directly provide input on whether copying is happening, but would also just generally be an amazingly useful tool. But the tech isn't there yet.
Most legal issues are ethical issues. The reason copyright law exists is because an ethical argument has been made that artists should be able to profit/make a living from their creations for a reasonable amount of time. Another contradictory ethical argument is that art should enter the public domain so that it is available to all. Copyright sits in limbo between these two conflicting ethical requirements.
Ethically it is also not very different from copying other people's code, removing/ignoring all copyright notices and then changing some parts slightly to try to hide this.
If you strip out the magic of AI or different machine learning models strung together. The question for copyright is thr type of model. If it is a diffusion based model that competes against human written code. There is no conflict.
But since release people have found code snippets of their own making. Therefore a layer in there is just an advanced indexing algorithm called AI.
Like other posters pointed out, the fundamental issue is the mismatch of license and purchasing of github. Retroactive change of terms of service, etc...
They are, because the armchair critics are focusing on the edge case scenario of populating a mostly blank file in a blank project.
Yes, demoing it in that setup, which the FAQ explicitly said not to do, will result in unusable IP infringement.
But when using it in a mature codebase that flavors the output to match the existing code, what you get pretty much doesn't ever match the training data vs reflecting a fusion of the training with your existing code.
So you have 90% of the conversation occurring by people who appear not even to have used the thing in any considerable way but saw demos of the edge case fail condition, which probably occurs less than 1% of the time in actual usage.
It's a good idea to have serious discussion and debate about the intersection of IP and AI.
But it'd be refreshing if that conversation orbited the reality of the intersection and not a largely fictional bogeyman.
At the end of the day, all decisions related to AI generated content, no matter if its code, art, text or something else, will favor big corporations.
If I take a dataset of public available images of Disney characters, which are obviously copyrighted, and train a model to generate new characters, they will sue me until they find a judge that rules I infringed their copyright just by using their copyrighted work, even if the result does not have any similarity with the copyrighted work.
But if a big corporation take a copyrighted public dataset to train a model, and this model start to regurgitate exactly copies of the copyrighted work, which apparently is the case of Github Co-pilot, in the case of a lawsuit, the big corporation will spend money until they find a judge that rules their use of the copyrighted work as fair use.
So, at the end, any decision will benefit big corporations.
The real question is if people will make big corporations fight for their victory or if people will let them win easily.
It's not just regular people vs big corporations, it's also an emerging technology with huge potential. You can't stop it, better to find ways to adapt.
It's is an emerging technology with huge potential owned by big corporations that as any other technology will or will not be regulated according big corporations interest, which usually goes against the regular people interest.
What I think it really comes down to, is whether copilot-like tech becomes a 2x (or even 10x) productivity multiplier.
If it becomes that powerful, we'll ignore these and other concerns. Just imagine Chinese or Russian devs moving 2x or 10x faster because they have no regard for our privileged concerns. Don't even have to go that far, a competitor is using GPT-17 and you're not - good luck!
And if it stagnates and never goes far beyond the current capabilities, then sure, it might become fashionable to try and hunt for copyright infringements caused by Copilot.
I don't think mentioning slavery is helpful or relevant to this discussion.
---
Let's take Google as a better example of an overpowering technology. Its world-domination has been built on scraping everyone else's data, and regurgitating it to users in a very useful manner. Had it been less useful, I'm sure you'd have everyone constantly complaining about them "stealing" public information.
Either way, I wasn't making a judgment of how the world should be, merely how it's probably going to work out. Copilot in its ideal final form would be: 1) great at writing good code 2) if needed, very good at obfuscating any stolen code into something that looks brand new.
Good luck fighting this mostly-undectable, productivity-boosting technology that has no obvious victims.
Come back with that line when the absolute number (not to mention the pay) of developer jobs worldwide starts decreasing because of this. It will probably happen by the end of the next decade.
Technology has been displacing people from established jobs for as long as civilizations have existed. The world isn't going to stop moving forward just so, us, developers can keep collecting good paychecks.
So it's indeed not "without victims", is it? Bonus points for reading comprehension and "coherent" comparison between automating physical and cognitive labor.
Devaluing all human intelligence (which is what the endgoal of all those advanced models is) is not "moving forward" in my book.
Are PHP programmers the victims of Python, JS and other languages that are taking over and reducing PHP's employability?
As for the physical vs cognitive labor: we automate the bottlenecks. Back in the day that was physical and now it's cognitive labor.
Also, let's not forget that right now programmers are one of the best compensated professions. For the non-tech businesses, we are the expensive gatekeepers for the world of software. Need to build a non-trivial tech solution? You could easily end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for devs to write it and maintain it.
If that instead can be done by the end-user themselves or with less employees, I'm sure they will be super happy to save resources. Or maybe you don't care about these people?
And I will be very happy if I had the famous ability of Midas whenever I willed so but that's not the question.
Those "super happy" people will themselves be automated away from their jobs by AIs at roughly the same point as programmers, give or take several years.
Turning people into economically useless appendages (at best being consumers at the mercy of state-dispensed UBI) is not something to celebrate but a dystopia. So is destroying the ability of humans to achieve station in life because of their cognitive ability.
I however don't think we will find common ground regarding that question.
Considering the opinions here [1] and the fact that Microsoft’s lawyers even signed off on something as seemingly risky as Copilot, it seems very likely that courts will not find Copilot to infringe on copyright.
I encourage you to read the linked article and respond to the authors instead of making me argue their case for them!
I am very happy to see the starting to think about and gather the community around this novel issue. This sheds a new light on existing IP laws.
It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus, such tool would not have been possible, hence the (IMHO) justified derivative work question.
Companies and individuals have spent decades building this open corpus and in exchange they deserve to have their will (aka license) respected. For a significant fraction of those, it means sharing the derivative works under the same license.
It's pretty sad, though not surprising to many of us, to see that Microsoft isn't really playing openly and nicely with the FOSS community about those issues.
When people started saying Microsoft had changed and was a fair player now, I had my doubts, and this doesn't help.
> It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus, such tool would not have been possible, hence the (IMHO) justified derivative work question.
Note though that a work not being possible without your work is not sufficient to make that work a derivative work of your work. It just suggests that you need to take a closer look at the relationship between your work and the other work.
For example Windows applications, even ones that make intimate use of the behavior of Windows and would take significant rewrites to port elsewhere or to run under current Windows compatible operating systems like ReactOS or under things like Wine, are not automatically derivative works of Windows.
To be a derivative work the work has to include copyrighted elements from your work in a way that is not covered by fair use. That's why clean room reverse engineering works--by making sure the coders do not have access to the work being reverse engineered they cannot copy any copyrighted elements from it and so cannot produce a derivative work.
I suspect that under current copyright law it is possible to do something like Copilot without the output violating copyright but it may need to be more sophisticated than the current Copilot.
From the few examples of Copilot output I've seen it seems to output stuff that would probably either be covered by fair use or that doesn't have enough creativity to be copyrighted. But from what people have said it occasionally spits out longer things that seem likely to be copyrighted and not covered by fair use.
What may be necessary for systems like this is to couple them with a second AI that can recognize when the first AI is making a suggestion that goes beyond fair use and stops it. I don't know if it is currently possible to make such an AI. Where would you get a good set of training data?
The above was about the output of Copilot. Another question is whether Copilot itself is legal. When you train an AI on some data is there a copy of that data in the AI? If there is then Copilot may be an infringement of the copying right.
In the US copyright law defines copies in 17 USC 101, where they are defined as
> [...] material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term “copies” includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed.
Is a collection of neural net weights something from which you can perceive, reproduce, or otherwise communicate the individual works the net was trained on? Or is it more like some kind of hash of the work?
My guess is that both the output of AIs and the AIs themselves are sufficiently beyond what anyone was contemplating the last time there was a major update of copyright to deal with new technology that to fit AI in we are probably going to need a major update to the law.
The points you are making are excellent. I don't have much to add, but I wanted to thank you.
The second one is particularly interesting and brings load of very interesting questions. Like, is it truly learning or just reciting ? From my limited knowledge about copilot, the latter might be more likely, so the copyright law might be triggered ?
> It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus, such tool would not have been possible
How is that obvious? I am relatively certain that MS committing their entire code base as training material would do the trick, if that's what it took. Or, additionally, maybe licensing some other huge high quality code bases (restricted to just training the ai) for a few million bucks? It's not like it would be an issue to find vendors happy to remonetize their already written code.
Given what's at stake here and who sits at the helm, I don't see how Copilot would not or could not be moved forwards regardless.
To be honest, I wish that better code repositories we're given more weight. Microsoft's should be given more weight, especially considering the security issues that is autosuggested by copilot.
If that would’ve worked, then they should’ve done that instead though! Why create such huge possibility for legal battles for themselves (and their users)? I would feel much more comfortable with the idea of using copilot if I was sure that I wouldn’t generate copyright infringing code, which Microsoft could guarantee if they had licensed the training data.
There would be huge benefits to going that route, but they didn’t. That’s what makes me think that it’s impossible because they needed a huge volume of data, and the only way to get enough was to take it without consent of the license owners.
I wish they were as careful of other's people's code IP as they're with their own.
If this is not derivative work, how come they didn't use their own codebase instead of taking the opensource ones ?
Either their codebase is low quality, either they think it would leak their IP, meaning it's derivative work. Neither solution sounds great for them
> how come they didn't use their own codebase instead of taking the opensource ones?
Convenience probably.
Using their own code would have required them to coordinate inhouse, and carefully and expensively sanitise everything, because committing their code, which was largely never written to be open sourced, to run the wild Copilot experiment (which it still is at this point) probably seemed a little riskier than they liked, potentially creating some kind of security disaster. So just use the stuff that is already in the open and thus better be secure enough as is, at what they apparently deem the relatively small risk and costs of lawsuits happening.
I could also see them wanting to test the water on how the license thing flies.
That's absurd. One company, even the size of Microsoft, cannot possibly cover all nuances, programming languages, patterns, architectures that the entire OSS is providing.
I won't pretend to know the specifics of the legal decision that will follow from this, but it's easy to guess that when those tools start causing structural unemployment (and that will happen soon enough), there will be a backlash.
Even the most naive takes I see here (it's no different than you reading public code = "the AI should be treated the same as a human") will be forced to re-evaluate their position once they become unemployable because of these AIs.
> when those tools start causing structural unemployment (and that will happen soon enough)
Is this actually happening? Some years ago there were articles about neural networks which can find errors/interesting points in law documents or find tumors during cancer imaging, but did this actually replace any jobs instead of just being an additional tool?
There is a capability line that needs to be crossed before we start seeing this. Which I think most of those older systems didn't cross.
For me, one answer to this could be given when we're able to compare the number of illustrators employed in the US in June 2022 vs in June 2027. + the delta of the average salary.
I don't think Copilot is at any risk of causing unemployment yet, but Dalle could very likely replace a number of graphic design jobs in marketing right now. I think it's an important question, but at the same time, replacing jobs didn't stop the spinning Jenny from taking the textile industry by storm. In fact the exact opposite was true. It was popular specifically because it replaced paid jobs with fewer paid jobs. I don't know if there was backlash at the time, but jobs get destroyed and rebuilt by technology all the time, for better or worse.
Edit: actually I take that back. I think a team that previously needed 3 developers might get away with only 1 or 2 developers thanks to improved productivity from copilot. So it can replace jobs in that way. Dalle can make a team that has one designer go to 0 designers.
Copilot currently is very far from being able to cut 33% of the time spend writing code, let alone 33% of the working time of the average software engineer.
In 3-4 years - maybe, but not now.
That being said, luddism was a thing for obvious reasons and it's not clear to me that we will be able to create any jobs at all post automation with this type of AI models. At the very least what will happen is that human intelligence will be devalued significantly in the job market.
Oh yeah those numbers were hogwash, I was just looking for a number less than 3 :P I was thinking like small mom and pop shop that has like a small Dev team for some reason might be able to reduce it down.
Vox hosted a fantastic discussion with artists after showing them Dalle, and their thoughts on how it'll affect their jobs are very interesting! Would highly recommend. https://youtu.be/sFBfrZ-N3G4 it notes a few times in history when people have thought a technology would dangerously displace jobs (eg photography replacing painters), but that in general new, unforseen jobs appear.
I know some argue that UBI is the natural conclusion of AI replacing more jobs. Or jobs shifting to be more coordinating the AI (the Vox video uses the term "prompt engineering" to describe this a bit). It's definitely an open question! But I'm honestly a little excited (and nervous!) to see where it goes. It could have realty positive impacts on humanity if we're careful! I think these tools could allow a certain level of individual productivity that would allow people to achieve more of their goals in our limited lifetimes :) But the future is murky and not guaranteed.
> I know some argue that UBI is the natural conclusion of AI replacing more jobs
UBI is not the natural consequence of automation increasing the value of automation and reducing the relative value of all other labor, sharply increasing inequality and with extraordinary concentrated wealth and increasingly broad poverty is.
UBI is a potential intervention to mitigate that natural consequence, though.
> Dalle can make a team that has one designer go to 0 designers.
It is the same as what happened with digital photography. In the old days every single publication, no matter how local or modest, that wanted to have a photo to accompany the text needed a photographer. With the invention of digital photography and smartphones, this is no longer the case. Any writer or editor can snap a picture themselves and often it even looks kind of ok.
However, for a real "professional" look and and quality, you still need a skilled expert to take care of the imagery. Because part of providing the image are the mechanics of producing one, but another part is knowing/deciding what the right image is for this occasion. The latter part can only be done by humans for the foreseeable future.
The result is that it is much easier to acquire some picture for you publication, but also there there still is a need for professionals that can do it "proper".
> I don't think Copilot is at any risk of causing unemployment yet, but Dalle could very likely replace a number of graphic design jobs in marketing right now.
Automation tools shift demand from the job automated to the jobs producing the automation tools.
That's why all other automation shifts demand to programming. Automation of programming, though, just shifts the demand within programming to a higher level of abstraction.
I think what is really going to be interesting is when someone finally does this trick for music, as the RIAA is 100% going to sue whomever pulls off "give me a song about my ex girlfriend that sounds like Taylor Swift singing a hypothetical cover of a song in the style of one from Bob Dylan" and we will finally have a real test of all of these laws (...likely followed by a ton of frantic edits driven by their interests). In contrast, photographers and artists have always been in relatively weak positions and the only software developers having issues right now are almost by definition of the task going to be from the open source ecosystem, and so what comes out of these discussions is mostly just a lot of frustration rather than a true throwing down of the gauntlet, an activity for which the RIAA is always ready.
(In case anyone else sees this and thinks this is useful without clicking the link, it isn't: this is one of those stupid "I generated every possible X and so obviously copyright has failed" pranks.)
Informally speaking, the idea of the free software movement and the copyleft specifically was born as a response to fundamental conflict between a business environment that in its ultimate goal wants to have a full control over the software and independent individual creators who just want to be free in creativity and are fine to share their work with anyone who also follows these principals in some way.
The members of the movement are also quite often criticizing Copyright laws. While I agree that the law is not ideal, to my vision the Berne Convention foundations are on the individual creators side. Fighting against Copyright, in my opinion, is a shooting yourself in the foot.
I'm not a big fan of the FSF and other similar movements rhetoric because of this(even though, I agree with some points). If creators just want to share their work with other people, and they don't care about the business "plutocracy", they can offer a License contract that would simply restrict the work usage by individuals only. It could still be a free of charge License that would allow even commercial use of the work, but the License should grant permissions to individuals only who are not representing a 3rd party interests(a business in particular). Such License is not a FOSS License in common sense, but in my opinion it could solve the initial goals laying behind the FOSS movements true intentions.
> the idea of the free software movement (...) was born as a response to fundamental conflict between a business environment (...) and independent individual creators
This is a skewed and very narrow view. The main contrast is not between "businesses" and "individual creators", but between people who control and people who use software. For example, between governments that hire programmers to write software, and citizens that get to use this software. The idea of the free software movement is that users of any software should have the right to know exactly what the software does, and to change it as they see fit. This has really nothing to do with business.
> The members of the movement are also quite often criticizing Copyright laws.
Do you have a reference for that? My impression is that the FSF is quite respectful of copyright laws, and acknowledges their importance. This is an orthogonal issue to that of software freedom.
I didn't talk just about FSF, but about the free software movement in general. Of course individual members may have different points of view.
For reference example. In the chapter "On Copyleft Maximalism and Unilateral Capitulation" of the first Article in the Thread's link:
"""
Draconian copyright law generally horrifies software freedom activists for good reason. Nearly all copyleft activists would prefer a true, multilateral rewriting of copyright rules that prioritized the interest of the general public and software rights. Copyleft exists primarily because of the long-standing political non-viability of a copyright law reboot. Nothing has changed in this regard; if anything, changing legislation has become an even more expensive lobbying proposition than it was at copyleft’s advent. Copyleft activists should expect, indefinitely, for proprietary software companies and media oligarchs to control copyright legislation.
This does not seem to criticize copyright law as much as people who abuse copyright for nefarious purposes. If anything, it vouches for a reform of copyright rules to clarify the situation, not for their demise! And in no way anybody is "fighting against copyright". After all, copyleft itself is implemented using copyright, so it wouldn't make any sense (and I agree with you that it would be obviously shooting oneself in the foot). Also, FSF and other major actors always sign their writings with an explicit copyright notice.
What about General Data Protection Regulation and anonymization? My source code files usually start with copyright notice with my name and email address followed by a reference to the license. In this case anonymization may be against my interests and rights.
Guys Microsoft gives you github for free and copilot makes you a better programmer. Isn’t the whole point to make singularity not worry about mit license
File an official complaint against these companies for their blatant theft and sale of your copyrighted content with the FTC, BBB, CA State Attorney General, San Francisco DA office & FBI IP Theft division.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadThis is such an important debate to have and my fear is that the companies investing in this tech have deep pockets, the lobbying around it could result in a unbalanced outcome. This isn’t really an area where “move fast and break things” is necessarily the right process.
Exciting though to see where this technology could lead, co-pilot blows my mind at times.
But what we mere citizens have to say about it, I fear, won't matter much.
They already are. Even Dall-E mini does a respectable job at cartoon characters (it struggles a lot with people, especially faces, but handles cartoons quite well).
[1] https://luckytrader.com/news/x2-y2-to-release-dmca-takedown-...
[2] Ask HN: Why do devs feel CoPilot has stolen code but DALL-E is praised for ART? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31868837
It is also not a derivative work, as it is not recognizable as any of the works it was trained on.
However, if the output it produces is close enough to existing copyrighted works, than that output cannot be used without a license.
That seems fair, and just like how we would judge a human being.
On the topic of derivative, backpropagation the method of training a model relies specifically on calculating the gradients or derivatives of your data.
What I wonder here is if you train a model with no Disney works, then tell it "draw a black mouse with red shorts" and it draws a close facsimile of Mickey RTM then what? You created the work without copying and provably so; you can derive from that work without infringement ... that would seem to break copyright in rather wonderful way?!?
However, there is certainly a broader spectrum of "copyright infringement" than simply cutting and pasting text verbatim.
The "source data" does not exist in a ZIP file either. Neural networks are just a form of data compression like ZIP, though more opaque and lossy, but still, a highly compressed abstract version of the training corpus is encoded in the weights.
One thought is that in construction you will learn to do things through others teaching you. And then you’ll do them at future sites, and they’ll be nearly identical. There’s only so many ways to build walls or run electrical, etc. to code.
I think coding is often similar. Let’s not fool ourselves: a lot of what we write isn’t novel or interesting or challenging. It’s the total end product that is.
That said, to my non-legal mind, I don't see Copilot as being that much different from taking a code block from a book or Stack Overflow or wherever to implement some function. Clearly there are some limits; Copilot probably couldn't lift an entire grammar checker or whatever. But people reuse function templates and the like all the time and no one generally cares. And I doubt most people upset about Copilot really want the copyright police scrutinizing every single line of code.
I think that’s another item I keep thinking about. Why should code be copyrightable? Especially when so much of it is just, like plumbing, just plumbing.
I think I might share your thoughts. Isn’t copilot just a template/boilerplate generator but on steroids?
If anything, I think Copilot is forcing the industry to recognize: a lot of the code people write is not the valuable or interesting part. The real value is in figuring out what to write and in what way it should all be connected together and interacted with.
This was an open question for a long time. Is it just a set of functional instructions about how to do something (which wouldn't typically be copyrightable) or is it a creative work?
It wasn't even an interesting question in the early part of the computer industry because software was mostly something created so that companies could sell hardware. Or it was written for internal use.
However, in 1974 the Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) was established in the US and decided computer programs were in general copyrightable. Congress added this to copyright law in 1980.
Ethically it is not very different from myself reading books, blogs and other available source codes, and then writing my own program based on whatever I learned.
Legally, IANAL but either the code generated would be novel, common enough or otherwise easily searchable to original source. For case 3, developer can take the call to keep it or not.
That is a matter of some debate among neurophysiologists and others. There are clearly differences but there also seem to be similarities that go beyond mere analogy.
But even with the human mind, I am 100% sure Microsoft would not like it if I read their precious Windows source code and then go and work on wine, they might claim that I did not learned from their code but memorize secret algorithms , or maybe would claim that I did not ask for permissions first.
This is really different though in that this code is all open source. The argument is that sufficient code is being verbatim copies so as to be a derivative work.
Open source or proprietary you still have to respect the license.
>The argument is that sufficient code is being verbatim copies so as to be a derivative work.
Yeah, it also depends what derivative work means, I could make a script that inputs MS code and outputs it with obfuscation, is it derivative work or will MS complain that is not enough and I did not had permission to do this,
AFAIK code on GitHub does not have the permssions to be used as input for copilot, and not all code there has the permissions from all authors to be hosted there.
What MS should do is
1 use their proprietary repos as input too to show us that they think the results are derivative code
2 use their customer private code too to prove again that they are ready to prove in court that this is derivative work
3 open the model with no restrictions, then we could say MS is doing it for the advancement of society and sure charge for the service
4 promise to defend any developer in case their AI outputs copyrighted content.
>they might claim that I did not learned from their code but memorize secret algorithms
The difference is that you can't claim open source code is a trade secret that contains algorithms that you can't reimplement in your own code.
You can't use "trade secret" but MS Windows code is also no longer secret, they shared the code with third parties and was also leaked, so they can claim you do not respect the license or TOS,NDAs etc. Not sure if "secret" has anything to do with this, proprietary stuff is not secret, it could be source availleble or be a scripting language stuff or something trivial to find the original implementation like C# and Java
[1] https://opensource.com/article/18/3/patent-grant-mit-license
My main concern here is that copilot itself might not be illegal but that it is causing otherwise well-meaning developers to put themselves at legal risk.
Can someone prove that it at least managed to understand trivial algorithms, like this is a find.sort,reverse,filter,map operation and it can say map an algorithm from one language to other?
Thinking at it , bad students when learning programming are doing this kind of stuff, they start writing stuff from memory that looks like valid code , one student wrote something like if(int i =0; i < n; i++) , clearly this student did not understand the lesson so Copilot will do a similar mistake just one level higher
I think your example is close. Copilot is a lot like an inexperienced developer. It doesn't (usually) make syntax errors, but because it doesn't understand your problem space, and because it doesn't have as many layers of abstraction as a human does, it does sometimes make silly mistakes. I definitely wouldn't trust it to write an entire program on its own! But with a human in the loop doing the more complicated abstract pieces of coding, it handles the more simple menial pieces pretty well!
Other experiment maybe test if it just repeats text that iot seen and has realy no idea about stiuff. I would use missleading variables, like
int namesLis; int[] counter; string i ="test";
add some comments or unrelated stuff here like print heelo world 12 times
then start with for( int ... and see it it just completes it correctly or will do something stupid and have 3 or more error) If it is a bit smart it will know what variable is the list because it associated the [] with a list
There are different levels of learning and reproducing. I think you could easily make a "neural net" trained exclusively on a copyright work, that reproduces the work exactly on request. Simply because the data entered and then subsequently exited a black box of a system doesn't mean it was transformed in any way.
If you have a movie camera and you use it to record a copyright movie at a movie theater and upload your recording, you used a creative tool but in a way that directly violates copyright. I don't see why using a tool like Copilot to reproduce a copyright work is any different.
You could create such a system. I agree that Copilot operates at a very different level of learning :) the question is a little murky actually, but I think some people are arguing that everything Copilot produces isn't sufficiently transformative and hence violates GPL of code in its training set. Some people are arguing it sometimes generates direct copies and hence violates GPL. Some people are arguing that it is sufficiently transformative and at little to no risk of violating copyright. It's a big question!
It is by definition a min/max reduced solution of a direct copy of existing code and therefore should have to respect their licenses.
I don't think that's the same. It's more similar to copying and adapting snippets of code, in which case I would have to check the licence.
Also, it's not an ethical, but a legal consideration. It's not particularly ethical that the Mouse keeps on having its copyright extended but it is legal.
Most legal issues are ethical issues. The reason copyright law exists is because an ethical argument has been made that artists should be able to profit/make a living from their creations for a reasonable amount of time. Another contradictory ethical argument is that art should enter the public domain so that it is available to all. Copyright sits in limbo between these two conflicting ethical requirements.
But since release people have found code snippets of their own making. Therefore a layer in there is just an advanced indexing algorithm called AI.
Like other posters pointed out, the fundamental issue is the mismatch of license and purchasing of github. Retroactive change of terms of service, etc...
An AI can't do that by definition.
Yes, demoing it in that setup, which the FAQ explicitly said not to do, will result in unusable IP infringement.
But when using it in a mature codebase that flavors the output to match the existing code, what you get pretty much doesn't ever match the training data vs reflecting a fusion of the training with your existing code.
So you have 90% of the conversation occurring by people who appear not even to have used the thing in any considerable way but saw demos of the edge case fail condition, which probably occurs less than 1% of the time in actual usage.
It's a good idea to have serious discussion and debate about the intersection of IP and AI.
But it'd be refreshing if that conversation orbited the reality of the intersection and not a largely fictional bogeyman.
If I take a dataset of public available images of Disney characters, which are obviously copyrighted, and train a model to generate new characters, they will sue me until they find a judge that rules I infringed their copyright just by using their copyrighted work, even if the result does not have any similarity with the copyrighted work.
But if a big corporation take a copyrighted public dataset to train a model, and this model start to regurgitate exactly copies of the copyrighted work, which apparently is the case of Github Co-pilot, in the case of a lawsuit, the big corporation will spend money until they find a judge that rules their use of the copyrighted work as fair use.
So, at the end, any decision will benefit big corporations.
The real question is if people will make big corporations fight for their victory or if people will let them win easily.
If it becomes that powerful, we'll ignore these and other concerns. Just imagine Chinese or Russian devs moving 2x or 10x faster because they have no regard for our privileged concerns. Don't even have to go that far, a competitor is using GPT-17 and you're not - good luck!
And if it stagnates and never goes far beyond the current capabilities, then sure, it might become fashionable to try and hunt for copyright infringements caused by Copilot.
---
Let's take Google as a better example of an overpowering technology. Its world-domination has been built on scraping everyone else's data, and regurgitating it to users in a very useful manner. Had it been less useful, I'm sure you'd have everyone constantly complaining about them "stealing" public information.
Either way, I wasn't making a judgment of how the world should be, merely how it's probably going to work out. Copilot in its ideal final form would be: 1) great at writing good code 2) if needed, very good at obfuscating any stolen code into something that looks brand new.
Good luck fighting this mostly-undectable, productivity-boosting technology that has no obvious victims.
This is practically freeing the code. Paradoxically, open source people oppose it, but it's going to empower open source as well.
Come back with that line when the absolute number (not to mention the pay) of developer jobs worldwide starts decreasing because of this. It will probably happen by the end of the next decade.
Devaluing all human intelligence (which is what the endgoal of all those advanced models is) is not "moving forward" in my book.
As for the physical vs cognitive labor: we automate the bottlenecks. Back in the day that was physical and now it's cognitive labor.
Also, let's not forget that right now programmers are one of the best compensated professions. For the non-tech businesses, we are the expensive gatekeepers for the world of software. Need to build a non-trivial tech solution? You could easily end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for devs to write it and maintain it.
If that instead can be done by the end-user themselves or with less employees, I'm sure they will be super happy to save resources. Or maybe you don't care about these people?
Turning people into economically useless appendages (at best being consumers at the mercy of state-dispensed UBI) is not something to celebrate but a dystopia. So is destroying the ability of humans to achieve station in life because of their cognitive ability. I however don't think we will find common ground regarding that question.
I encourage you to read the linked article and respond to the authors instead of making me argue their case for them!
[1] https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications...
It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus, such tool would not have been possible, hence the (IMHO) justified derivative work question. Companies and individuals have spent decades building this open corpus and in exchange they deserve to have their will (aka license) respected. For a significant fraction of those, it means sharing the derivative works under the same license.
It's pretty sad, though not surprising to many of us, to see that Microsoft isn't really playing openly and nicely with the FOSS community about those issues.
When people started saying Microsoft had changed and was a fair player now, I had my doubts, and this doesn't help.
Note though that a work not being possible without your work is not sufficient to make that work a derivative work of your work. It just suggests that you need to take a closer look at the relationship between your work and the other work.
For example Windows applications, even ones that make intimate use of the behavior of Windows and would take significant rewrites to port elsewhere or to run under current Windows compatible operating systems like ReactOS or under things like Wine, are not automatically derivative works of Windows.
To be a derivative work the work has to include copyrighted elements from your work in a way that is not covered by fair use. That's why clean room reverse engineering works--by making sure the coders do not have access to the work being reverse engineered they cannot copy any copyrighted elements from it and so cannot produce a derivative work.
I suspect that under current copyright law it is possible to do something like Copilot without the output violating copyright but it may need to be more sophisticated than the current Copilot.
From the few examples of Copilot output I've seen it seems to output stuff that would probably either be covered by fair use or that doesn't have enough creativity to be copyrighted. But from what people have said it occasionally spits out longer things that seem likely to be copyrighted and not covered by fair use.
What may be necessary for systems like this is to couple them with a second AI that can recognize when the first AI is making a suggestion that goes beyond fair use and stops it. I don't know if it is currently possible to make such an AI. Where would you get a good set of training data?
The above was about the output of Copilot. Another question is whether Copilot itself is legal. When you train an AI on some data is there a copy of that data in the AI? If there is then Copilot may be an infringement of the copying right.
In the US copyright law defines copies in 17 USC 101, where they are defined as
> [...] material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term “copies” includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed.
Is a collection of neural net weights something from which you can perceive, reproduce, or otherwise communicate the individual works the net was trained on? Or is it more like some kind of hash of the work?
My guess is that both the output of AIs and the AIs themselves are sufficiently beyond what anyone was contemplating the last time there was a major update of copyright to deal with new technology that to fit AI in we are probably going to need a major update to the law.
How is that obvious? I am relatively certain that MS committing their entire code base as training material would do the trick, if that's what it took. Or, additionally, maybe licensing some other huge high quality code bases (restricted to just training the ai) for a few million bucks? It's not like it would be an issue to find vendors happy to remonetize their already written code.
Given what's at stake here and who sits at the helm, I don't see how Copilot would not or could not be moved forwards regardless.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09293
There would be huge benefits to going that route, but they didn’t. That’s what makes me think that it’s impossible because they needed a huge volume of data, and the only way to get enough was to take it without consent of the license owners.
Simple: They disagree with you on the risk of that happening and the potential cost if it did.
If this is not derivative work, how come they didn't use their own codebase instead of taking the opensource ones ? Either their codebase is low quality, either they think it would leak their IP, meaning it's derivative work. Neither solution sounds great for them
Convenience probably.
Using their own code would have required them to coordinate inhouse, and carefully and expensively sanitise everything, because committing their code, which was largely never written to be open sourced, to run the wild Copilot experiment (which it still is at this point) probably seemed a little riskier than they liked, potentially creating some kind of security disaster. So just use the stuff that is already in the open and thus better be secure enough as is, at what they apparently deem the relatively small risk and costs of lawsuits happening.
I could also see them wanting to test the water on how the license thing flies.
I am more than relatively certain that it would provide far worse quality, if not be unusable by developers on average.
“How about Outlook366?”
Even the most naive takes I see here (it's no different than you reading public code = "the AI should be treated the same as a human") will be forced to re-evaluate their position once they become unemployable because of these AIs.
Is this actually happening? Some years ago there were articles about neural networks which can find errors/interesting points in law documents or find tumors during cancer imaging, but did this actually replace any jobs instead of just being an additional tool?
Edit: actually I take that back. I think a team that previously needed 3 developers might get away with only 1 or 2 developers thanks to improved productivity from copilot. So it can replace jobs in that way. Dalle can make a team that has one designer go to 0 designers.
In 3-4 years - maybe, but not now.
That being said, luddism was a thing for obvious reasons and it's not clear to me that we will be able to create any jobs at all post automation with this type of AI models. At the very least what will happen is that human intelligence will be devalued significantly in the job market.
Vox hosted a fantastic discussion with artists after showing them Dalle, and their thoughts on how it'll affect their jobs are very interesting! Would highly recommend. https://youtu.be/sFBfrZ-N3G4 it notes a few times in history when people have thought a technology would dangerously displace jobs (eg photography replacing painters), but that in general new, unforseen jobs appear.
I know some argue that UBI is the natural conclusion of AI replacing more jobs. Or jobs shifting to be more coordinating the AI (the Vox video uses the term "prompt engineering" to describe this a bit). It's definitely an open question! But I'm honestly a little excited (and nervous!) to see where it goes. It could have realty positive impacts on humanity if we're careful! I think these tools could allow a certain level of individual productivity that would allow people to achieve more of their goals in our limited lifetimes :) But the future is murky and not guaranteed.
UBI is not the natural consequence of automation increasing the value of automation and reducing the relative value of all other labor, sharply increasing inequality and with extraordinary concentrated wealth and increasingly broad poverty is.
UBI is a potential intervention to mitigate that natural consequence, though.
It is the same as what happened with digital photography. In the old days every single publication, no matter how local or modest, that wanted to have a photo to accompany the text needed a photographer. With the invention of digital photography and smartphones, this is no longer the case. Any writer or editor can snap a picture themselves and often it even looks kind of ok.
However, for a real "professional" look and and quality, you still need a skilled expert to take care of the imagery. Because part of providing the image are the mechanics of producing one, but another part is knowing/deciding what the right image is for this occasion. The latter part can only be done by humans for the foreseeable future.
The result is that it is much easier to acquire some picture for you publication, but also there there still is a need for professionals that can do it "proper".
Automation tools shift demand from the job automated to the jobs producing the automation tools.
That's why all other automation shifts demand to programming. Automation of programming, though, just shifts the demand within programming to a higher level of abstraction.
Anyway, my paper is at https://gavinhoward.com/2021/10/my-whitepaper-about-github-c... .
Already done, although I don't think an actual lawsuit has been filed.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw
The members of the movement are also quite often criticizing Copyright laws. While I agree that the law is not ideal, to my vision the Berne Convention foundations are on the individual creators side. Fighting against Copyright, in my opinion, is a shooting yourself in the foot.
I'm not a big fan of the FSF and other similar movements rhetoric because of this(even though, I agree with some points). If creators just want to share their work with other people, and they don't care about the business "plutocracy", they can offer a License contract that would simply restrict the work usage by individuals only. It could still be a free of charge License that would allow even commercial use of the work, but the License should grant permissions to individuals only who are not representing a 3rd party interests(a business in particular). Such License is not a FOSS License in common sense, but in my opinion it could solve the initial goals laying behind the FOSS movements true intentions.
This is a skewed and very narrow view. The main contrast is not between "businesses" and "individual creators", but between people who control and people who use software. For example, between governments that hire programmers to write software, and citizens that get to use this software. The idea of the free software movement is that users of any software should have the right to know exactly what the software does, and to change it as they see fit. This has really nothing to do with business.
> The members of the movement are also quite often criticizing Copyright laws.
Do you have a reference for that? My impression is that the FSF is quite respectful of copyright laws, and acknowledges their importance. This is an orthogonal issue to that of software freedom.
> Do you have a reference for that?
I didn't talk just about FSF, but about the free software movement in general. Of course individual members may have different points of view.
For reference example. In the chapter "On Copyleft Maximalism and Unilateral Capitulation" of the first Article in the Thread's link:
"""
Draconian copyright law generally horrifies software freedom activists for good reason. Nearly all copyleft activists would prefer a true, multilateral rewriting of copyright rules that prioritized the interest of the general public and software rights. Copyleft exists primarily because of the long-standing political non-viability of a copyright law reboot. Nothing has changed in this regard; if anything, changing legislation has become an even more expensive lobbying proposition than it was at copyleft’s advent. Copyleft activists should expect, indefinitely, for proprietary software companies and media oligarchs to control copyright legislation.
"""
Source: https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/if-software-is-my-copi...
First and foremost anyone who cares should remove their code from github.
Anyway, time to move back to bitbucket
But please don’t start with an organization as utterly biased as the FSF.
File an official complaint against these companies for their blatant theft and sale of your copyrighted content with the FTC, BBB, CA State Attorney General, San Francisco DA office & FBI IP Theft division.
Like I did.