Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?
Few things in software have made me as viscerally angry as witnessing the vocal minority fighting Copilot and now the class action lawsuit. I have no doubts that Microsoft is prepared to defend themselves, but I want to do more.
What is the opposite of class action lawsuit? Has anyone ever done a class-action amicus brief? Can we organize a group of programmers in FAVOR of GitHub Copilot and fight back?
58 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadI would think this a risk that commercial customers would want to avoid - getting something GPLv3 or other "infecting" licenses contaminating their product due to a developer cutting/pasting code. I also think that Microsoft would not be interested in getting a result that code was obvious and so could not be protected by patent or copyright.
Anybody using FOSS should be (vaguely) concerned about this kind of legal battle. Would hate to see Linux or GNU damaged to MS's gain.
You choose what license you want to use. If you violate the GPL license by including GPL software in your application then you must remove the GPL software as you do not have the right to copy it in that context.
If your application is written by exclusively copying GPL code, then obviously the entire application will be under the GPL license because you didn't write any of the code.
If you had 10tb worth of decently written code, you could probably train a competitive model.
Microsoft Copilot is an abuse of open source. It is perhaps the greatest theft of intellectual property in human history.
We should do everything we can to defeat it.
That said, here is my Request For Comments regarding a slightly modified BSD 2-Clause License explicitly prohibiting Copilot-style use:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33458374
We need to do everything we can to defend open source software against Microsoft and the like.
What it's functionally doing is incredibly valuable and I want to see it succeed. Figuring out how to navigate licensing effectively is an important step, but as someone who writes open source, I am happy my code is helping potentially make other people's code better too.
"GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, a new AI system created by OpenAI. It has been trained on a selection of English language and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub."
Not dramatized, evil is the correct word to describe many pf their practices.
Unfortunately you can't pick and choose what copilot is being used for.
For example, it is a wonderful tool in cutting down the time needed to generate/write tests in TDD but how do you differentiate that between large chunks of proprietary code that it may spit out.
It has some benefits, but far more downsides, and Microsoft and its people in management have a history of being very evil in the truest sense of the word.
A lot of people see that as a trigger word instead and can't recognize it for what it is. What's that say about society when a majority can't recognize evil...
It would be like if J. K. Rowling went to war over the fact that I lifted a few paragraphs from Harry Potter and used them in an entirely different book.
Also this is entirely anecdata, but at my company I'd say we have about a dozen other engineers actively using copilot and not a single one of them has an issue with it. (ideological or otherwise)
Take a look at the Chilton's Manuals, all the publishers were bought up and now its paywalled for a subscription, consists only of steps and procedures (know-how) so you can repair your own vehicles. That shouldn't be copyrighted.
People who work hard to produce open source software expect credit and acknowledgement for their work. That's why almost every license has an attribution clause.
If you don't want credit for your work, you use the MIT No Attribution License:
https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT-0
Not widely used, as you might expect.
What is a ML model that has knowledge of huge swaths of humanity's code (eventually all of it) and can serve as an assistant to build any kind of software on demand if not a huge milestone on the road to the total software freedom envisioned by RMS and GNU? People will be able to build whatever software they want, easily and at any time, and whatever the code they finally wind up with will even feed back into making the ML model even better for the future. One could still build closed source software or harp about "credit" but why bother? The ML model would replicate anything with a modest bit of effort. It might not have been the path to end-user freedom that the early FOSS proponents imagined but, if it works, that's victory.
"Copyleft" protections depend on copyright protections. The reason the GNU GPL can be viral is because the license is preserved from one instance of the code to the next. If credit is not being given, then how can the GPL survive and perpetuate its virality?
RMS wanted software to "be free, like air". Free software is not gained by putting it into proprietary code without licensing it. Free software is not served by filing off the serial numbers and scattering it to the four winds. The writers of free software should be given credit and they also deserve to earn a living from writing it, if they so desire. CoPilot threatens to rob them of that livelihood by side-stepping IP protections.
Yeah, by stealing it.
Last time someone wrote a comment on HN on this topic he insulted a library author and said something like "you are just bitter that eventually this AI software will be able to write your opensource library based on the GitHub description alone"
Well, of course it does, it can just literally search through GitHub and produce a verbatim copy.
Yes, we all want to stick it to Microsoft, but that’s not what’s at stake here.
If the class action loses then this will not be possible.
But realistically, a win here would effectively ban training AIs on the internet.
The compression ratio for Stable Diffusion is 1:25000 or more, 5B images into 5GB. I think you're overly dramatic about it. Not even a single pixel from an image. And a snippet 2-3 lines long of code, that 99.9% of the time is generic, is not worth all this scandal.
There is a distinction between learning and replicating an idea vs. the expression of it. AI is entitled to learn ideas from copyrighted works even if authors don't approve. Only expression is protected. Even API names are ok.
I think the natural balance would be to set filters that restrict replication of copyrighted code. And that's it, every kind of derivative is ok as long as it does not look overly similar to any copyrighted code. But excluding code that is generic and replicated in many sources, because that doesn't deserve to be protected and it would just stunt the model.
Oh, and you'll want to detect incompatible software licenses and prevent derivative works from being created with such conflicts .
In so doing, you would be helping Microsoft to follow the law and respect my copyright. The lawsuit would probably evaporate overnight.
This is a bug, and IMO the correct solution is to fix it. Preferably people should nip it in the bud at the start of the process, rather than play whack-a-mole with the outcome.
When your model gives you back exactly the same data as was put in, that's called "overfitting". It's a kind of bug (or at very least a smell).
It means (among other things) that it might actually give back the same answer in other situations where it is wrong to do so. It could then also give a different, wrong answer in a situation where this answer was actually the correct one.
It also means that the model spent all this time "learning the answer by heart" instead of the underlying pattern. This is typically a waste of perfectly good training time if nothing else.
And of course if you have an overfit, in this case you end up suggesting copyrighted code to the user instead of something original. This is rather undesirable.
In one of the cases I looked at with a friend, we think many people had actually copied one person's code without attribution. So the training set might contain -say- 100 copies of that same solution. That would then be a strong signal that there is only one correct/common solution to that particular problem: "Copy this one guy and leave off the attribution". Oops.
I wonder how many complaints about copilot are actually +/- "blaming the messenger". I suspect that fixing/improving/mitigating this particular set of bugs may have an unforseen side effect: a number of rather interesting conversations with some of the developers in the source data-set.
Do you have a link(s) to the study, or more details on training?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.06499
Quantifying Memorization Across Neural Language Models
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.07646.pdf
So if this suit succeeded, I would be very surprised. Even the FSF isn't rushing to file suit and they care about this controversy probably more than anyone.
You have no chance to increase those odds; but it’s possible you could reduce them.
Now that AI is showing face at the first step of removing programmers and allowing business-speaking people to generate code suddenly there's websites and links all over the HNews front page trying to shut down Co Pilot.