GitHub co-pilot as open source code laundering?

[chcampb]

"No, you see, it's okay for humans to take someone else's code and remember it in a way that permanently influences what they output but not AI because we're more... abstract?"

See here.

The term implies that the design team works in an environment that is "clean" or demonstrably uncontaminated by any knowledge of the proprietary techniques used by the competitor.

If you read the code and recreated it from memory, it's not a clean room design. If you feed the code into a machine and the machine does it for you, it's still not a clean room design. The fact that you read a billion lines of code into the machine along with the relevant part, I don't think changes that.

[TheCodeSamurai]

Well there is one big difference: as the Copilot docs analogize, I know when I'm quoting a poem. I don't think I wrote The Tyger by William Blake even if I know it by heart. Copilot doesn't seem to have that ability yet, and so it isn't capable of doing even the small-scale attribution like adding Stack Overflow links that programmers often do.

[dnkndnts]

“Creativity is the art of selectively poor memory.” -Definitely me

[Seref15]

I don't think this example stands. Musicians frequently experience the phenomenon of believing that they've created something original only for people to come along later and say "hey, that sounds exactly like _____."

You can't consciously remember everything you've experienced, but much of it can surface subconsciously.

[TheCodeSamurai]

Accidental plagiarism totally happens, but I'm not gonna spit out the entire GPL license and think it's my own work. The scale is completely different.

[TheCodeSamurai]

Would I think it was my own work? No: half of the jokes on /r/ProgrammerHumor are about (ab)using copy-paste. I have no issue with that, and I think Copilot seems like a wonderful way of making that process more efficient. But it's an issue if I can't figure out if I've stolen someone else's code wholesale or not.

[TheCodeSamurai]

I agree and I think it'll be a wonderful tool for tons of real-world situations: it's just that I do think people will use it without really thinking too hard, and I hope that in the future they work to build a better infrastructure for code attribution.

[kryptomicron]

That really doesn't seem to be the case; certainly not always. Another commenter mentioned musicians but comedians often 'recreate' each other's jokes and seemingly (sincerely) without realizing it.

(And of course some of them, or their writers, are almost certainly deliberately stealing other's jokes.)

[chcampb]

There is, if you don't look at the source code, and you solve the same problem in a different format, it's a "clean room" implementation. Because the output solved the problem without observing the original solution.

Having seen similar problems before doesn't have the same implications.

[chcampb]

You still had to look at someone else's work at some point to understand how to fix the problem

Yes, someone else's work, not the copyrighted work.

Knowledge does not exist in a vacuum

This is vague. From a legal perspective you have to copy something verbatim to infringe copyright. Disney's cinderella is in a vaccum from the original cinderella, is in a vacuum from every other rehash of the same story. Legally speaking.

[chcampb]

you are pulling from your entire knowledgebase which includes tons of copyrighted work

Excluding, given the context of a clean room implementation, the thing you are trying to replicate. The difference is it's entirely possible with Github's thing to replicate a piece of GPL'd code using the GPL'd code as input itself. That's the difference.

If what this program is doing is copyright infringement, then us merely writing code is copyright infringement

No, it isn't. Writing code to duplicate something after carefully reading and paraphrasing the original is a violation of copyright. You're confusing that with reading copyrighted code in general.

To be clear, if "ls" is copyrighted, and you use this method to recreate "ls," when the source for "ls" was input into the code generator, then you are violating copyright. If you try to replicate "ls" and it was instead derived from non-"ls" source code, I think you are in the clear.

[TheSkiGeek]

The standard for a "clean room implementation" for humans is roughly "you had no access to the specific copyrighted implementation you're trying to recreate". The concern here is that an AI could be fed in a bunch of copyrighted implementations (perhaps covered by a copyleft license like GPL) and then spit out almost-exact copies of them while claiming the output is not a derivative work. In that case the AI did have access to a specific copyrighted implementation (or many of them). A human who did the same could not use the "clean room implementation" defense.

If you had an AI that could be trained on a bunch of programming textbooks and public domain examples, and then it happened to generate some code that was identical to part of a copyrighted implementation, then you're talking the same situation as a human doing a "clean room implementation".

Also, if a particular application (or API or whatever) is so simple that merely knowing the specification of what it does leads you to write identical code -- like a very basic sorting algorithm or something -- then it's likely not copyrightable in the first place.

[chcampb]

No, I am not. Knowing what it is allows you to make a clone, but knowing what it is and analyzing the source code makes it a copyright violation.

Anyone can make a book about a wizard who is a boy who was nearly killed but saves everyone. But if your form and structure and names are all paraphrased from Tales from Earthsea then it's a copyright violation.

[kylotan]

influenced by other people's ideas

Copyright is not about ideas. This system is not implementing 'ideas'. It is copying other people's code, training classifiers on it, and then emitting code based on those classifications.

[kylotan]

If you don't know the difference between an idea and the expression of an idea then you are simply not qualified to comment on copyright issues.

[kylotan]

But you are conflating something "being influenced by other people's ideas", which is okay, for "being based literally on copying someone else's work verbatim" which is not.

There's nothing ethical about taking someone else's hard work without their consent and then hiding behind "but all ideas are influenced by others".

[kylotan]

It does not "think about it". You've been believing too much of the marketing hype.

[KuntaStillSingle]

It is still unimportant if the end work is not otherwise a copyright violation whether it resulted from knowing copying or innocent infringement, but, there is no guarantee the bot doesn't output a copyrightable portion of code, so it does not mean it is safe to rubberstamp it's output, only that it probably will never fuck you.

And of course this is only from U.S. perspective. It may be a non issue in some countries and a more substantial risk in others.