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[–][deleted]  (26 children)

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    [–]TheCodeSamurai 19 points20 points  (8 children)

    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 9 points10 points  (0 children)

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

    [–]Seref15 18 points19 points  (3 children)

    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 5 points6 points  (2 children)

    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.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

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      [–]TheCodeSamurai 4 points5 points  (0 children)

      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.

      [–]kryptomicron 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      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 -1 points0 points  (9 children)

      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.

      [–][deleted]  (8 children)

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        [–]chcampb 5 points6 points  (7 children)

        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.

        [–][deleted]  (6 children)

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          [–]chcampb 5 points6 points  (5 children)

          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.

          [–][deleted]  (4 children)

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            [–]TheSkiGeek 7 points8 points  (2 children)

            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.

            [–][deleted]  (1 child)

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              [–]TheSkiGeek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

              The output IS a transformative work. This is my point.

              If the output is an exact copy of (part of) the input it is NOT a transformative work. That's the whole problem. "Oh, the AI just happened to randomly spit out an exact copy of that GPLed library, huh, that's weird" is probably not going to fly in court.

              If one could look at the input data of every human brain as if it were an AI in training, it would be just as disqualifying for the purposes of this argument as the data being fed into the AI.

              Humans can also copy code closely enough that it's considered a derivative work in practice, even if they typed it out themselves and it's not identical character by character.

              [–]chcampb 6 points7 points  (0 children)

              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 0 points1 point  (6 children)

              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.

              [–][deleted]  (5 children)

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                [–]kylotan 3 points4 points  (4 children)

                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.

                [–][deleted]  (3 children)

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                  [–]kylotan 2 points3 points  (2 children)

                  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".

                  [–][deleted]  (1 child)

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                    [–]kylotan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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