> It will be a real shame if the fantastic achievement of OpenAI with copilot etc is smothered by ego.

I don't know if you watch YouTube, but this is probably how every creator hit with a bullshit DMCA claim for 5s of audio from a song feels. Why does OpenAI's work demand special consideration here? Or to put it another way - if we're going to be ignoring copyright, everyone should be able to do it.

> if we're going to be ignoring copyright, everyone should be able to do it.

Yes, yesss. You're getting to the logical conclusion. Now I don't think Microsoft have become 'based' and want to break the copyright system but I hope they have inadvertently done so through their actions.

Oh I have no problem with protecting genuinely innovative work, including code. That's not the vast majority of code produced by or derived from these tools though.

I don't think it would be a big deal if OpenAI/Copilot get shut down. Honestly it might be a good thing. Then we can generate new versions of these tools that are truly open using data that has been freely contributed, rather than obtained by for profit companies in shady cash grab.

And those tools will be similarly illegal if the court strikes down Copilot. Also it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to train things like Copilot and GPT-3, so can we really rely on innovation happening in open source without any way to recoup costs? I get that you might not like OpenAI/Copilot for creating these tools in the way that they did, but surely you have to see that this decision goes WAY beyond what you blithely call a "shady cash grab".

You seem to completely miss the point about using data which was freely given. I would say that most of us like the idea of Copilot what OpenAI is accomplishing. The main issue stems from violating licenses which require attribution etc. As the article noted, one can get around attribution by getting express permission from the copyright holder (or by not using their work at all).

The fact of the matter is that some companies have made a paid service by violating the copyright of individuals. That's fundamentally not okay.

So we are going to end up with a less powerful version of Copilot, which would benefit who? Copilot competitors?

This field is moving so fast that copilot is already way behind state of the art. New tools, even with more limited data sets, are going to be more powerful, not less powerful.

It's very easy to be generous with other people's property, intellectual or otherwise.

It's also very easy to invent supposed "intellectual property" rights out of thin air that conveniently last for a century or more (!) for your own work.

But instead of either of these views that focus on selfishness, it's much more productive to instead think about what benefits society as a whole.

Microsoft has been one of the most aggressive enforcers of intellectual property rights ever known, and it can be easily argued that their stranglehold retarded the development of computing and the internet as a whole.

It's so bizarre to see these prima facie bad arguments being used by someone who isn't being paid by Microsoft to make them. If Microsoft puts all of their code in, requires anyone who uses copilot to share their code with the algorithm, and allows anyone to run the model on their own platform complete with updates, you'll see all of the FOSS objections dry up in an instant.

It's also pretty easy to be generous with your own when it comes to copilot. I have not been damaged in any way by copilot learning from my code, and no one else has either.

I'm sure that once you've informed everyone involved that you've declared this to be true, they'll call off the lawsuits and apologize.

You could make this kind of "just" and "bog standard" argument for anything. Just using an image for educational or illustrative purpose, just using a song for a political rally etc etc.

The fact is as a society we have decided to reward creators with copyright as a means to commercialise their creation and get compensation. Who is to say programmers are not creators and the compensation they want for open source licenses is attribution?

Microsoft really should have known better than to touch OpenAI without a 10 feet barge pole.

How are you a "creator" (in an attribution-worthy sense) if you are producing an unoriginal implementation of an old algorithm that thousands of coders have produced before you?

Most coding is not innovative, and that is the kind of code that these tools are producing and derived from in most cases.

> How are you a "creator" (in an attribution-worthy sense) if you are producing an unoriginal implementation of an old algorithm that thousands of coders have produced before you?

So your requirements are pseudo-code which you simply have ti translate. I see. No creativity required. Jepp.

> Most coding is not innovative, and that is the kind of code that these tools are producing and derived from in most cases.

I see what you want to suggest. Then it woulnb't be required to learn on these datasets and simply build a "fair use" product which covers these cases with a snippet engine.

Don't be naive.

> How are you a "creator" (in an attribution-worthy sense) if you are producing an unoriginal implementation of an old algorithm that thousands of coders have produced before you?

If programming is nothing but translating unoriginal old algorithms, then you should train copilot on those. Nobody would complain. The fact that they don't is an unassailable proof of the unsurprising fact that programmers add value to programs.

I agree with you. I love using copilot (and similar tools) and I’ve found it is exceedingly good at predicting patterns in my own coding. It has saved me a lot of time, and I would hate for it to go away or be crippled because of lawsuits like this. I could care less if my own code is used for training. My code isn’t precious, it’s what I do with it that is important.

You're arguing that it should be allowed because you don't feel it harms you personally.

Literally no one objects to people like you donating your code to Microsoft.

Protecting the property rights of the rich is protecting freedom and civilization, protecting the property rights of people who share their work is ego.

In my mind I don't want MS to rehash my code and sell it using "OpenAI" as some laundry machine.

Given how insane copyright laws are I would be pleased if they for once worked in my favour.

Completely agreed. It's crazy that people who claim to value freedom and being open quibble over copyright laws and licenses written for and by lawyers.

After reading the comments here, apparently everyone is a genius with code so special and unique, it would be unfathomable for two or more people to arrive at the same exact outcome.

Nobody is asking for AI in general to be illegal, only training on code you don't own and then emitting it for profit.

Why can't they train on code that they own, such as the windows source code?

Why doesn't copyright law apply to open source code but applies strongly to windows source code?

Who's more entitled? The coder who has no issue with their unoriginal code being copied and mixed with millions of other samples and churned out in a helpful way for others, or the one who demands attribution in the most trivial of cases, or denies the access in these forms as it doesn't credit their brilliance in implementing a sort function?

I'm in the first category; I'm guessing by your abusive response you are in the second?

Nice straw-men you're collecting there.

First one: Uses of attribution and copyleft licenses are just ego-boosting, instead of legitimate protection of authorship against corporate piracy.

Second: Criticism of said corporate exploitation of community work is the actual entitled behaviour. Oh, it's also abusive.

Third strawmen: that people who oppose CoPilot in its current form just want to defend copyright around boilerplate stack-overflowish type code.

All false.

I can only assume... You're either too young and inexperienced to remember the early days of the copyleft, free software, and open source movements and why these licenses exist (and still need to exist)... or your values are so backwards that you just think it's Ok to harvest other people's hard work for your own (or your employer's) own profit.

To be clear: There is no heuristic at work in something like CoPilot that can distinguish between boilerplate code and genuine innovation. It has been shown multiple times to just freely copy and paste novel, copyrighted code; without attribution or conforming to license restrictions. That is unacceptable and deserving of legal countermeasures.

I would have no problem with CoPilot copying only the code of people who have opened their code for that kind of use. But that's not what it does.

Notable that Microsoft, its owner, is not training CoPilot on its own massive corpus of code. Just other people's code.

"Second: Criticism of said corporate exploitation of community work is the actual entitled behaviour. Oh, it's also abusive."

No. You are being abusive when you throw out insults to a commenter who argues something you disagree with - please don't try and obfuscate what you were doing, and check the HN guidelines before commenting further, as you are repeating the hostile and condescending tone and should know better.

Looking at this thread, I don't think you have much room to call someone else out for being condescending. I think it'd be useful for you to slow down and write a more considered position, taking time to address the valid concerns others have raised.

There are definitely valid concerns and counter arguments; they will be more powerful and persuasive when presented on their own merits rather than with the assumption and accusation the poster they are responding to is unethical, stupid or commenting in bad faith. I think I've been polite in response.

However, as I started the thread with a comment that I guess was more provocative (and perhaps more personally felt by others here) than I intended, I'll accept your criticism and bow out.

The coder that thinks that making the first decision about their own code entitles them to everyone else's.