In this case though we have machine learning model that is trained with some code and is not merely learning abstract concepts to be applied generally in different domains, but instead can use that knowledge to produce code that looks pretty much the same as the learning material, given the context that fits the learning material.

If humans did that, it would be hard to argue they didn't outright copy the source.

When a machine does it, does it matter if the machine literally copied it from sources, or first transformed it into an isomorphic model in its "head" before regurgitating it back?

If yes, why doesn't parsing the source into an AST and then rendering it back also insulate you from abiding a copyright?

>When a machine does it, does it matter if the machine literally copied it from sources, or first transformed it into an isomorphic model in its "head" before regurgitating it back?

You've hit the nail on the head here. If this is okay, then neural nets are simply machines for laundering IP. We don't worry about people memorizing proprietary source code and "accidentally" using it because it's virtually impossible for a human to do that without realizing it. But it's trivial for a neural net to do it, so comparisons to humans applying their knowledge are flawed.

> We don't worry about people memorizing proprietary source code and "accidentally" using it

I'm not sure why it's different, but that's a common concern with music. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/4v8u8d...

That's a really good observation. Perhaps it highlights an essential difference between two modes of thought - a fuzzy, intuitive, statistical mode based on previously seen examples, and a reasoned, analytical calculating mode which depends on a precise model of the system. Plausibly, the landscape of valid musical compositions is more continuous than the landscape of valid source code, and therefore more amenable to fuzzy, example-based generation; it's entirely possible to blend two songs and make a third song. Such an activity is nonsensical with source code, and so humans don't even try. We probably do apply that sort of learning to short snippets (idioms), but source code diverges too rapidly for it to be useful beyond that horizon.

This is not such a big problem in reality because the output of Copilot can be filtered to exclude snippets too similar to the training data, or any corpus of code you want to avoid. It's much easier to guarantee clean code than train the model in the first place.

> then you'd want to forbid contributors from using CoPilot

I mean, if you used CoPilot on one computer, stared at it intensely for 1 hour, closed that computer, and then typed out code in the other computer that you were contributing from, you technically didn't use it for the contribution, you just used CoPilot for your education only.

Intellectual property is itself a flawed concept in many ways. It's like asking someone to do physics research but forbidding them from using anything that Einstein wrote.

Intellectual property itself is silly. How can a thought be the property of someone ? Secrecy is the solution if you don't want others to learn from you (like Coca-Cola does).

It's not a natural right, we supposedly do it too stimulate innovation by offering a reward and in order to get things into the public domain -- obviously Disney (and the politicians that kowtowed to them) ruined that for the World.

Patents should have reduced with product lifecycles, copyright should be a similar period; maybe 10-14 years.

My personal opinion.

That's just words for you... Intellectual property isn't property, at least not a full-blown one.

http://www.av8n.com/physics/weird-terminology.htm

It's not silly, it's an evolved and pragmatic solution to the question of how society can incentivize creative work. More or less every society has developed some notion of IP and there's little appetite in wider society to debate it - the idea of abolishing IP laws is deeply fringe and only really surfaces in forums like this one.

Does it have flaws and can it be improved upon? Sure. I think society underweights what improvements to the patent system in particular could do. But such ideas are so niche they are hardly even written down, let alone debated at large. Society has bigger issues on its mind.

Like any evolved system IP law encounters new challenges over time and will be expected to evolve again, which it will surely do. A simple fix for Copilot is surely to just exclude all non-Apache2/BSD/MIT licensed code. Although there might technically still be advertising clause related issues, in practice hardly anyone cares enough to go to court over that.

> Intellectual property itself is silly. How can a thought be the property of someone ?

No category of intellectual property covers thoughts, so the question has no relevance to the preceding statement.

An equally valid, AFAICS, way of looking at it is that "intellectual property" covers nothing but thoughts, only expressed in different forms.

If you read the video with a view to reproducing it then you created a derivative work, ie copyright infringement.

If you just used it for inspiration, that's fine; if the way it was coded is a result of technical constraints, that's fine too; if the code is generic it's not distinctive enough to acquire copyright in the first place.

>That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied.

and they made those decisions based on the need to be able to argue in court that code was not copied.

>then you'd want to forbid contributors from using CoPilot

Right, the whole thing about arguing if copilot spits out a ten line function verbatim is not really what will be the problem, the problem is a human programmer still needs to run copilot and they will be the ones shown in the codebase as the author of the code (they could of course put a comment 'I got this bit from copilot' but might be cumbersome and anyway would hardly work as proof), although I suppose it would be not just proprietary code but code with an incompatible license.

> >That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied.

> and they made those decisions based on the need to be able to argue in court that code was not copied.

Yeah, but only to make it easier for them to argue it; the letter of the law doesn't require it. You could argue that "Sure, I read Windows source code once -- but that was years ago and I can't remember shit of it, so anything I wrote now is my own invention." That might be harder to get the court to accept as a fact, but it's not a prima facie legal impossibility.

Cautionary decision =/= actual law.

>That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied.

Okay, so it's not law, it's just a policy compelled by preceding legal judgements. Case law, perhaps.

It's a policy compelled by the cost of fighting a court case compared to getting one dismissed.