We're upset because it's quite literally infringing on intellectual property. Infringing on intellectual property that's been set aside for the exclusive use of the commons.
copyright was established to increase the innovation and creative will of the arts and sciences, what could increase that creative force more than an AI assistant who has seen every creative work ever made?
Except that is not what is happening here. The problem is that AI is being used to take code, which was provided to the commons under the explicit condition that anything built with it is also released under the same terms, is now being fed to a magic mystery machine to produce code that can supposedly legally be witheld from the comments. The only code that this affects is the one that was already shared - you won't see Microsoft feeding Windows and Office source code into Copilot anytime soon.
If it infringes everyone equally and everyone equally benefits from the infringement, has a net wrong actually occurred? (which of course begs the "do the ends justify the means" question...)
I don't see how this is any different a form of "infringement" than me copying and pasting snippets of other peoples' code, and then modifying it to suit my particular context, without specific attribution, except that the latter is a much more laborious and time-consuming process than copilot autocomplete, and programming is all about tedium elimination
It’s not done equally though. Copyleft code is extremely likely to be on GitHub somewhere, while internal proprietary code is often not. Copilot will thus have been trained more on the former than the latter.
> I don't see how this is any different a form of "infringement" than me copying and pasting snippets of other peoples' code, and then modifying it to suit my particular context, without specific attribution
It’s no different, but that is also copyright infringement.
so basically all of Stackoverflow is copyright infringement and has been for decades? Find me the programmer who has never either 1) copied and pasted directly from the internet, or 2) taken an idea found on the internet and massaged it for their own purposes. I mean... this is basically why programming is so lucrative IMHO. Everyone is piggybacking off of everyone else's work (at least in open source)
A typical case mentioned in the training is that code from StackOverflow is (probably) licenses under CC-BY-SA 4.0 and as such it can never be copied inside their proprietary-licensed code base.
If the code is really sufficiently trivial (and I’d guess that most code samples you’ll find on StackOverflow are) you may have a fair use argument in the US. Generally speaking though (and especially for anything nontrivial) you need to respect the license. CC BY-SA 4.0 is one-way compatible with GPLv3, though, so that helps if you’re including it in a GPLv3 codebase: https://creativecommons.org/2015/10/08/cc-by-sa-4-0-now-one-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
Then even if it is copyrightable, under some circumstances your use of it may be considered fair use anyway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors
Or potentially de minimis:
https://blogs.library.unt.edu/copyright/2017/09/05/the-de-mi...
But when in doubt, ask for permission or ask a lawyer.
If Microsoft included their own source code when training copilot then at least they would be intellectually honest, but they don't. They only consider GPL and other free and open source code to be up for grabs.
You know, pretty much all of programming can be summed up as "tedious labor elimination," and this tool directs that same labor elimination at the work of programming itself (I no longer have to constantly google syntax idiosyncrasies etc.), and NOW coders are pissed? I don't get it. Eat your own dog food, people, because this is what it looks and tastes like.
As to the copyright infringement or licensing-violation claims, I have yet to see it autocomplete an entire algorithm correctly, or one copied verbatim from somewhere, although that could be mitigated. You still have to pay attention (kind of like Tesla autopilot), it's not going to eliminate your job.