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Re:An Open Source Lawyer’s View on the Copilot Class Action ... by visarga on Thursday November 10, 2022 @03:32AM (#33543760)
Replicating copyrighted code from the training set only happens 1% of the time, it's the exception not the rule. And when it happens it's usually because the same text appears multiple times in the training set. So it will memorize boilerplate and popular code snippets, not unique stuff. Even a replicated piece of code 100 lines long is no big deal in my opinion, unless it contains some kind of unique thing never seen before, like an optimized matrix multiplication function. Certainly not FizzBuzz.

On the practical side, it is actually easy to filter out sequences of words that are too similar to the training set from the output of the model. You just generate another snippet until it is "original" enough.

Re:An Open Source Lawyer’s View on the Copilot Class Action ... by david_allison on Thursday November 10, 2022 @04:00AM (#33543943)
I have ~400KLOC changed on GitHub. 1% of the time happens multiple times a day given scale.

Pragmatically, people are already knowingly committing commercially viable copyright violations of my work. I'd rather it wasn't encouraged further by a US-based 'big tech', especially if the people using my code aren't aware that they're doing anything questionable.

Some months, I earn over 100x less from OSS than I would in industry. I don't want people taking advantage any more than I'm comfortable with, especially for commercial purposes.

Re:An Open Source Lawyer’s View on the Copilot Class Action ... by visarga on Thursday November 10, 2022 @04:17AM (#33544050)
It's the wild west phase, after it settles down there will probably be ways to signal you don't want to allow training on your code. But I think it's just like taking your grain of sand from the beach so nobody else can have it. The beach is going to be just the same.
Re:An Open Source Lawyer’s View on the Copilot Class Action ... by ISL on Thursday November 10, 2022 @06:05AM (#33544846)
As part of the wild-west phase, it is possible that the inclusion of a single identifiable AGPL project in the training set leads to the licensing of Copilot as AGPL. Such an outcome might lead hastily to the future you imagine.