- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
GitCode, a git-hosting website operated Chongqing Open-Source Co-Creation Technology Co Ltd and with technical support from CSDN and Huawei Cloud.
It is being reported that many users’ repository are being cloned and re-hosted on GitCode without explicit authorization.
There is also a thread on Ycombinator (archived link)
With the obligatory “fuck everyone who disregards open source licenses”, I am still slightly amused at this raising eyebrows while nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM, which will help circumvent licenses & copyrights by the bazillion.
Came here to say this. As much as I don’t like china, there is really nothing to see (apart from the source, that’s for everybody to see).
This could be illegal for git repos that do not have a open source license that allows mirroring or copying (BSD, Apache, Mit, GPL, etc.) Sometimes these repos are more “source available” and the source is only allowed to be read, not redistributed or modified. I would say that this is more of a matter for each individual copyright holder, not Microsoft.
But ultimately I agree, this really isn’t as big of a deal as people are making.
edit: changed some wording to be clearer
China is a sovereign entity. I’m pretty sure they can decide foreign licensing laws don’t apply there.
China is a soverign state and they should make their own laws. However, China has promised repeatably that they will take IP concerns more strictly (trade deal with Trump in 2020 is one example of this promise). It seems of this moment they still use the World Intellectual Property Organization for inspiration for their IP laws. At one point, China did not acknowledge IP rights at all. Being consistent is good for business; especially when it comes to international business.
China has never been consistent. Doing business there is all about relations with the CCP. This is a perfect example of how an authoritarian regime differs from a liberal regime. One is bound by it’s promises and rules and the other binds it’s rules to it’s needs.
What rock have you been living under??
Lots of people complained about that. I’ve only seen this single thread complaining about this.
I complain all the time. But that’s not the subject of this post…
Yeah exactly, fuck llms that don’t honor licenses
If I look at a few implementations of an algorithm and then implement my own using those as inspiration, am I breaking copyright law and circumventing licenses?
That depends on how similar your resulting algorithm is to the sources you were “inspired” by. You’re probably fine if you’re not copying verbatim and your code just ends up looking similar because that’s how solutions are generally structured, but there absolutely are limits there.
If you’re trying to rewrite something into another license, you’ll need to be a lot more careful.
What’s the limit? This needs to be absolutely explicit and easy to understand because this is what LLMs are doing. They take hundreds of thousands of similar algorithms and they create an amalgamation of it.
When is it copying and when it is “inspiration”? What’s the line between learning and copying?
I disagree that it needs to be explicit. The current law is the fair use doctrine, which generally has more to do with the intended use than specific amounts of the text. The point is that humans should know where that limit is and when they’ve crossed it, with motive being a huge part of it.
I think machines and algorithms should have to abide by a much narrower understanding of “fair use” because they don’t have motive or the ability to Intuit when they’ve crossed the line. So scraping copyrighted works to produce an LLM should probably generally be illegal, imo.
That said, our current copyright system is busted and desperately needs reform. We should be limiting copyright to 14 years (as in the original copyright act of 1790), with an option to explicitly extend for another 14 years. That way LLMs can scrape comment published >28 years ago with no concerns, and most content produced >14 years (esp. forums and social media where copyright extension is incredibly unlikely). That would be reasonable IMO and sidestep most of the issues people have with LLMs.
First, this conversation has little to do with fair use. Fair use is when there is an acceptable reason to break copyright. For example when you are making a parody or critique or for education purposes.
What we are talking about is the act of reading and/or learning and then using that information in order to synthesize new material. This is essentially the entire point of education. When someone goes to art school, they study many different artists and their techniques. They learn from these techniques as they merge them together in different ways to create novel art.
Everybody recognizes this is perfectly OK and to assume otherwise is absurd. So what we are talking about is not fair use, but extracting data from copyrighted material and using it to create novel material.
The distinction here is you claim when this process is automated, it should become illegal. Why?
My opinion is if it’s legal for a human to do, it should be legal for a human to automate.
Sure, but that’s not what LLMs are doing. They’re breaking down works to reproduce portions of it in answers. Learning is about concepts, LLMs don’t understand concepts, they just compare inputs with training data to provide synthesized answers.
The process a human goes through is distinctly different from the process current AI goes through. The process an AI goes through is closer to a journalist copy-pasting quotations into their article, which falls under fair use. The difference is that AI will synthesize quotations from multiple (many) sources, whereas a journalist will generally just do one at a time, but it’s still the same process.
Are you just trying to make a bad pro-China argument or have you never been online before?
I see it more as a good anti-Microsoft argument 🤷🏻♀️
“Why does no one say murder is bad unless China is murdering”
Isn’t a good anti-murder argument
I can not fathom how you absolutely nailed the essence of my comment, yet misunderstood it (and - arguably - your own example) so fundamentally.
Let me try to help, once:
“Why do most people not complain about murder when Microsoft is doing it, but when China is doing it, the very justified outrage can be heard?”
I cannot fathom how you absolutely nailed the essence of my comment, yet misunderstood it (and - arguably - your own example) so fundamentally.
People do criticize Microsoft for using open source data to train LLMs
Hence the query about never been on the internet before
❤️