I'm fine with Copilot, but I think all rightsholders should be allowed to decide if they want their code training it or not. And that should be opt-in, not opt-out.
(And refusing to opt in shouldn't have to mean switching to a new hosting platform.)
> Beyond that, the class members aren't likely to get much if any money. The only party here who stands to clearly benefit is the attorneys.
That's the case in pretty much any class action. I look at class actions as having two purposes: to require that the defendant stops doing something, and to fine the defendant some amount of money. Sure, individual class members will see very little of that money, but I look at it as a way of hurting a company that has done people wrong. Hopefully they won't do that anymore, and other companies will be on notice that they shouldn't do those bad things either. Of course, sometimes monetary damages end up being a slap on the wrist, just something a company considers a cost of doing business.
>I look at class actions as having two purposes . . . to require that the defendant stops doing something
That's my point. Many of the class members don't want the company to stop doing this.
I have code on GitHub, and Copilot is a useful tool. I don't care if my code was used to train the model. Sure, I personally could opt out of the suit, but that would be utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The bottom line is, if I'm a coder with code on Github and I like Copilot, this suit is a huge net negative.
Even more importantly, I want to see the next version of Copilot that will be created by some other company, and then the next version after that. I want development to continue in this area at a high velocity. This suit does nothing but put giant screeching brakes on that development, and that is just a shame.
If lawsuit goes through, it's not likely that Copilot would disappear.. but there would be a checkbox to opt-in your code. You could check it and your code will be used to train model.
I have some code on Github as well and would not want it to be used in training, nor by Microsoft nor by other company. It is under GPL license to ensure that any derived use is public and not stripped of copyrights and locked into proprietary codebase, and copilot is pretty much 100% opposite of this.
If this lawsuit is successful it doubt it will change anything at all. Microsoft will just pay the damages as a cost of doing business and continue what they are doing. Maybe they will add an opt-out.
seems like a great opportunity for Microsoft to alter copilot so it's opt-in to get your code scanned, and to mandatorily add licensing and attribution to outputs
I know you said you're OK with it as is, but many aren't, so if I'm a coder, this suit represents a big net positive for me, being a way to reduce the probability of someone laundering my code away without proper attribution or license attention
Hypothetically, if I wanted to learn how to code by studying open source examples on GitHub, should I have to go ask permission of each rightsholder to learn from their code? I agree that, if Copilot is based on a model that overfits to output the exact same code it read, the lawsuit has merit (and Copilot is not really ML), but the idea of ML is that the model doesn’t memorize specific answers, it learns internal rules and higher-level representations that can output a valid result when given some input. Very much like me, the coder, would output valid code when given a use case description, after studying a lot of open source examples of that. Should most programmers just be paying rights to all publishers of code they have studied?
(And refusing to opt in shouldn't have to mean switching to a new hosting platform.)
> Beyond that, the class members aren't likely to get much if any money. The only party here who stands to clearly benefit is the attorneys.
That's the case in pretty much any class action. I look at class actions as having two purposes: to require that the defendant stops doing something, and to fine the defendant some amount of money. Sure, individual class members will see very little of that money, but I look at it as a way of hurting a company that has done people wrong. Hopefully they won't do that anymore, and other companies will be on notice that they shouldn't do those bad things either. Of course, sometimes monetary damages end up being a slap on the wrist, just something a company considers a cost of doing business.