Also I experience something similar of CoPilot for the Mozilla Italia 
DeepSpeech Italian model 
(https://github.com/MozillaItalia/DeepSpeech-Italian-Model).

When I studied how to deal with various audio+text/text-only italian datasets I 
talked a bit with other people of the Machine Learning community and also with 
some lawyers.
It is a grey area because the focus is that you are generating a model that 
don't let you to recreate the (in our case) original materials and also doesn't 
store (in some cases) the real trained content but just numbers.

So for the audio+text dataset we chosen to use only dataset with licenses that 
are CC or public domain (very few as a lot of them are academic and don't use 
license at all), instead for text-only we used various sources also with no 
licenses.
This because we are aggregating all the sources together, removing duplicates, 
symbols and other stuff so it is not possible to recreate the original material.
The model generated is released as CC0 and mention all the dataset used and for 
the text-only it is the same, also we release all the scripts to generate it 
but we don't release the files created during the parsing but just the final 
output.

Similar of what is doing the 
https://github.com/common-voice/cv-sentence-extractor that is using Wikipedia 
and Wikisource as source but they pick for every article just 3 sentences 
randomly. I know that for the project was involved the Mozilla Legal team and 
also if Wikipedia is CC0 they preferred that way.

The issue I see with CoPilot, but also with Kite or TabNine, that are all 
services for autocomplete or auto write code trained on open source code, is 
they can recreate part of the code but not all of that but the law doesn't 
mention the amount of that.
As example in Italy is allowed to photocopy just the 20% of a book by the 
copyrights laws.

PS: the story of the italian project with a talk at fosdem 2020 
https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/how_to_get_fun_with_teamwork/ or 
the written version 
https://daniele.tech/2019/12/how-the-italian-deepspeech-model-helped-our-mozilla-italia-community/


Daniele Scasciafratte - OpenSource MultiVersal Guy
daniele.tech <https://daniele.tech> - @Mte90Net <https://twitter.com/Mte90net> - GitHub 
<https://github.com/Mte90> - Italian Linux Society council member <http://www.ils.org/> - 
Mozillian <https://people.mozilla.org/p/Mte90>
Mozilla Reps, Mozilla TechSpeakers, WordPress Core Contributor 
<https://profiles.wordpress.org/mte90>, FSFE member <https://fsfe.org/>,
LibreItalia member <http://www.libreitalia.it/soci/>, Wikimedia Italia member 
<https://www.wikimedia.it/> and LUG Rieti founder <http://lugrieti.linux.it/>.
Il 12/07/21 11:12, Paul Schaub ha scritto:
Hey,

while I can't answer your questions, here is an article by Julie Reda,
arguing that Copilot is not in fact infringing copyright and that the
copyleft movement would not benefit from stricter copyright rules:

https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringing-your-copyright/

Regarding your question about music, there is an interesting provocative
project:

Fairuseify.ml uses a neural network to "learn" music that you upload to
it. You can then download what the network "learned" (which in my
experiments pretty much sounds like what you uploaded).

https://fairuseify.ml/

I'll watch this debate closely.

Paul

Am 10.07.21 um 10:58 schrieb marc:
Hi

The way I understand this (I welcome corrections), is that
copilot is a piece of proprietary software which was built
using a corpus of software hosted on github.

And if I understand it properly, this corpus of software
includes code nominally released under the GPL and similar
licenses. Is my understanding correct sofar ?

I am told that copilot reproduces verbatim identifiable
chunks of the code that was loaded into its model. This
presents two interesting questions - is the model (which
is an algorithmic transformation of copyrighted material)
a new, rather than derivative work ? Are the fragments of
code reproduced by it sufficiently small to be considered
fair use ?

If I had to guess, I would answer no to both of these
questions: The pasting in is verbatim and automated,
and while individual pieces might not be large, there are
many. Fundamentally, I also would like to think that being
creative is something only a human/real intelligence
can be, otherwise the guy who wrote a program to enumerate
all melodies shorter than N would be owed sampling fees on
all new music... and few notes of music require a royalty
then a snippet of code might too ? If somebody writes an
"autocompose" equivalent to copilot, trained on existing
music, then they could expect legal action from record
labels ? And not only for the output of the "autoimprovise"
but also the model that forms the core of "autoplay" ?

But I am not qualified to provide a final answer on
that - I suppose judges will be the ones to make that
determination. Note the plural there - I am told fair
use and its equivalents differ nontrivially between
countries...

But assuming a no to those two points, github would then
(I think) rely on the terms and conditions on its site
which state that by uploading code to its site, you give
it the license to re-use your work, even in closed-source
products, apparently ?

Now: If you upload somebody else's GPLed code to github
that then implies that you (and maybe github) have
contravened the license, right ? And possibly that means
you lose your own permission to hold a copy of the GPLed
code ? Alternatively, if you are the legitimate owner of
the code, you have just dual licensed your code (with a
commercial grant to github, owned by microsoft) which is
probably not what you intended ?

Note the question marks everywhere - have I gotten my
facts wrong ? Is my reasoning incorrect ? Would it be
prudent to avoid using github for (A/L/)GPLed code until
the legalities have been settled ?

regards

marc
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