🚩 Report: Legal issue(s)
StarCoder is trained on The Stack v2.0, which is built illegally on copies of copyrighted code with no license. It does not honor opt-out requests that have been made in the last year, which is most of them.
Per https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigcode/in-the-stack, my copyrighted repositories such as https://github.com/arborelia/advent2020 are still being distributed as part of The Stack v2.0.1. It tells me that the code has been removed from The Stack v2.1, but:
- HuggingFace is still distributing v2.0.1
- StarCoder2 is trained on v2.0.1, not v2.1, despite the clause in The Stack requiring users to update
- Both v2.0.1 and v2.1 still contain copyrighted code with no license, as well as code with attribution clauses that it does not attribute correctly. Copyright is not an "opt-out" system in the first place.
It appears that, between The Stack v1 and v2, HuggingFace chose to ignore the copyright status of code, including code I have written that HuggingFace has no license to use and that I have explicitly asked HuggingFace not to use.
HuggingFace must cease distributing The Stack v2 and StarCoder2.