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Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

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Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#111

Post by lakecresva »

Animats wrote: post #45
sudosysgen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But legally, they can't provide such a license. So GitHub can't have that license, surely, because they never had the legal authority to bestow it upon Github.

A third party who finds their GPL code on Github but is not themselves a user of Github has a right of action. They're not bound by Microsoft's terms.

I'm not sure that someone who published their work under the GPL hasn't thereby given consumers the right to put the repo on github. If the rights Github asks for in their ToS can be construed as a subset of the rights granted by the GPL, Github is just another GPL licensee. Unless they violate the conditions of the license, they're just utilizing their GPL rights.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#112

Post by xdennis »

erhk wrote: post #97
guitarbill wrote: post #9

It would be nice if we moved from a copyright discussion to an ethical one, since it could be years until the law is even tested. Is it ethical to do this, when some licenses are clearly chosen because of e.g. attribution or sharing improvements? Did Microsoft/GitHub consider the ethical implications, for example a chilling effect on code being open sourced in future (i.e. people choosing not to open source stuff so…

You can opensource with Git without using github. You can self host.

If it's publically available, there's no guaranty that Microsoft won't gobble up your code.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#114

Post by eitland »

lakecresva wrote: post #111
Animats wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A third party who finds their GPL code on Github but is not themselves a user of Github has a right of action. They're not bound by Microsoft's terms.

I'm not sure that someone who published their work under the GPL hasn't thereby given consumers the right to put the repo on github. If the rights Github asks for in their ToS can be construed as a subset of the rights granted by the GPL, Github is just another GPL licensee. Unless they violate the conditions of the license, they're just utilizing their GPL rights.

> Github is just another GPL licensee. Unless they violate the conditions of the license, they're just utilizing their GPL rights.

And here is exactly the problem.

GitHub seems to be copying copyrighted code left and right and pretend they made it!

No attribution, no license.

They are of course allowed to let their AI study the code, but as "employer" of that AI GitHub/Microsoft has a responsibility if that AI breaks copyright right and left and they as a company pretend the code is theirs to give away.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#115

Post by EamonnMR »

pedrocr wrote: post #31

Given this fair use argument that the work is probably transformative enough here's what I'll be doing next. I'll take the Windows and Office source code, run it through a decompiler and then train a neural network on that output. This sequence of steps should be at least as transformative of Microsoft's copyright as what Copilot is doing with the open-source corpus, probably much more so. I will then use that neural…

Might be faster to generate verbatim copies of Disney IP.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#116

Post by EamonnMR »

progbits wrote: post #96
dmitrygr wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if one could enforce a license's "this code may not be used to train any ML model of any sort for any reason without prior permission".

I've been wondering the same though found basically no discussion on this topic. Let's ignore whether GPL or whatever license allows GitHub to do this - let the lawyers sort this out. Instead we should focus on whether it is possible to legally prevent such behavior via license. In other words, where is my GPLv4 with anti-ml clause?

FSF and SFC and OSI if you're listening, this would be very nice.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#117

Post by ghaff »

rjzzleep wrote: post #46
Zambyte wrote: post #14

Google Books is a great parallel to make with Microsoft's Copilot. The key differences between the two is A) Google Books produces verbatim results 100% of the time, while Microsoft's Copilot produces verbatim results some N > 0% of the time (with some % of results greater than N that would be considered a derivative if a human wrote it), and B) Google Books doesn't make the claim that you own the copyright to any gr…

If you copy a quote from Google Books you still have to attribute the original author. It's not magically your text just because it was hosted on Google Books. Why do they even compare these two? You can compare Github itself with Google Books, but not copilot.

>If you copy a quote from Google Books you still have to attribute the original author.

Mostly because if you don't do so, that's a plagiarism issue which the law mostly doesn't concern itself with except insofar as an attributed quote, unless the length is truly excessive, is likely to be seen as Fair Use while an unattributed quote, especially if it's more than a minimal snip, is not. (IANAL, etc.)

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#118

Post by sampo »

> Downing thinks there’s a strong case that Copilot uses said code in a transformative manner, which would support a fair use argument that there is no copyright infringement.

Fair use seems to be a legal concept that mostly only exists in the anglosphere. How will this be in the many other countries, then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#119

Post by kmeisthax »

tomrod wrote: post #17
tyingq wrote: post #3

“If you look at the GitHub Terms of Service, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features,” Downing says. “So with respect to code that’s already on GitHub, I think the answer to the question of copyright infringement is fairly straightforward.” I don't know if it's really that straightforward. The TOS includes snippets like th…

Further, what if I branched the code from something hosted outside of Github -- and failed to follow proper attribution? This is a huge legal mess and its not being used to IMPROVE Github products and ops, it IS the Github product.

It's actually fairly difficult to remove attribution from a Git repository. It's embedded in each commit. You'd have to rewrite the entire project history - something far different from just "branching" a repo.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#120

Post by scintill76 »

jcelerier wrote: post #30

> "To the extent you see a piece of suggested code that’s very clearly regurgitated from another source — perhaps it still has comments attached to it, for example — use your common sense and don’t use those kinds of suggestions.” how is "use common sense" even remotely a meaningful thing

I thought this was weird too. Why are comments the dividing line? Because they sound like a human? How do we know Copilot won’t regurgitate an exact copy of human code that doesn’t have comments?

It’s kinda surprising Copilot even reads and outputs comments.

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