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Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

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Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#141

Post by mr_toad »

jolmg wrote: post #109
lindenksv85 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are putting up code on GitHub to which you don’t have all the rights you’re actually in violation of their TOS and you are violating the rights of other copyright holders. I understand this is common and may not violate community norms or expectations but it is technically a license violation on multiple fronts. Contributors who add to existing GitHub projects are providing the same license to GitHub as the pr…

> If you are putting up code on GitHub to which you don’t have all the rights you’re actually in violation of their TOS and you are violating the rights of other copyright holders. I can't find where in the TOS it says that you must "have all the rights [to the code]". It just says that you must not violate copyright nor other laws.[1] FOSS licenses by definition permit redistribution, so uploading to GitHub seems to…

> FOSS licenses by definition permit redistribution

Uploading to GitHub is not just redistribution, it’s relicensing. Whether that is permitted depends on the license.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#142

Post by blackoil »

eitland wrote: post #40
dogleash wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's no way they are going to claim that every user who uploaded code without owning the full rights is violating their TOS. If they're taken to court and that part of the TOS is relevant to the issue, then yes, they can and will argue exactly that.

Well then let's hope the judges apply the same standards as when criminals claim they wasn't aware that the money they got was being laundered through them.

Doesn't banks/financial institutions have similar protection. Unless someone can prove that they were aware of it or it makes substantial part of operations. I haven't heard of Google being sued when play store cards are used bu fraud victims.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#143

Post by Zambyte »

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. It's not magically your text just because it was hosted on Google Books.

That's the point I was trying to make, sorry if that wasn't clear. The parallel that I was trying to highlight is that it's not magically your code just because it was hosted on Microsoft Copilot.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#144

Post by Zambyte »

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?

I personally hope that a new GPL would not be anti-ml. It's a very cool and interesting technology imo. I think a new GPL should be explicit and say that code produced my a machine learning algorithm is trained on GPLv4 code should remain under GPLv4 or a compatible license.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#145

Post by bigwavedave »

rented_mule wrote: post #102
bigwavedave wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sort of. DMCA protects service providers against copyright infringement claims related to stuff uploaded to their services by third parties. So long as they adhere to DMCA requests, they’re not violating copyright law themselves. This is probably an extremely stupid question as I'm neither a lawyer nor an ML dev (merely an humble backend developer), but let's say that the above situation applies and that Github has…

Also not a lawyer, but I've been around ML for a while. The question makes perfect sense to me! It takes some amount of time to comply with a takedown notice. For example, time passes between receiving Alice's notice and taking down Bob's repo. I would expect Copilot's model(s) to be retrained periodically in order to remain relevant. The next retraining could exclude Alice's code. That might be a longer window than…

That makes plenty of sense, thank you for the explanation!

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#146

Post by mr_toad »

dmitrygr wrote: post #85
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…

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".

You can’t make a license that takes away fair use. The MPAA and RIAA would really love to be able to do that, but they can’t.

To the extent that training a model is fair use, it will always trump your license.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#147

Post by otterley »

eitland wrote: post #39
pc86 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Bob is unable to give GitHub the rights that GitHub demands, then it means Bob was unable to lawfully upload the code to GitHub in the first place. You're making an argument that Bob violated GitHub's terms, not that GitHub is violating Alice's (though that may also be true).

I learned here on HN that contracts are supposed to be a "meeting of minds". And in EU, as a consumer, you can pretty much ignore most EULAs because they aren't valid if they break EU consumer protections. Now if your interpretation is correct the idea of a meeting of minds falls completely on its face. And, as a lot of individuals also upload their projects to GitHub, GitHub is on shaky ground there as well. I think…

> I learned here on HN that contracts are supposed to be a "meeting of minds".

HN is not law school and you would be well-advised not to treat it as one. There's a ton of false information about the law flying around here and not nearly enough educated people or time to correct it all. If you want to know the law, go to law school, or ask a practicing lawyer.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#148

Post by dragonwriter »

otterley wrote: post #147
eitland wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned here on HN that contracts are supposed to be a "meeting of minds". And in EU, as a consumer, you can pretty much ignore most EULAs because they aren't valid if they break EU consumer protections. Now if your interpretation is correct the idea of a meeting of minds falls completely on its face. And, as a lot of individuals also upload their projects to GitHub, GitHub is on shaky ground there as well. I think…

> I learned here on HN that contracts are supposed to be a "meeting of minds". HN is not law school and you would be well-advised not to treat it as one. There's a ton of false information about the law flying around here and not nearly enough educated people or time to correct it all. If you want to know the law, go to law school, or ask a practicing lawyer.

> > I learned here on HN that contracts are supposed to be a "meeting of minds".

> HN is not law school and you would be well-advised not to treat it as one. There's a ton of false information about the law flying around here and not nearly enough educated people or time to correct it all.

Since I learned the exact same thing about contracts being supposed to be a “meeting of the minds” in the first week of Contracts in law school (and much of the rest of Contracts was rules that have been developed operationalizing that principle), while I would agree with your “HN is not law school...” rant as a general rule, I don’t think its germane to the quoted statement.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#149

Post by otterley »

dragonwriter wrote: post #148
otterley wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I learned here on HN that contracts are supposed to be a "meeting of minds". HN is not law school and you would be well-advised not to treat it as one. There's a ton of false information about the law flying around here and not nearly enough educated people or time to correct it all. If you want to know the law, go to law school, or ask a practicing lawyer.

> > I learned here on HN that contracts are supposed to be a "meeting of minds". > HN is not law school and you would be well-advised not to treat it as one. There's a ton of false information about the law flying around here and not nearly enough educated people or time to correct it all. Since I learned the exact same thing about contracts being supposed to be a “meeting of the minds” in the first week of Contracts…

The problem is that people here tend to take a true generalization and form incorrect conclusions from it in the absence of proper legal education. That’s why I advise caution.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#150

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

How would a DMCA takedown against a machine learning model work? Is it possible to build it in a way where you can easily reverse the effects of any given stimulus, or would you need to start completely from scratch?

This seems like a problem similar to explainable AI.

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