Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

fossa.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 173 posts

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#151

Post by eitland »

dsr_ wrote: post #140
eitland wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

With GPL rights come GPL responsibilities.

Agree.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#152

Post by eitland »

blackoil wrote: post #142
eitland wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Unless someone can prove that they were aware of it or it makes substantial part of operations.

In Norway I think the rule is often "is aware of it or should have been aware of it".

> I haven't heard of Google being sued when play store cards are used by fraud victims.

Banks try to prevent cards from being abused and I guess Google try to. For example when someone tried to buy jewelry in an American store with my stolen card number the card was immediately locked.

Sometimes something slips through though and banks won't be held accountable for that.

The difference here is that there is no way GitHub cannot be aware that people upload personal projects from EU and copies of open source projects etc without agreement from the copyright holder. Besides the easily missed clause in the terms there is nothing to prevent it. Now if they'd done any reasonable effort to inform about it: a couple of blog posts over the years, a "Please note:" banner, even mentioning it in discussions here on HN before doing this that would have counted to their defense.

As far as I am aware no such thing happened.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#153

Post by omegalulw »

kmeisthax wrote: post #119
tomrod wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's fairly easy to erase something like a header from all git history. It will update all commits for you.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#154

Post by eitland »

I don't like copilot in its current form at all. That said, there exist similar solutions that I find acceptable in their current form as far as I know them, even including one that is owned by Microsoft: SwiftKey.

SwiftKey is kind of magically good without being - to the best of my knowledge - a plagiarizing or creepy thing.

You can have some fun by feeding it a start of the sentence but to the best of my knowledge it won't autocomplete a full stanza from a famous poem or the first two paragraphs from a best seller or anything like that.

It also learns from me but stores what it learns from me connected only to my account. Again as far as I know: this is based on my reading of the user agreement but also on how it lacks a lot of instant messaging language and stays reasonably formal.

That is how it should be.

If copilot was like that many more people would find it acceptable.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#155

Post by tomrod »

omegalulw wrote: post #153
kmeisthax wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's fairly easy to erase something like a header from all git history. It will update all commits for you.

I wasn't thinking of removing the history specifically, but yeah, this applies.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#156

Post by BeefWellington »

kmeisthax wrote: post #121
BeefWellington wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting thought experiment around this whole topic: If I were to take all the scripts of profitable films rated G or PG and train an AI on it, generate a bunch of scripts, then made movies out of those scripts, would I lose in court? Tangibly, how is this AI method substantially different from non-clean-room implementations? In terms of business use, it seems incredibly risky to me to even just *use* GitHub si…

No thought experiment needed. If I watch a bunch of movies and then make my own movie, whether or not I lose in court depends on if the movie I made is at least "substantially similar" to any movie I happened to watch - or, in other words, had "access" to. That's a fact-intensive thing that juries usually decide on a case-by-case basis. The difference between that and having an AI do it is probably low. My gut instin…

> Pretty much every Internet service is going to have similar clauses to GitHub's; because anything else would basically be a "click here to make me liable for copyright infringement" button. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised that merely running something like GitHub but without a ToS would still give you similar levels of implied license over whatever people push to your server.

The specific part of their ToS I was talking about was the (paraphrasing) [we can use your code to improve our tools and services] part.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#157

Post by EamonnMR »

Zambyte wrote: post #144
progbits wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would have the same effect, but is slightly nicer.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#158

Post by account42 »

lindenksv85 wrote: post #20
kzrdude wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about open source projects where the uploader and github users are not the only copyright holders? As a user i can't grant github any random license for the code, if I maintain for example Linux or python or any other old project there. The ONLY available terms are those given by the license, surely?

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 the TOS has been violated is irrelevant to the question if github has a license to the code. They may be able to take action against the uploader for damages, but ff the uploader does not have the rights to give them the license, they don't have a license.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#159

Post by UncleMeat »

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…

> I'll take the Windows and Office source code, run it through a decompiler and then train a neural network on that output.

At the risk of adding another uneducated voice onto this legal discussion - the law is not written like code. Judges can absolutely say "hey asshole, we know exactly what you are doing" even though engineers like to imagine that all situations that use the same technical processes will be handled in precisely the same manner.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#160

Post by UncleMeat »

ghoward wrote: post #79
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…

I am doing something very similar: https://twitter.com/GavinDHoward/status/1415380847537135620 . We'll see if they answer.

Why the heck would microsoft ignoring you somehow create legal precedent?
Post reply on HN