Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot • Hacker News Board

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#161

Post by jolmg » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #141

jolmg wrote: post #109

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 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.

From the TOS[1]:

> If you upload Content that already comes with a license granting GitHub the permissions we need to run our Service, no additional license is required.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#162

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#163

Post by zja » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #84

zja wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Supreme Court found Google’s use to be fair, not infringement.

the supreme court did not reconsider the previous judgment on the 9 lines of sorting algorithm being copied, which was not considered fair use

Didn’t know that, thanks!

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#164

Post by ghoward » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #160

ghoward wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Declining to sue in this case, when I have publicly said what I am going to do, shows other companies that Microsoft is ignoring the threat to closed source software that this poses.

So while it would not be a legal precedent, it would be a social one that would be fought against by other companies.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#165

Post by dmitrygr » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #146

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".

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.

pretty sure I can license my code however I wish, and others may choose to, or not to, use it under my license. I literally OWN it! Watch this: "you may only use my code if you accept my cat Trixie (http://trixie.cat) as your lord and savior. All use of my code outside of such acceptance is prohibited and will be prosecuted as copyright infringement to the fullest extent of law."

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#166

Post by mr_toad » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

dmitrygr wrote: post #165

mr_toad wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

pretty sure I can license my code however I wish, and others may choose to, or not to, use it under my license. I literally OWN it! Watch this: "you may only use my code if you accept my cat Trixie ( http://trixie.cat ) as your lord and savior. All use of my code outside of such acceptance is prohibited and will be prosecuted as copyright infringement to the fullest extent of law."

> and others may choose to, or not to, use it under my license.

Fair use essentially means you can use the work without a license. As long as its ‘fair’. The license might literally say ‘no fair use’, but if you’re not abiding by the terms of the license it means nothing.

You can put anything in a license you want, but it doesn’t mean it will stand up in a court of law.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#167

Post by flipcoder » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

How do they know that all the contributors to your project consent to this usage? How do they know that the project you're hosting is actually your own and that it's only using code written by people who permit this. This seems like a legal disaster. Leave it to Microsoft to do something like this. No wonder they "love" open source.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#168

Post by _ph_ » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 10:26 AM UTC

jozvolskyef wrote: post #128

_ph_ wrote: post #125

I think the discussions miss a bit an important point. IANAL, but I think if a young programmer reads a lot of source code on GitHub, and based on this reading becomes a better programmer, this is a fair use of copyrighted material and pretty much independant of the license. If I read any book and learn the corresponding language, this isn't a copyright violation of the book either. This starts, when I begin to quote…

If a person who's never seen a goat looks at a million copyrighted images of goats and draws a goat, are they committing copyright infringement? What if an algorithm does the same? The result is 'a recomposition of learned fragments' in either case.

The point is, with a human you can assume that the person did learn how a goat looks and that a drawing isn't a mechanical translation of one image. Only in cases, where a single image is faithfully reproduced in the drawing, copyright questions might arise. But the base for this is: humans can learn and have an obvious creative process.

With the AI it is not clear, that there is an abstract lerning beyond building certain memories.

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#169

Post by joshspankit » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 11:36 AM UTC

josephh wrote: post #67

lindenksv85 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a problem before copilot though. And copyright holders have and will continue to have the right to send DMCA take-down notices if they like.

I think the bigger question is whether GitHub will be able to honor DMCA requests that pertain to copyrighted materials showing up in Copilot's suggestions.

Are we entering in to a new realm where a DMCA (or DMCA-like) request can be filed to remove content from the training data for an AI (and likely cause it to require retraining)?

Re: Analyzing the legal implications of GitHub Copilot

#170

Post by pedrocr » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 12:37 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #159

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 handle…

What asshole thing would I exactly be doing? The scenario I described isn't a weird hypothetical to exercise the law as code. It would be a genuinely useful use of the Microsoft copyrights if that was allowed, just like Copilot is a genuinely useful use of the open-source copyrights. You just can't have one without the other.