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GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

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Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a programmer and a songwriter and I am not worried about these tools and I don’t think they are bad for society. What did the photograph do to the portrait artist? What did the recording do to the live musician? Here’s some highfalutin art theory on the matter, from almost a hundred years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...

But this isn’t like photography and portrait artistry. This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. Stable Diffusion has literally been used to create new art by screenshotting someone’s live-streamed art creation process as the seed. While creating derivative work has always been considered art(such as deletion…

> This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator.

If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid. If I parody your work, that's my work. If you paint a picture of a building and I go to that spot and take a photograph of that building it is my work.

I can derive all sorts of things, things that I own, from things that others have made.

Fair use is a thing: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/

As for talking about the originals, would an artist credit every piece of inspiration they have ever encountered over a lifetime? Publishing a seed seems fine as a nice thing to do, but pointing at the billion pictures that went into the drawing seems silly.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure DALL-E was trained only on not copyright material ( they say so :| ). But to be honest if your code is open source im pretty sure Microsoft don't care about licence they'll just use it cause "reasons" same about stable diffusion they don't give a fuk about data if its in internet they'll use it so its topic that probably will be regulated in few years. Until then lets hope they'll get milked (both Mic…

> I'm pretty sure DALL-E was trained only on not copyright material Nope. DALL-E generates images with the Getty Watermark, so clearly there’s copyrighted materials in its training set: https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/xdjinf/its_pretty_o...

Lots of people ironically put the Getty watermark on pictures and memes that they make to satirically imply that they are pulling stock photos off the internet with the printscreen function instead of paying for them.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#64
post #12
post #9

Ok. So instead of whining about it on Twitter sue GitHub. No matter what you think of Copilot, establishing some case law on AI-generated code will be beneficial to everyone.

Whining about it on Twitter = free and easy Suing Github = signing up for a ~decade long incredibly expensive and time-consuming legal battle against one of the richest companies in the world There may be a slight difference in effort between these two options.

Not to mention Microsoft could countersue using their enormous patent war chest, which they have a history of doing[0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/22/microsoft-and-tivo-drop-th...

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Joe Rando plays a song from 1640 on a violin he gets a copyright claim on Youtube That can't possibly be a valid claim, right? AFAIK copyright is "gone" after the original author dies + ~70 years. Before fairly recently it was even shorter. Something from 1640 surely can't be claimed under copyright protection. There are much more recent changes where that might not be the case, but 1640? > When Jane Rando uses dev…

This isn't a legal copyright claim, it's a "YouTube" copyright claim which is entirely owned and enforced by YouTube.

OK but then we're just talking about content moderation, which seems like a separate issue. I think using "YouTube copyright claim" as a proxy for "legal copyright claim" is more to the parent's point, especially since that's how YouTube purports the claim to work. Otherwise it feels irrelevant.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#66
post #42
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Joe Rando plays a song from 1640 on a violin he gets a copyright claim on Youtube. When Jane Rando uses devtools to check a website source code she gets sued. When Microsoft steals all code on their platform and sells it, they get lauded. When "Open" AI steals thousands of copyrighted images and sells them, they get lauded. I am skeptical of imaginary property myself, but fuck this one set of rules for the poor,…

> one set of rules for the poor, another set of rules for the masses. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. —Composer Frank Wilhoit[1] [1]: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...

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Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#67
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good! Large corporations shouldn’t be able to profit off of other people’s data without consent or compensation.

Great! I assume you believe all search engines should be illegal then?

Accessing a computer system without permission is illegal. Search engines operate under the assumption that they have permission to access any public available server unless explicitly forbidden.

If a company or person assume they got copyright permission to any work public accessible then they will quickly find out that such assumption is wrong, and that they require explicit permission.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#68
post #58
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a programmer who has written extensively on my blog and HN against Copilot. I am also not a hypocrite; I do not like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion either. As a sibling comment implies, these AI tools give more power to people who control data, i.e., big companies or wealthy people, while at the same time, they take power away from individuals. Copilot is bad for society. DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are bad for soci…

> these AI tools give more power to people who control data, i.e., big companies or wealthy people, while at the same time, they take power away from individuals. Not sure I agree, but I can at least see the point for Copilot and DALL-E - but Stable Diffusion? It's open source, it runs on (some) home-use laptops. How is that taking away power from indies? Just look at the sheer number of apps building on or extending…

SD is better than the other two, but it will still centralize control.

I imagine that Disney would take issue with SD if material that Disney owned the copyright to was used in SD. They would sue. SD would have to be taken off the market.

Thus, Disney has the power to ensure that their copyrighted material remains protected from outside interests, and they can still create unique things that bring in audiences.

Any small-time artist that produces something unique will find their material eaten up by SD in time, and then, because of the sheer number of people using SD, that original material will soon have companions that are like it because they are based on it in some form. Then, the original won't be as unique.

Anyone using SD will not, by definition, be creating anything unique.

And when it comes to art, music, photography, and movies, uniqueness is the best selling point; once something is not unique, it becomes worth less because something like it could be gotten somewhere else.

SD still has the power to devalue original work; it just gives normal people that power on top of giving it to the big companies, while the original works of big companies remain safe because of their armies of lawyers.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#69
Not entirely sure how this could happen! “naikrovek” assured me not three days ago on this very site that I was “detached from reality” [1] for thinking that this would happen again.

To be fair I thought it might be at least a week or two.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33194643

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#70
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one set of rules for the poor, another set of rules for the masses. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. —Composer Frank Wilhoit[1] [1]: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...

Thanks for posting the link to the quote. Having said that, I don't think it's possible to quote that bit and get an understanding of the idea being conveyed without it's opening context. Indeed, it's likely to cause a false idea of what's being conveyed. From earlier in the same post: "There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exi…

I agree that adds considerable depth to the value of the quote, and connects it to the conversation he appeared to be having, which is about the first line you've quoted:

There is no such thing as being a Liberal or Progressive, there is only being a Conservative or anti-Conservative, and while there is much nuänce and policy to debate about that, it boils down to deciding whether you actually support or abhor the idea of "the law" (which is a much broader concept than just the legal system) existing to enforce or erase the distinction between in-groups and out-groups.

But that's just my read on it. Getting back to intellectual property, it has become a bitter joke on artists and creatives, who are held up as the beneficiaries of intellectual property laws in theory, but in practice are just as much of an out-group as everyone else.

We are bound by the law—see patent trolls, for example—but not protected by it unless we have pockets deep enough to sue Disney for not paying us.

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