We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot • Hacker News Board

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#481

Post by yenwodyah » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 11:27 PM UTC

nickelpro wrote: post #454

klabb3 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your code is not in that thing. That thing has merely read your code and adjusted its own generative code. This is kinda smug, because it overcomplicates things for no reason, and only serves as a faux technocentric strawman. It just muddies the waters for a sane discussion of the topic, which people can participate in without a CS degree. The AI models of today are very simple to explain: its a product built from…

It's not something to dismiss but it is something that has already been addressed. Authors Guild v Google. Google Books is built upon scanning millions of books from libraries without first gaining permission from copyright holders, this was found to not be a violation of copyright. Building a product on top of copyright works that does not directly distribute those works is legal. More specifically, a computer consu…

But Copilot has been shown to distribute (parts of) the copyrighted works used to create it. That’s the difference.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#482

Post by chlorion » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 11:29 PM UTC

rowanG077 wrote: post #320

Supermancho wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The brain is also just a "complex math program". This is not a fact.

Explain yourself. There is not a understood natural phenomenon which we could not capture in math. If you argue behavior of the brain cannot be modeled using a complex math program you are claiming the brain is qualitative different then any mechanism known to man since the dawn of time. The physics that gives rise to the brain is pretty much known. We can model all the protons, electrons and photons incredibly accur…

I think you are mostly correct but most people don't like this explanation and choose to believe in magic or spirits or whatever instead of physical reality. For some reason the brain is "magic" and non-physical unlike other organs (and everything else that exists) to most people. It's almost impossible to convince anyone of this though and it's not even worth trying.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#483

Post by xigoi » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 11:29 PM UTC

puffoflogic wrote: post #470

xigoi wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You grant them a separate licence when you start using their service. And that license explicitly states that it doesn't give them the right to sell your code.

And it explicitly states that it does give them the right to share your code. Copilot isn't selling code; if it were, then GitHub wouldn't let you share the output of Copilot; that would destroy their market. That they allow you to share the output of Copilot with others proves that what they are selling is the service, not the output. The output is, at worst, "shared" code from Github's licensors.

They're selling the service, which is a derivative work of the code.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#484

Post by blackbrokkoli » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 11:31 PM UTC

krono wrote: post #295

r3trohack3r wrote: post #158

I'm not confident in this stance - sharing it to have a conversation. Hopefully some folks can help me think through this! The value of copyleft licenses, for me, was that we were fighting back against the notion of copyright. That you couldn't sell me a product that I wasn't allowed to modify and share my modifications back with others. The right to modify and redistribute transitively though the software license ga…

Farmers plant their crops out in the open too. Should Boston Dynamics be allowed to have their robots rob those fields empty and sell the produce without having to at least pay the farmer? They'd be walking and plucking just like any human would be. Some source code might be published but not open source licensed. At least some such code has been taken with complete disregard of their licenses and/or other legal prot…

This is literally the "you wouldn't steal a car" meme.

To spell it out: No, this analogy does not hold. "Stealing" data does not deprive the owner of anything, so it should not be treated remotely the same as physical stealing (usually not even of potential revenue, as piracy studies show).

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#485

Post by obiefernandez » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 11:31 PM UTC

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #469

I am sorry for not bringing any kind of legal perspective here, but: *Jesus Christ*, I hope I live long enough to see copyright die. Here we are at the cusp of a new paradigm of commanding computers to do stuff for us, right at the beginning of the first AI development which actually impresses me. And we are fucking bickering about how we were cheated out of $0.00034 because our repo from 2015 might have been used fo…

Amen. This lawsuit is sickening me at a “fuck this entire industry” magnitude.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#486

Post by Guid_NewGuid » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 11:31 PM UTC

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #469

I am sorry for not bringing any kind of legal perspective here, but: *Jesus Christ*, I hope I live long enough to see copyright die. Here we are at the cusp of a new paradigm of commanding computers to do stuff for us, right at the beginning of the first AI development which actually impresses me. And we are fucking bickering about how we were cheated out of $0.00034 because our repo from 2015 might have been used fo…

Yes, the passion to defend copyright trolling for isEven functions (an example included in the filing) from people here is bizarre.

I can't decide if people just hate Microsoft enough that a future where you must pay to include an iseven function in your code is a price worth paying to give them a bloody nose, or there are just a large contingent of users making millions off their GPL code who are put out.

More seriously yes, copilot damages copyright (or is perceived to) and that is a good outcome irrespective of the actor. I will never see eye to eye with people defending the existing legal framework.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#487

Post by franciscop » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 11:31 PM UTC

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #469

I am sorry for not bringing any kind of legal perspective here, but: *Jesus Christ*, I hope I live long enough to see copyright die. Here we are at the cusp of a new paradigm of commanding computers to do stuff for us, right at the beginning of the first AI development which actually impresses me. And we are fucking bickering about how we were cheated out of $0.00034 because our repo from 2015 might have been used fo…

I am only slightly hopeful for a lawsuit so that it loses spectacularly and sets a precedent that this is legal; however I don't trust the legal system enough to think they'll logically reach that conclusion.

My code is 100% in Github Pilot, is there any way to publicly say that I'm against the lawsuit even if they pretend to represent me?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#488

Post by hjroberts » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 11:32 PM UTC

Whether it is legally wrong or not to scan OSS code (I think it is wrong), there has been a time-honored precedent for disallowing automated scanning:

  robots.txt

This is exactly what is needed for source code, and the default (no robots.txt) should be "disallow".

The fact that the Web has considered this moral issue should be a strong hint for the AI people not to take a purely legal stance but consider the OSS community that they are so heavily using.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#489

Post by throwaway675309 » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 11:33 PM UTC

Even if this succeeds, you've already lost.

1. The ability to be able to run and train these models is going to eventually be perfectly plausible on a home machine.

2. It's only a matter of time before models, e.g. a popular model scraped from all of the code on GitHub, is a publicly available torrent.

3. People will be able to just run it locally as an integrated plug-in in jet brains or VS code.

4. You'll never know if somebody has lifted their code in violation of a license anymore than you would be able to tell if somebody used code from stack overflow without attribution in any commercial endeavor.

The End.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#490

Post by thomastjeffery » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 11:33 PM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #398

thomastjeffery wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but we aren't here talking about whether copyright should exist. We're talking about whether Copilot violates it.

I'm replying to the comment that RMS supports copyright. I don't believe he does, I believe he would rather it not exist at all but since it does, you have to make use of it.

That's the full context of what I was saying. Copyleft is a hack for copyright. In a world where copyright is enforced, RMS doesn't consider the neutral ground of public domain licenses (like the popular MIT and BSD licenses) good enough. They do nothing to solve the problem of proprietary software.

The GPL is entirely dependent on copyright. Rather than pretend copyright doesn't exist, the GPL turns it in the other direction. By violating the GPL, Copilot is still violating copyright.