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GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

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Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#11

Post by distcs »

> “Your honor, we needed so many works that it was simply not practical to ask permission of the creators.” I don’t find this argument convincing given the ability today to license many content types at scale for TDM, including images, music and yes, journal articles (See “Full disclosure” above), but it is an argument often offered by infringers.

Why is this type of argument even valid? Isn't this fundamentally saying, "The cost of not infringing copyright is massive, so we will glibly infringe!"

So it is not okay to infringe copyright at a small scale but okay to do it in a large scale? How can such a line of argument be sensible in court? But apparently infringers are using this line of argument. So how? Is it not absurd?

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#12

Post by qayxc »

jacquesm wrote: post #7
amelius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just hope it doesn't end in Microsoft paying some (from their perspective) small fine that is just the cost of doing business.

The range of possible outcomes is enormous, I'll just wait by the sidelines but cherish the thought that moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision. They can't be trusted, this has been proven over and over again and yet people keep falling for it. It's the fox guarding the chickens. I wrote about my misgivings at the time: https://jacquesmattheij.com/what-is-wrong-with-microsoft-buy...

[flagged]

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#14

Post by tpush »

qayxc wrote: post #8
amelius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just hope it doesn't end in Microsoft paying some (from their perspective) small fine that is just the cost of doing business.

But why stop there? What's the difference between Microsoft, Google, Meta, and OpenAI in this regard? All of those build their models based on the same sources and it's therefore a much more general issue than just one particular company being sued.

I mean, yeah.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#15

Post by hnrodey »

full screen popup/overlay "Sign up for daily email alerts"

This popup appears within a half second of the page loading. It's so abrupt and disruptive to my mind. My eyes have JUST located where to start reading and then BAM THIS GIANT POPUP TAKES OVER THE SCREEN.

I'm exiting your page immediately. I don't care if you have a free recipe for alchemy. I wish I had an easy way to outright block the domain so I could keep track of the offenders.

Popups and overlays have ruined the modern web.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#16

Post by jacquesm »

qayxc wrote: post #8
amelius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just hope it doesn't end in Microsoft paying some (from their perspective) small fine that is just the cost of doing business.

But why stop there? What's the difference between Microsoft, Google, Meta, and OpenAI in this regard? All of those build their models based on the same sources and it's therefore a much more general issue than just one particular company being sued.

That's a good point, but the subject of the thread is Microsoft. I'm pretty sure that Google will happily train their models on the contents of your Gmail account, I wouldn't trust Facebook with my birthdate and OpenAI is likely doing the exact same thing.

But that doesn't make it right in this case and, conveniently, someone has decided to bring suit. The funny thing is that Microsoft depends on Copyright law for their existence and now they want to change the rules to favor them when it suits them. In fact one of the first things that Bill Gates ever did that I remember is bitch about people copying the software that he wrote.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#17

Post by jacquesm »

qayxc wrote: post #12
jacquesm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The range of possible outcomes is enormous, I'll just wait by the sidelines but cherish the thought that moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision. They can't be trusted, this has been proven over and over again and yet people keep falling for it. It's the fox guarding the chickens. I wrote about my misgivings at the time: https://jacquesmattheij.com/what-is-wrong-with-microsoft-buy...

[flagged]

Why make the same comment twice in one thread?

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#18

Post by samwillis »

I think one of the interesting things that will be covered in this lawsuit is whether the licence under which the code is released applies at all in the case of screen scraping.

The current understanding of screen scraping is that it is allowed, despite what is in the websites terms. Effectively if a human can access the content freely without having to actively agree to a license or terms you can scrape the content. You can't republish verbatim, but you can data mine and perform an analysis and publish that. This is how the legal status of all AI training data scraped from the web is being interpreted.

When it comes to open source code I suspect it will be found to be similar, if the code is freely visible on the web by a human without an active agreement to view it, then it will be possible to "scrape" it. I don't think the license the code is under will apply if that is the case.

Obviously in this case is GitHub "scraping" its own site for the training data? Probably not, that may come back to bite them.

This then also opens up all sorts of interesting questions of whether you can copy paste code from a website and use it internally (not republishing), despite the license attached to the code. If it is freely visible.

Clearly a test case, this one, is needed to clarify the situation. And just because it's legal, it doesn't mean it's moral or ethical.

We may yet see the outcome of this case change the current interpolation of legal screen scraping, it's going to be an interesting time.

On top of all this there is then the question of an AI model reproducing code (or and image or music) verbatim. That obviously needs to be clarified by the courts too.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#19

Post by throwaway4aday »

If the model is being trained on the code and is not copying and pasting it or including it directly from the various repositories then I would think a blanket attribution that covers all material used to train the model, basically a giant list of all of the authors, added to the Copilot repo should cover the attribution requirement.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, to my understanding, these language models are strictly statistical in nature so they aren't creating a database of code that they paste snippets from. They're looking at all the examples and encoding the statistical likelihood that one token follows another and are then just feeding in the pre-amble (the code you wrote) and generating the chain of tokens that most likely follows that. It seems like it would be the same process if a person were to read a lot of code, identify patterns e.g. an tag has an href= attribute or other more complex configurations, and then writes code based on that understanding. If you can prove that is infringing then you could potentially prove that the act of reading other people's code and then writing your own based on what you have learnt is infringement even if it doesn't exactly match the code that other people have written! I hope this can be effectively explained in court.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#20

Post by jasode »

jacquesm wrote: post #3

Excellent. GitHub is in my opinion crossing a whole pile of lines here that should not have been crossed without the authors explicit permission, regardless of the utility of the tool they built. Copyright is not something that can be signed over by a terms-of-use change of a hosting provider, the expectation is that your host does not automatically claim the rights to anything that you store there. Such projects sho…

>lines here that should not have been crossed without the authors explicit permission, regardless of the utility of the tool they built.

Fyi... Google Books (scanned and OCR'd books) eventually won against the authors filing lawsuits of copyright infringement. So there is some precedent that courts do look at the "utility" or "sufficiently transformative" aspect when weighing copyright infringement.

https://www.google.com/search?q=google+books+%22is+transform...

But courts in Europe may judge things differently.

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