I’m surprised it’s taken this long to see something like this on HN. Maybe something like this could be a propellant for legitimate copyright reform.
There have been
plenty of discussions of this subject here.
Eg
GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
21–30 of 475 posts
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#22Steve Ballmer once called Linux and the GPL License a cancer because to copy a portion of code from a copyleft project, minimal as it may be, would make the whole project require a copyleft license. If Github Co-Pilot includes GPL code then produced works should have GPL too, right? It is known that it produces verbatim copies of sections of code, so the 'derivative' explanation doesn't hold water. Alternatives may b…
it's not just trained on GPL code. it's trained on code of incompatible licenses, which means that the code is produces is potentially unlicensable in general. There's of course also the question of attribution, which many licenses require
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#23> “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 sayi…
>So how? Is it not absurd?
it is.
"Your honor, I've been drink-driving so many times I honestly can't tell you an accurate estimate any more so in both our interests let's agree it was basically uncountable, or 0."
wait a minute...
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#24Has there been a law suit filed on the image generation side? Dalle and Stable Diffusion trained on images on the web, a lot of which weren't even freely licensed. So I would think similar legal arguments would apply there.
The big difference there is that you never get a 1 to 1 copy of the source content out of the image models, where you often do with copilot. Whether your use is transformative is a part of the fair use legal test.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#25Wouldn't this kind of ruling effectively put a halt to ChatGPT and other AI's training on publicly accessible data? What's the difference between Copilot creating output based on code on Github, and ChatGPT giving answers based on a NYT article (without attribution)?
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#26Excellent. 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…
> Copyright is not something that can be signed over by a terms-of-use change of a hosting provider,
I mean, it's obvious that uploading code requires you license the hosting provider a license to host it (which is not singing over copyright); although feel free to argue that the license doesn't or shouldn't extend to CoPilot usage.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#27[deleted]
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#28This seems to ignore the widely repeated claim that GitHub's terms of service explicitly grant them a license beyond the actual open source license attached to the code and thus transfer the burden of liability to the uploader when it comes to code they can not control the licensing of. So either this is about code authored by people who did not use GitHub (in which case GitHub would be immediately liable, though the…
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Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#29Wouldn't this kind of ruling effectively put a halt to ChatGPT and other AI's training on publicly accessible data? What's the difference between Copilot creating output based on code on Github, and ChatGPT giving answers based on a NYT article (without attribution)?
IMO it should be treated like a human. Your output is 99% similar to this ? Copyright infringement, you should have mixed your own thoughts and reasoning into your output. Humans can plagiarize just as easy as ChatGPT/CoPilot can generate verbatim text from its training set.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#30Excellent. 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.googl…
A number of points in Google's favor: they are not passing off Google books content as their own, they limit your access to a small fraction of the offering.
The thing that surprised me about that ruling is that it was deemed final without a chance of an appeal.