Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 475 posts

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

#31

Post by jacquesm »

judge2020 wrote: post #26
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…

> 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.

Copyright is pretty complex legal material but the one thing that stands out for me is that you receive it upon creation and it requires a positive act on your part to relinquish it.

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

#32

Post by core-utility »

judge2020 wrote: post #29
core-utility wrote: post #25

Wouldn'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.

At what point can one say that the source is unique enough to qualify for protection? Otherwise, I can't use `print "Hello world"` because I didn't mix my own thoughts and reasoning into the output.

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

#33

Post by AlexandrB »

MetaMalone wrote: post #6

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.

Given who has more money for lawyers, I worry that copyright reform will take the form of small creators being given weaker protection than large entities - for example by making formally registering a copyright on a work necessary to get "full" protections, while self-applied licenses are treated as merely suggestions.

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

#34

Post by judge2020 »

distcs wrote: post #11

> “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…

On the other side, they could argue that it's like a human learning how to code over a decade of looking at the internet, and that human doesn't need to DM every code author to ask if they can learn from their content (and the risk for the author is similar given the human might one day recall some author's code verbatim and not give attribution).

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

#35

Post by marmetio »

hnbad wrote: post #4

This 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…

I think they're challenging the validity of what's in the user license agreement. Companies can put whatever they want in there, but not everything is enforceable.

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

#36

Post by bluGill »

amelius wrote: post #5
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…

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

While the fine is a cost of doing business, if they don't change behavior they can be sued again, and courts tend to impose very large fines if they discover you were already fined for this and didn't change afterwards.

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

#37

Post by coldpie »

core-utility wrote: post #25

Wouldn'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)?

Good question. I think that's exactly what we need to decide as a society: both whether these things are violating existing copyright laws, and whether the laws should be changed to specifically handle this new situation. I don't know where I land, myself. My gut instinct is on the side of the creators and that these AI tools are illegally infringing on the creators' work. But I think there's reasonable arguments on both sides.

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

#39

Post by ianbutler »

I've produced a few pieces of software that has user generated content as a feature and every lawyer I've used to draft the ToS has added provisions that gave my organization explicit rights that extend beyond whatever other licensing may be applicable. Both in being able to improve our own features or create new ones with that content and other rights that would indemnify us from a wide range of legal issues.

I'm curious to see how this will be litigated because of that. The difference here seems to be how publicly Copilot's use of user generated content has been, the wide range of licensing that content falls under and the fact this is an entirely new product produced by a third party with a partnership versus a 1st party tool.

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

#40

Post by throwaway4aday »

ergonaught wrote: post #9

If it reaches a decision, I’m curious how it will affect “education”. If you study a hundred repos to learn how to do a thing, and then produce something of your own that happens to be similar (because that’s how you learned), are you under any particular obligations? One hopes Oracle et al are not further inspired by such an outcome.

Learning from others is copyright infringement, better make sure none of your code contains any sequences longer than 150 characters that match any other code ever written.
Post reply on HN