GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by b112 » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #30

jasode wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

As well, Google is, because of these things, somewhat acting as a library.

An libraries are very special entities.

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

#52

Post by brezelgoring » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

asddubs wrote: post #22

brezelgoring wrote: post #10

Steve 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

I wonder who's decision was it to train the bots in 'code that is accessible to our scraper' and not in 'code we can sell derivatives products of'. I can tell the second group is quite small, so I understand the incentive, at least.

Maybe they chose the Uber strategy of 'What we are doing is bordering on illegal but by the time the bell rings we'll be valuable enough to write the law ourselves'.

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

#53

Post by visarga » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

Copyright covers expression, but not the ideas themselves. So it should be ok to mine ideas from projects, open or not, as long as the model doesn't reproduce expression. And even expression can be copied if it is small enough, trivial, public knowledge, the only obvious way to do something or an API call.

If you want idea protection you need to look at patents.

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

#54

Post by NicoleJO » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

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 suggest reading the actual complaint. Your interpretation is wrong.

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

#55

Post by belorn » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

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.

With creative common and GPL there is a fairly common practice that work include multiple authors and rights holders. When a single user uploads such work to a hosting provider, the permission given to the provider will be limited to the permission that the user had. They can't give out permissions that they themselves do not have.

It is a similar case when a single user uploads a movie or game to a pirate torrent site. The site can have a terms-of-use that gives a license to the hosting provider, but naturally the users who upload the content might not have the permission to grant anything to the hosting provider. Depending on how much the hosting provider is or should be aware, hosting the content can still be illegal.

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

#56

Post by marginalia_nu » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

mellosouls wrote: post #42

It will be a real shame if the fantastic achievement of OpenAI with copilot etc is smothered by ego. Innovation in code should be heralded but if in the majority of cases the coder using Copilot and similar tools is just saving time on bog standard functions they could write themselves, it's difficult to understand why that needs to be attributed.

It's very easy to be generous with other people's property, intellectual or otherwise.

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

#57

Post by smoldesu » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

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.

You're right, but GitHub's TOS doesn't (or at least shouldn't) change the conditions of the original license. You're giving GitHub a copy of the source code, not the ability to dictate your license for you. There's certainly a lot of legal ambiguity in the copyright sense, but one thing seems clear: Microsoft trained Copilot on code they weren't certain they could use.

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

#58

Post by hnbad » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

marmetio wrote: post #35

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.

I think it wouldn't be enforceable in a consumer service (at least in my jurisdiction, see a German court ruling against WhatsApp banning a user for using a third-party client by claiming doing so violated their ToS).

But given that implicitly or explicitly GitHub users act more like users of a commercial service (remember: commercial doesn't mean paid or b2b), things might be different given that consumer protections don't necessarily apply.

Personally I'd love to see the same "you can't hide surprises in your ToS to obtain 'consent'" yardstick be applied here though, commercial service or not.

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

#59

Post by SamoyedFurFluff » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #34

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).

But the thing is that we explicitly allow humans to learn and develop their own skills learning from other humans, but we have our own taboos around directly copying peoples work without permission and passing it off as your own. The debate is that copilot isn’t a human, it’s a machine that outputs copied work on a statistical basis.

Humans are allowed to be unoriginal, uncreative, boring, mediocre, and all sorts of things. But they’re not copying whole cloth the way copilot is.

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

#60

Post by NicoleJO » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

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.

Humans aren't machines, so it won't affect education at all. This argument is a distraction.