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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)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That's not obvious, because you don't necessarily own the code you're uploading. I can upload any sort of MIT-licensed, BSD-licensed, Apache-licensed, Creative-Commons-licensed, or GNU-copylefted works I want, anywhere within reason and compatible with those licenses, but if I didn't write them then I don't have the legal right to relicense, grant exclusive or restricted license to any specified parties. So in a way…
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...
> moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision What do you use instead? The top alternatives in my opinion are: - SourceHut https://sr.ht/ - Codeberg https://codeberg.org/ - Self-hosted using Forgejo https://forgejo.org/ (fork of Gitea) I was self-hosting my code with Gitea for a while but currently I’m using GitHub. Planning on setting up a Forgejo instance in the coming weeks. At work we use…
There's a prediction market on this suit's success, which is currently at 35% (https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...).
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.
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.
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.…
> 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. I don't see the scraping case applying here -- the idea that all human-readable code accessible on the public internet can be ingeste…
"In the style of" killed copyright in 2022.
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…
Agreeing to GitHub's terms doesn't try to assign copyright over your code, it grabs licence to use your code however they see fit which is¹ legally quite different.
Of course the real fun comes if someone agrees to their terms then uploads some of my code which they have to right to assign the licence to GitHub for. What come-back do I get in that case if I don't want my stuff used that way?
It seems odd to me that MS² who for many years strongly spoke against touching anything with the remotest whiff of GPL because of what it could legally do to your release requirements, are now more than happy to hoover up all the GPL covered code in GitHub and potentially mix it into their users' work output via copilot.
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[1] in my not-at-all-legally-trained understanding
[2] current owners of GitHub, for those not paying attention
Has 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.
There is no difference between the two. Given that another project called Dance Diffusion was trained on public domain music and audio and permission by musicians, it is clear that Stability knew that they would be sued to the ground if Dance Diffusion was trained on copyrighted music. [3] They already seem to have admitted and felt guilty into trampling over the copyright and watermarks of images and knowingly avoided doing the same with music.
My point is, use and train on public domain content only and content that has the permission of the creator. This applies to all of them; DALL-E, Copilot, Stable Diffusion. Clearly wasn't a problem to use public domain music with Dance Diffusion was it?
[0] https://venturebeat.com/ai/stability-ai-to-honor-artist-opt-...
[1] https://platform.stability.ai/
[2] https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1603147709229170695
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/07/ai-music-generator-dance-d...
> “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…