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

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

#81

Post by hnbad »

NicoleJO wrote: post #54
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.

Is the actual complaint linked or quoted somewhere in the article? I've re-read it twice and it spends most of its wordcount explaining what open source is, mentioning a previous case and describing the implications of the attribution requirement with regard to the DMCA. There are plenty of links but they go in all kinds of places except to the ruling itself.

Your response is not very helpful beyond telling me I lack information I'm unaware of and couldn't find.

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

#82

Post by belorn »

brezelgoring wrote: post #52
asddubs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Microsoft chose to not use all code that is accessible to their scraper. All proprietary closed repositories on github that large companies use are excluded. I can easily image all the lawsuit that would had happened if paying customers that kept company secrets hosted at github had been used and leaked by copilot.

The decision to only train it on "open" repositories was one of self preservation.

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

#83

Post by chrismorgan »

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…

The relevant part of the terms would be https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t..., plus the definition of Service, which would include Copilot. I don’t believe GitHub have ever claimed to be or suggested that they are using this, and I think it would be a very shaky claim in a court due to the second paragraph.

Rather, GitHub have consistently cited “fair use”, as also noted in the suit, including in the summary at https://unicourt.com/case/pc-db5-doe-1-et-al-v-github-inc-et.... I also don’t believe GitHub have ever claimed to only use GitHub repositories, though I know of no obvious evidence of them having fetched from other sources, and they may well not have simply because it’s more convenient not to and they’ve got enough already, even if it honestly weakens their position (“if you’re relying on ‘fair use’, why haven’t you added closed-source software like the GitHub backend to show you mean it?”).

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

#84

Post by ZhangSWEFAANG »

> Some open code carries relatively light requirements, for example: “Don’t use my code commercially (don’t sell it or use it in something you sell)” and, very basically.

How can anyone even enforce this? Why can't I take some code, create a SaaS product for drug dealers, and then go sell it to my Opp Daquavion Marshawn III down the block? Who will ever find out?

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

#85

Post by AlexandrB »

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 will be a real shame if the fantastic achievement of OpenAI with copilot etc is smothered by ego.

I don't know if you watch YouTube, but this is probably how every creator hit with a bullshit DMCA claim for 5s of audio from a song feels. Why does OpenAI's work demand special consideration here? Or to put it another way - if we're going to be ignoring copyright, everyone should be able to do it.

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

#86

Post by JimDabell »

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…

> But apparently infringers are using this line of argument. So how? Is it not absurd?

You realise that they haven’t actually used that line of argument, right? The article author speculated that it might be part of the defence and then said they didn’t find it compelling. Set up a straw man and then knocked it down in virtually the same breath.

Don’t waste your time complaining about legal arguments that have not been made except in the imagination of one author.

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

#87

Post by elil17 »

visarga wrote: post #53

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.

>And even expression can be copied if it is small enough

This is what I would argue if I was Microsoft's lawyer. You can't win a copyright lawsuit over one bar of music, one dance move, or a few words. Similarly, copilot can't be considered to be infringing on anyone's copyright because the snippets it might copy verbatim are too short to be copyrightable.

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

#88

Post by jwestbury »

NicoleJO wrote: post #45
bluGill wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "fine" is 9 billion dollars.

Against a company which makes 6-7x that in yearly profits, that's still not an effective deterrent.

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

#89

Post by UncleMeat »

visarga wrote: post #67
ascagnel_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think we're facing a copyright extinction event. The whole concept is out of touch with the new reality - when you can generate 100 variations for your text, code or image with the click of a button, what does it even mean to hold copyright over the original? "In the style of" killed copyright in 2022.

How many people want to read AI generated text in the style of Lord of the Rings vs how many people want to read Lord of the Rings?

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

#90

Post by sfifs »

azeemba wrote: post #13

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.

Definitely about to happen as soon as lawyers can establish reasonable damages can be assessable to be worth the effort - or they piss off some rich artist who will be willing to underwrite the cost ala Theil did with Gawker. There was a ruckus just some weeks ago about some artist feeling that her style of art has become very easy to rip off.
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