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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

#91

Post by jcranmer »

samwillis wrote: post #18

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.…

> 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.

Screen scraping is essentially a question of whether or not the actions constitute something akin to hacking, which is almost completely orthogonal to copyright. The main intersection you get is that many screen scraping scenarios are about things that aren't copyrightable (the US doesn't recognize "sweat of the brow" doctrine, so databases aren't copyrightable). When Google was scraping lyrics off of lyric sites--lyrics being totally and clearly copyrightable--it was dinged pretty hard for that.

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

#92

Post by judge2020 »

smoldesu wrote: post #57
judge2020 wrote: post #26

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.

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.

Technically the GitHub TOS is in itself a license; much like how you can dual-license code, uploading to GitHub is its own license grant separate from the license of the code you're granting to anyone who wants to use it for their own purposes. LICENSE.txt/md is not the only way to grant access to code you write.

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

#93

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

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…

[flagged]

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

#94

Post by visarga »

UncleMeat wrote: post #89
visarga wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe it's not interesting to see what other people generate with it.

I want to have chatGPT answer my questions, and reference materials when doing that. For example I could paste an article and start asking probing questions, debating it, asking for summary, ELI5, etc.

It would be a research assistant and tutor.

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

#95

Post by londons_explore »

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.

As someone who would vote to repeal copyright entirely, because I think its downsides outweigh its benefits, this is a good thing.

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

#96

Post by AlexandrB »

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.

This is a pipe dream. There's too much money behind strictly enforcing copyright protections on commercial products. If anything gets killed, it's going to be automatic copyright protection for "little guys". Microsoft will be able to copy your publicly shared code/art/images willy-nilly but will still send their compliance officers to check that your company has a valid Office 365 license if they notice you writing a private letter in Word.

Edit: If you doubt this, notice that co-pilot was trained on public, open-source code on Github. Not on Microsoft's/Github's own proprietary code. If co-pilot is truly so transformative that copyright doesn't apply, why not feed it all of Microsoft's code to train it better?

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

#97

Post by judge2020 »

belorn wrote: post #55
judge2020 wrote: post #26

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.

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 si…

> They can't give out permissions that they themselves do not have.

Then, chances are, it's technically illegal to upload those other contributors' code, although if that code is contributed via GitHub itself then the code in the pull request has already been licensed to GH.

It boils down to copyright/DMCA not requiring that hosting providers ensure the code people say they have the rights to is valid at submission, so GitHub now has tons of examples where people themselves lied about the permission when they uploaded code that wasn't theirs, and this will probably be a valid legal defense, at least only for the argument of "does GitHub have the right to use the source in their ML model" (it might really boil down to "are GH's terms vague enough to where nobody thought they the license included the ability to train artificial intelligence").

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

#98

Post by core-utility »

judge2020 wrote: post #43
core-utility wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's no different from how current copyright works for us humans. Something is only copyright protected if it's a "sufficiently original" work and "possesses at least a minimal degree of creativity" https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...

So (just thinking out loud), if Copilot suggests something only seen in one codebase, the code owners have a decent copyright case. But if copilot suggests something that's frequent across multiple, there's really no case to be made.

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

#99

Post by jcranmer »

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.

Google couldn't get this argument to fly for software APIs-are-not-copyrightable at SCOTUS. And that was for an argument where pretty much every computer person except Oracle agreed that Google was right.

Arguing that AI is mining ideas and not expressions is going to be a lot less successful when you've got a large pool of expert witnesses who are going to be able and willing to say that AI is only capable of mimicking the form of what it sees.

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

#100

Post by hoherd »

samwillis wrote: post #18

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.…

> Effectively if a human can access the content freely without having to actively agree to a license or terms you can scrape the content. You can't republish verbatim, but you can data mine and perform an analysis and publish that.

Would this apply to books? I can walk into a library or book store and OCR countless pages of countless books without agreeing to any license.

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