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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

#111

Post by ClumsyPilot »

judge2020 wrote: post #62
Eleison23 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Uploading someone else's code without permissions is, in itself, copyright infringement. Just like you can't take someone else's code and license it to GitHub without the copyright holder's permission, you can't take images off of someone's website and sell/license them to Getty Images for profit.

> Uploading someone else's code without permissions is, in itself, copyright infringement

Suppose person A comitted a crime, that does not mean you are now allowed to profit from someone else's crime

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

#112

Post by marmetio »

hnbad wrote: post #58
marmetio wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 protection…

I wouldn't be surprised if the result varied by country.

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

#113

Post by judge2020 »

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.

Google also used all of this to improve their OCR algorithms, almost certainly used in Google Cloud Vision[0], but I doubt this was a consideration when deciding if it was transformative/fair use.

0: https://cloud.google.com/vision

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

#114

Post by mch82 »

dspillett wrote: post #68
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 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. Wh…

How did you type the superscript footnotes?

Edit: Wow, this is game changing. Markdown parsers need to implement superscript ascii character support!

Lowercase ⁽ᵃ⁾ Uppercase ⁽ᴬ⁾ Numbers ⁽⁹⁹⁾

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

#115

Post by amflare »

I don't understand this case. Is Copilot copying code wholesale and presenting it as its own? Because if not, then it doesn't need to attribute anything more than I need to attribute John Go or Edward PHP everytime I use a trick I picked up by reading their code. Obviously, if they trained Copilot on private code repos, that a whole other discussion. But I assume they didn't, so you don't even have the argument that they should have paid the repo authors to be able to train on their code.

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

#116

Post by chasing »

hoherd wrote: post #100
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.

Try publishing those OCRed pages and see what happens.

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

#117

Post by jcranmer »

elil17 wrote: post #87
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.

> You can't win a copyright lawsuit over one bar of music, one dance move, or a few words.

Actually... The smallest successful copyright claim is I believe over 10 words or so.

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

#118

Post by marginalia_nu »

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.

Haven't stepped on the right toes yet. Create code that will generate art "in the style of Disney/Nintendo" and hey would you look at that, copyright is back and alive again!

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

#119

Post by marcosdumay »

qayxc wrote: post #8
amelius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But why stop there? What's the difference between Microsoft, Google, Meta, and OpenAI in this regard? All of those build their models based on the same sources and it's therefore a much more general issue than just one particular company being sued.

Google and Meta aren't redistributing your code claiming that it's theirs and that you can re-license freely.
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