131–140 of 475 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 is known that it produces verbatim copies of sections of code, so the 'derivative' explanation doesn't hold water. For reference it's been shown to cough up code from Quake verbatim. This from John Carmack(?) also includes his profanity laden comments: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
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.
Yes, yesss. You're getting to the logical conclusion. Now I don't think Microsoft have become 'based' and want to break the copyright system but I hope they have inadvertently done so through their actions.
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The "fine" is 9 billion dollars.
Against a company which makes 6-7x that in yearly profits, that's still not an effective deterrent.
Parking tickets should start at 50% of your yearly take home income. Didn't feed the meter an extra quarter? $10k minimum sounds fair.
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…
It clearly isn't in public domain. But if we define something new, public knowledge domain. This being material it is legal for a human to look at and learn from. They gain no rights to copyright or IP, but they can learn from it and use it per the existing limits of copyright and IP. Saying that anything posted online gets entered into public knowledge domain seem agreeable. Few things wouldn't be allowed here, generally material that is agreed upon to be illegal world wide (and some countries may have tighter limits, like a theocracy banning someone from learning anything from material deemed blasphemous).
Then it is a question of if an AI can also learn off of such material as long as it doesn't produce works that violate existing copyright or IP laws, same as a human. This doesn't seem, on its face, inherently ridiculous. There are still corner cases and potential for abuse, but those also exist with copyright law yet we don't throw the whole system away and just ban all forms of copying or selling the right to copy.
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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.
The problem here ends up being that code, especially in popular languages, will always looks similar when you're doing something like finding the best implementation for an algorithm. So if you invoke CoPilot for a common problem, chances are it can pull the exact code it needs from is dataset, but it also could've generated that same code snipped had the solution not existed in its training dataset. And when you start out solving a problem then ask it to continue writing more code, it just assumes you're solving the exact same problem that the original source code was solving.
This could probably be remedied if CoPilot spit out a "this is % similar to source code from the internet" so that you can know just how unique CoPilot is being. Legally, copyright is just a mess and was not ready for the scale of the internet nor the advancements in ML when there are machines that have a 50% chance of infringing on someone's copyright and 50% chance of creating something new.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/fact-and-fiction-in-...
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.
Actually, Kraftwerk did
https://www.factmag.com/2019/07/30/kraftwerk-sample-lawsuit-...
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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
Same will be for GitHub: if people really didn't have the legal authority to bind someone else's code to GitHub's TOS, then GitHub can go after the $x million of users that have uploaded code they shouldn't have.