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

scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

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

#151

Post by [deleted] »

mch82 wrote: post #114
dspillett wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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⁾

[deleted]

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

#152

Post by mellosouls »

AlexandrB wrote: post #85
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.

Oh I have no problem with protecting genuinely innovative work, including code. That's not the vast majority of code produced by or derived from these tools though.

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

#153

Post by jfk13 »

chasing wrote: post #116
hoherd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As I understand it, "fair use" would allow you to do various kinds of analysis of all those pages, and to quote fragments of them in your own work, which is arguably similar to what copilot etc might do.

But republishing large chunks of the content, whether verbatim or in a "derivative" form such as a translation, would generally not be allowed without explicit permission.

How much "fair use" allows when it comes to copilot spitting out copies of functions it saw in somebody's repo.... well, that's a line that hasn't been defined yet, afaik.

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

#156

Post by sillysaurusx »

dspillett wrote: post #146
mch82 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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⁾

They are available in most fonts with reasonable-or-better Unicode coverage ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc... ). 1, 2 and 3 are available in ISO-8859-1 so can sometimes be used in 8-bit-only text, but I'd use them with care in that context. To type them easily you'll usually need composition (sometimes called chording) support. Some Linux (and other Unix) distributions still have this…

> On Android, unless you have a different keyboard in use which doesn't support this of course, long press on the number on the touch keyboard gives superscripts as an option

chucks iPad out the window

We only get the standard shift character as an option. E.g. 1 shows !, 2 shows @, etc.

I’d use superscripts all the time if it was on the keyboard. Anyone know if MacOS can do it? Other than pressing the weird globe key and searching.

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

#157

Post by ghaff »

b112 wrote: post #51
jacquesm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As well, Google is, because of these things, somewhat acting as a library. An libraries are very special entities.

Libraries are really not very special. They mostly exist on the basis of first-sale doctrine and have to subscribe to electronic services like everyone else.

Entities like the Internet Archive skate by (at least before their book lending stunt during COVID) by being non-profit and bending over backwards to respect even retrospective robots.txt instructions, meaning that it's not really worth suing them given they'll mostly do what you ask anyway.

But I guarantee you that if I set up a best comic strips of all time library I'll probably be in court.

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

#158

Post by jacquesm »

kmeisthax wrote: post #101
b112 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As well, Google is, because of these things, somewhat acting as a library. An libraries are very special entities.

Not really. Google won because Google Books was not actually a new concept; someone else had already built a book search engine the same way Google did, also got sued by the Authors Guild, and also prevailed. The only thing different about Google Books was that it'd give you two pages worth of excerpt out of the book. So it was very easy for a court to extend the fair use logic that they had already weaved into the l…

Precisely, that is the key point.

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

#159

Post by dspillett »

mch82 wrote: post #114
dspillett wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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⁾

> implement superscript ascii character support

They are _not_ in ASCII. A few are available in some 8-bit code-pages that expand on ASCII's 7-bit character set, otherwise you need to be working in a Unicode-supporting environment (which is most these days, thankfully).

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

#160

Post by yladiz »

judge2020 wrote: post #92
smoldesu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m skeptical of this interpretation since it seems to imply that you could upload copyrighted code and now GitHub has a license to do whatever they want with the code, which is obviously not true. An example would be someone uploading Microsoft Windows source code illegally, and GitHub can’t just use it because it was uploaded to their service. I would argue that this then extends to CoPilot, in that just because they have a license to host it, they don’t have a license to do whatever they want with it.
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