161–170 of 475 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google and Meta aren't redistributing your code claiming that it's theirs and that you can re-license freely.
Only because they arrived later at the party.
That doesn't include not giving me credit.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems a lot of this stems from how the DMCA does not require that these hosting providers actually check for code ownership at submission, or maybe just how they don't have an explicit checkbox for "I affirm that I can license this code to GitHub" every time someone is uploading code. If it is shown that the license in the TOS is valid, the legal question might boil down to "is the TOS License broad enough to wher…
A checkbox would make no difference in the case where the uploaded has not been granted the right to agree to such terms with respect to the code in question, leaving the matter in the same situation.
More specifically, if Copilot breaks the "rules," so too does (probably--IANAL) pretty much every generative AI project out there. Restricting training to public domain datasets would be very limiting.
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.
The big difference there is that you never get a 1 to 1 copy of the source content out of the image models, where you often do with copilot. Whether your use is transformative is a part of the fair use legal test.
Not at all. You need to bait it really hard and push it into a corner for it to reproduce anything. At that point you might just as well go to the repo and copypaste the code directly.
I've used Copilot since day one and still haven't seen anything that felt like a 1 to 1 copy of something. It's highly contextual and all about using the code I have already written to craft its suggestions. Even if I ask it explicitly for a known algorithm it will use my code style, patterns and naming conventions to write it.
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.
Tell me you don't know the history of and reasoning for free software (and attribution) licenses, without telling me you don't know the history of... etc. Mind-bogglingly entitled.
I'm in the first category; I'm guessing by your abusive response you are in the second?
If it reaches a decision, I’m curious how it will affect “education”. If you study a hundred repos to learn how to do a thing, and then produce something of your own that happens to be similar (because that’s how you learned), are you under any particular obligations? One hopes Oracle et al are not further inspired by such an outcome.
Learning from others is copyright infringement, better make sure none of your code contains any sequences longer than 150 characters that match any other code ever written.
Isn't this the reason for clean room implementations?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Against a company which makes 6-7x that in yearly profits, that's still not an effective deterrent.
Exactly. That's why you're arguing for fines against people to be significantly more than 1/6th of their net pay, since harsher punishments are effective deterrents? Parking tickets should start at 50% of your yearly take home income. Didn't feed the meter an extra quarter? $10k minimum sounds fair.
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.
The range of possible outcomes is enormous, I'll just wait by the sidelines but cherish the thought that moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision. They can't be trusted, this has been proven over and over again and yet people keep falling for it. It's the fox guarding the chickens. I wrote about my misgivings at the time: https://jacquesmattheij.com/what-is-wrong-with-microsoft-buy...
The most likely of which – if this lawsuit ends up winning – is that corporations will have new ways to sue everyone and that the world will be a worse place.
Copyright expansion has never benefited the "little guy" such as Open Source authors, only large entities with deep pockets who can litigate to no end.