There has to be an option or something like "repositoy opt-out from copilot" type of button.
GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
171–180 of 475 posts
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#172Excellent. 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…
I just hope it doesn't end in Microsoft paying some (from their perspective) small fine that is just the cost of doing business.
If the fine is higher than what they can feasibly gain from the product in a reasonable time, it'd make them drop the product entirely even if they are able to adjust it to conform to the laws.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#173Earlier 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.
> The thing that surprised me about that ruling is that it was deemed final without a chance of an appeal. They did appeal it. SCOTUS declined to hear the case. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/technology/google-books-c...
Yes, sorry I could have worded that more precisely.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#174Even if it reproduces (proportionally) small sections of code it's been trained on verbatim, its function is transformative and will likely be deemed fair use. This lawsuit is going nowhere other than the HN front page.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#175Excellent. 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…
Not "excellent" at all. This Richard Roe plaintiff is trying to use the notorious DMCA as an end-run around having to prove copyright infringement and withstand a possible fair use defense. That shouldn't be allowed, as a matter of Constitutionally-relevant protections.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#176Earlier 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.
GitHub is still subject to the terms of your license though; they can impose whatever rules they want on you service-wise, but their use of your software should be dictated by the accompanying LICENSE file.
To illustrate: GitHub could delete any project they want, and there would be no real recourse for the project's author. That is a service decision that they reserve the right to impose via their TOS. However, if they were to steal code from a user's private repository and violate the license therein, the author could sue for theft of intellectual property.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#177FOSS licenses need to add provisions that only 100% open and free to download AI models can be trained on works licensed under them. They need to add this yesterday.
Do you consider WTFPL a FOSS license? The polite versions are MIT0, BSD0 and CC0. I guess anyone using them is fine with Copilot been close and doing whatever they want. But people using AGPL may have a very different opinion.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#178I 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…
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Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#179Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#180> “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…
On the other side, they could argue that it's like a human learning how to code over a decade of looking at the internet, and that human doesn't need to DM every code author to ask if they can learn from their content (and the risk for the author is similar given the human might one day recall some author's code verbatim and not give attribution).
If copilot is so advanced that we need to grant it right human has, then it has right to freedom and owning copilot is a crime.
I dony think Microsoft wants to go down this path