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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

#191

Post by crazygringo »

distcs wrote: post #11

> “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…

> So it is not okay to infringe copyright at a small scale but okay to do it in a large scale?

No, I think you're missing the "transformative" part.

The line of argument isn't "we're going to resell millions of codebases as-is for pure profit", which would be undisputed copyright infringement.

The argument is that something highly transformative (e.g. training models) isn't infringement at all, because transformative works are covered by fair use. And that, if we still wanted to explore interpreting/changing the law to force opt-in for highly transformative things, it's logistically unreasonable, to such an extent that the transformative thing couldn't occur at all. So that it's a waste of time to even be discussing asking for permission as some kind of potential compromise or requirement. If it's transformative and therefore fair use, asking for permission is an irrelevant distraction.

That's why this type of argument is valid. I'm not saying whether the argument will/should win in this particular case, but I'm definitely saying there's nothing absurd whatsoever about it.

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

#192

Post by jacquesm »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #190
dspillett wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd like to propose a "golden rule" test. If Copilot was truly not at risk of regurgitating large blocks of code verbatim, why didn't Microsoft train it on proprietary Microsoft code as well? Why was it limited to user-submitted code on GitHub? If there is any argument pointing to licensing or copyright or patents, it stands to reason those concerns would apply to any corpus of user-submitted code since users could e…

Precisely. I made this exact point a while ago, how come Microsoft didn't submit the source code to Windows as part of the training data, that is at least code that they can plausibly claim they have the rights to.

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

#193

Post by TAForObvReasons »

jrm4 wrote: post #186

I'm still baffled as to why people treat Github like a public library despite being owned by what was at one time the greatest enemy of free and open source software in existence. Not saying they haven't changed their tune somewhat, but a library owned by Barnes and Noble is going to have very different incentives than an actual library. Made all the more silly by the fact that it's Git. You could just host it yourse…

GitHub built goodwill over the years. There were many controversies, but there were also many die-hard fans. That didn't evaporate overnight. Microsoft bought GitHub (and minted 3 billionaires in the process) specifically to acquire that goodwill and monetize it.

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

#194

Post by tpxl »

codetrotter wrote: post #50
jacquesm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision What do you use instead? The top alternatives in my opinion are: - SourceHut https://sr.ht/ - Codeberg https://codeberg.org/ - Self-hosted using Forgejo https://forgejo.org/ (fork of Gitea) I was self-hosting my code with Gitea for a while but currently I’m using GitHub. Planning on setting up a Forgejo instance in the coming weeks. At work we use…

> - Self-hosted using Forgejo https://forgejo.org/ (fork of Gitlab)

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, not Gitlab.

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

#195

Post by jacquesm »

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…

You would need to agree for every copyrighted work that you intend to allow them to use it for different purposes. Since GitHub can be completely invisible from the point of a contributor I highly doubt that clears the bar for such an invasive and irrevocable act.

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

#196

Post by guffins »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #156
dspillett wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ke…

The “UniChar” app, among others, can be used as an alternative keyboard “language” to access Unicode symbols with an interface similar to the emoji picker. Includes “favorites” and “recently used” sections.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unichar-unicode-keyboard/id880...

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

#197

Post by toyg »

distcs wrote: post #11

> “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…

> Isn't this fundamentally saying, "The cost of not infringing copyright is massive, so we will glibly infringe!"

Copyright is not a natural human right; it's a construct invented and conferred by governments in order to achieve certain objectives. (It's more like a state license than a right, to be honest; using "right" was a historical masterstroke from the original inventors).

As such, if those objectives can be provably achieved in a better way without copyright (or rather cutting copyright a bit smaller), there might well be a case for foregoing punishment.

It's an exceptionally-hard argument to make, but it's not illogical.

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

#198

Post by crazygringo »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #56
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's very easy to be generous with other people's property, intellectual or otherwise.

It's also very easy to invent supposed "intellectual property" rights out of thin air that conveniently last for a century or more (!) for your own work.

But instead of either of these views that focus on selfishness, it's much more productive to instead think about what benefits society as a whole.

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

#199

Post by codetrotter »

tpxl wrote: post #194
codetrotter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision What do you use instead? The top alternatives in my opinion are: - SourceHut https://sr.ht/ - Codeberg https://codeberg.org/ - Self-hosted using Forgejo https://forgejo.org/ (fork of Gitea) I was self-hosting my code with Gitea for a while but currently I’m using GitHub. Planning on setting up a Forgejo instance in the coming weeks. At work we use…

> - Self-hosted using Forgejo https://forgejo.org/ (fork of Gitlab) Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, not Gitlab.

Sorry, that was an autocorrect mistake. I meant to write fork of Gitea. Edited it now.

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

#200

Post by jacquesm »

breck wrote: post #124
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…

[flagged]

I'm sorry but Copyright is very much the law of the land no matter how often you post your links.
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