GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by jfk13 » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 3:57 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #191

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…

Yes, transformative works may be allowed. So I'd guess that creating a model is probably OK (speaking as a non-lawyer!). But using output generated by that model is another matter. The "model" is fundamentally a machine that produces output that is derived from the input it was given. And that output might not be sufficiently transformative to "escape" copyright/licensing restrictions.

In the extreme case, the model's output might be a verbatim copy of a large portion of the original input ("training materials"); but even if it has been extensively modified, e.g. to conform to the coding style of a target repository or to follow a different language standard, this might not be "transformative".

(Compare: A translation of Harry Potter to French looks superficially quite different from the English original, yet it is still a derivative work; and if you're planning to publish one, Ms Rowling (or her publisher) may want a word with you. And that would apply whether you translated it "manually" or pushed it through Google Translate.)

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

#212

Post by npteljes » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 3:57 PM UTC

iinnPP wrote: post #185

breck wrote: post #120

[flagged]

Thank you. After pondering for months on this I have come to the same conclusions as you and reading your link made perfect sense. We are fighting to work harder because we value currency above humanity. What a silly fight. Most jobs can already be done by an AI and we should work towards that, not the other way. What is the point of free software again? The tech is out of the bag. The hard part is done, the part whe…

>What is the point of free software again?

The point of the free software movement, and the licenses, is to make sure that in the future, they will still be free software. It's the Paradox of tolerance[0], expressed in legal language, for software source code. Digital goods, while often posing as tangible goods, actually have near zero replication cost, unlike tangible goods. This, combined with the special circumstances provided by free software licenses, enable a special economy, where the barrier to entry is the lowest possible, and the contributions to it are maximized for further enabling the special economy, for all current, and future participants.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

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

#213

Post by naasking » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 3:57 PM UTC

nequo wrote: post #130

jasode wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>lines here that should not have been crossed without the authors explicit permission, regardless of the utility of the tool they built. Fyi... Google Books (scanned and OCR'd books) eventually won against the authors filing lawsuits of copyright infringement. So there is some precedent that courts do look at the "utility" or "sufficiently transformative" aspect when weighing copyright infringement. https://www.googl…

There are two important differences. Google Books retains the bibliographical information so you can properly cite the authors or contact them for permission to use their material. And Google Books does not automatically write new books for you that you can then send off to Penguin Books or self-publish on Amazon.

Copilot also isn't retaining the actual content of the source code repositories and then deriving works from that. If I wrote a giant table of token frequencies and associative keywords by analyzing a bunch of source, and sold that to people as a "github code analysis" book, I'm pretty sure that's perfectly fine because it's not a derivative work. I'm not sure that the fact that a program can then take that associative data and generate new code doesn't suddenly make it not ok.

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

#214

Post by panzi » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

distcs wrote: post #46

judge2020 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> 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 would make sense and it would be argued on its own merit. The judge/jury will decide if this argument is correct and legal. But the article implies that there are lawyers and infringers out there who are arguing that they could not have possibly afforded the cost of not infringing, so th…

So if I make a script that automatically downloads every torrent in existence it's suddenly ok, since it is infeasible to check the copyright of them all?

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

#215

Post by b112 » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

gnramires wrote: post #202

kmeisthax wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I still think "training is fair use" still has a leg to stand on, though If that's the case, we need to serious re-consider how we reward Open Source as a society (I think that would be fantastic anyway!) -- we have people producing knowledge and others profiting directly from this material, producing new content and new code that's incompatible with the original license. You make GPL code, a make an AI that learns…

You make GPL code, a make an AI that learns from GPL code, shouldn't its output be GPL licensed as well?

I think, for the desired outcome to occur, you should instead ask:

You write close sourced code, then a make an AI that learns from that code, shouldn't its output be licensed as well?

Ask the above, and suddenly Microsoft will agree.

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

#216

Post by chrismorgan » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #175

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…

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.

But hang on, there would only be a DMCA violation if copyright infringement had in fact occurred, right? So fair use would be a perfectly legitimate defence, causing the DMCA not to apply.

Look, proving copyright infringement is downright trivial here, if copyright law applies. And that shows where GitHub’s defence will—must—lie.

(And for other readers unfamiliar with the parent comment’s phrasing: “end-run” is apparently an American sporting term which here makes “as an end-run around” mean “to circumvent” or “to work around”.)

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

#217

Post by marginalia_nu » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #209

kmeisthax wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But it doesn't save GitHub Copilot because they're not merely training a model; they're selling access to its outputs and telling people they have "full commercial rights" to its outputs (i.e. sublicensing). But if you read the source code of 100 different projects to learn how they worked and then someone hired you to write a program that uses this knowledge, that should be legit. I'm not sure if the law currently…

That's not necessarily true at all. There's even techniques designed to demonstrably avoid such knowledge-contamination.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

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

#218

Post by reset-password » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

Ethics aside, By the time this case is resolved it won't likely matter anymore. I see models getting more granular and specific (and thus smaller) while typical personal computer resources are getting larger. At some point you'll just download the largest 'javascript inference model' that will run on your hardware and be done with it.

There are a huge number of motivated developers that want this to exist, the techniques themselves are not novel, and the code itself cannot be kept from whomever wants to train a model. It's a lost cause.

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

#219

Post by b112 » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 4:03 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #208

gnramires wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still think "training is fair use" still has a leg to stand on, though If that's the case, we need to serious re-consider how we reward Open Source as a society (I think that would be fantastic anyway!) -- we have people producing knowledge and others profiting directly from this material, producing new content and new code that's incompatible with the original license. You make GPL code, a make an AI that learns…

If open source code authors (and other content creators) don't want their IP to be used in AI training data sets then they can simply change the license terms to prohibit that use. And if they really want to control how their IP is used then they shouldn't host it on GitHub in the first place. Of course Microsoft is going to look for ways to monetize that data.

And if they really want to control how their IP is used then they shouldn't host it on GitHub in the first place

No. It's called copyright, it is enforceable, and that's the control.

GPL source code is available everywhere, in all formats, in textbooks, on CDs, on websites, but it is still gpl.

And Microsoft doesn't get to scrub the license.

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

#220

Post by jacooper » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 4:03 PM UTC

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #193

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.

Its not good will, its features and comfort. Github has the UI that almost every developer is used to, easy to use CI/CD, great issue and Pull request handling. And more importantly, everything is free.

Even Ignoring the value and the features, Employers don't ask for your git link, they ask for your GitHub account. And since most projects are on GitHub having all of your projects there tooz makes it easier to see all of your commits, making your profile look more active.

That's without mentioning the ease of discovery and issue reporting since everyone has an account.