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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

#221

Post by cmrdporcupine »

mellosouls wrote: post #167
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who's more entitled? The coder who has no issue with their unoriginal code being copied and mixed with millions of other samples and churned out in a helpful way for others, or the one who demands attribution in the most trivial of cases, or denies the access in these forms as it doesn't credit their brilliance in implementing a sort function? I'm in the first category; I'm guessing by your abusive response you are i…

Nice straw-men you're collecting there.

First one: Uses of attribution and copyleft licenses are just ego-boosting, instead of legitimate protection of authorship against corporate piracy.

Second: Criticism of said corporate exploitation of community work is the actual entitled behaviour. Oh, it's also abusive.

Third strawmen: that people who oppose CoPilot in its current form just want to defend copyright around boilerplate stack-overflowish type code.

All false.

I can only assume... You're either too young and inexperienced to remember the early days of the copyleft, free software, and open source movements and why these licenses exist (and still need to exist)... or your values are so backwards that you just think it's Ok to harvest other people's hard work for your own (or your employer's) own profit.

To be clear: There is no heuristic at work in something like CoPilot that can distinguish between boilerplate code and genuine innovation. It has been shown multiple times to just freely copy and paste novel, copyrighted code; without attribution or conforming to license restrictions. That is unacceptable and deserving of legal countermeasures.

I would have no problem with CoPilot copying only the code of people who have opened their code for that kind of use. But that's not what it does.

Notable that Microsoft, its owner, is not training CoPilot on its own massive corpus of code. Just other people's code.

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

#222

Post by npteljes »

ZhangSWEFAANG wrote: post #84

> Some open code carries relatively light requirements, for example: “Don’t use my code commercially (don’t sell it or use it in something you sell)” and, very basically. How can anyone even enforce this? Why can't I take some code, create a SaaS product for drug dealers, and then go sell it to my Opp Daquavion Marshawn III down the block? Who will ever find out?

The reality is that open source license violation is rampant, even in big, recognized names. Enforcement, as you feel, is sparse. Usually an entity has to notice, and then make the effort to react to the situation, which doesn't happen often. There are entities who specifically work on licence violations, for example, you can report them on gnu.org[0]. Because there are large cases like TikTok using OBS code, and not contributing back[1], I'm sure there are lots of cases where the community simply doesn't find out in the first place, similarly to how software piracy is rampant in some places in the world, even among commercial entities.

In case you're interested in more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license_litigation

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.en.html

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/20/22847213/tiktoks-live-st...

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

#223

Post by [deleted] »

jfk13 wrote: post #211
crazygringo wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

[deleted]

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

#224

Post by npteljes »

api wrote: post #126

FOSS 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.

I can see that in like GPLv4, they could consider AI training and such as derivative work.

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

#225

Post by jacquesm »

breck wrote: post #204
jacquesm wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Physical slavery was once the law of the land too. I like to think I would have been on the right side of history at that time, as well.

You are simply not making much sense, and to compare physical slavery with copyright is ridiculous.

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

#226

Post by tommyage »

mellosouls wrote: post #142
sfifs wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make this kind of "just" and "bog standard" argument for anything. Just using an image for educational or illustrative purpose, just using a song for a political rally etc etc. The fact is as a society we have decided to reward creators with copyright as a means to commercialise their creation and get compensation. Who is to say programmers are not creators and the compensation they want for open source lic…

How are you a "creator" (in an attribution-worthy sense) if you are producing an unoriginal implementation of an old algorithm that thousands of coders have produced before you? Most coding is not innovative, and that is the kind of code that these tools are producing and derived from in most cases.

> How are you a "creator" (in an attribution-worthy sense) if you are producing an unoriginal implementation of an old algorithm that thousands of coders have produced before you?

So your requirements are pseudo-code which you simply have ti translate. I see. No creativity required. Jepp.

> Most coding is not innovative, and that is the kind of code that these tools are producing and derived from in most cases.

I see what you want to suggest. Then it woulnb't be required to learn on these datasets and simply build a "fair use" product which covers these cases with a snippet engine.

Don't be naive.

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

#227

Post by CJefferson »

judge2020 wrote: post #34
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…

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 enough code is recalled verbatim, I can sue the author of that code. That seems to fit entirely with this case -- they are suing the owner of Copilot, partially because it reproduces chunks of code.

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

#228

Post by mpoteat »

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…

If this lawsuit succeeds, I have a startup idea that I think would be effective.

Create a for-profit copyright registry for code snippets that are long enough to qualify for copyright protection. You can be the canonical owner of the copyright for a given piece of code! For a premium fee, we can generate and submit a patent on your behalf as well.

Once I have a large corpus (perhaps millions of entries of code, most one or two lines long), I can automatically scan new respositories and send cease and desist letters for violating my client's copyright. Even if a piece of code is very common, that doesn't mean its unoriginal, it just means that there are many people violating its copyright after all. According to the logic of the folks in this thread at least.

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

#229

Post by sebzim4500 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #96
visarga wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're facing a copyright extinction event. The whole concept is out of touch with the new reality - when you can generate 100 variations for your text, code or image with the click of a button, what does it even mean to hold copyright over the original? "In the style of" killed copyright in 2022.

This is a pipe dream. There's too much money behind strictly enforcing copyright protections on commercial products. If anything gets killed, it's going to be automatic copyright protection for "little guys". Microsoft will be able to copy your publicly shared code/art/images willy-nilly but will still send their compliance officers to check that your company has a valid Office 365 license if they notice you writing…

>If you doubt this, notice that co-pilot was trained on public, open-source code on Github. Not on Microsoft's/Github's own proprietary code. If co-pilot is truly so transformative that copyright doesn't apply, why not feed it all of Microsoft's code to train it better?

Presumably because there might be trade secrets in there that they don't want to leak. That seems entirely separate to copywrite to me.

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

#230

Post by icambron »

toyg wrote: post #197
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 p…

This seems like a good argument for adjusting copyright law, but seems unhelpful in interpreting it. "This law isn't a good way to achieve the government's objectives" is not the same as "this law wasn't broken". Judges do have some discretionary power in interpretation and that can take into account congress's intent, but here that would be a massive stretch. A judge would simply say it's congress's job to fix copyright if it's not the best way to achieve certain policy goals.
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