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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

#231

Post by sebzim4500 »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #59
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).

But the thing is that we explicitly allow humans to learn and develop their own skills learning from other humans, but we have our own taboos around directly copying peoples work without permission and passing it off as your own. The debate is that copilot isn’t a human, it’s a machine that outputs copied work on a statistical basis. Humans are allowed to be unoriginal, uncreative, boring, mediocre, and all sorts of…

Don't you have to work pretty hard to get copilot to reproduce snippets verbatim? My understanding is that, while its possible to make copilot reproduce snippets so long as they appear in a large number of files, this basically never happens under normal usage.

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

#232

Post by moralestapia »

mpoteat wrote: post #228
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…

Oh, the internet!

Just yesterday, I bought a nice domain name for an idea that's very close to what you mention, monetize on snippets of code.

If you want to team up, hit me up!

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

#233

Post by sebzim4500 »

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 pretty easy to be generous with your own when it comes to copilot. I have not been damaged in any way by copilot learning from my code, and no one else has either.

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

#234

Post by kmeisthax »

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?

If the output (not just the model) can be determined to be a derivative work of the input, or the model is overfit and regurgitating training set data, then yes. It should. And a court would make the same demands, because fair use is intransitive - you cannot reach through a fair use to make an unfair use. So each model invocation creates a new question of "did I just copy GPL code or not".

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

#235

Post by naasking »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #217
naasking wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yes, it will sometimes depend on the unique qualities of the code. For instance, if you learned a new sorting algorithm from a C repo, and then wrote a comparable imperative solution in OCaml, that might be a derivative work. But if you wrote a purely functional equivalent of that algorithm, I don't think that could be considered a derivative work.

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

#236

Post by naasking »

kqlan wrote: post #105
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.

[flagged]

"Copyright" is not a natural right, it's an artificial right we invented ostensibly to benefit society. If innovations like Copilot provide more benefit then they could get exemptions. That's why fair use is an exemption.

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

#237

Post by UncleMeat »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #203
UncleMeat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people want to read AI generated text in the style of Lord of the Rings vs how many people want to read Lord of the Rings?

If an AI can generate an infinite number of stories that take place in the LotR world and do it well and faithfully in the style of JRR Tolkien then I would happily read it. You can only read the trilogy and The Hobbit so many times.

You'd happily read it, but that's an answer to a different question. You've already read LotR. An AI generated novel in a similar style doesn't take money from Tolkien's estate.

Some people will want to read the AI generated knockoff. That number of people will usually be much smaller than the number of people who want to read the original and many of those people interested in the AI generated knockoff will also read the original.

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

#238

Post by skybrian »

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…

It's been a bit over four years since the acquisition and Microsoft hasn't screwed it up yet.

It's good to have a backup plan, but it's convenient to keep using it for now.

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

#239

Post by layer8 »

mpoteat wrote: post #228
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…

Do note that there’s the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality, which may be substantial for mere code snippets.

This may be one of the reasons why the lawsuit isn’t based on copyright.

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

#240

Post by deltarholamda »

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…

>Made all the more silly by the fact that it's Git. You could just host it yourself for five bucks a month

Ah, but GitHub isn't selling git hosting. It's a social network that also does git. That's the cake that Microsoft bought, not the UI and API frosting.

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