251–260 of 475 posts
The article is once again mixing up the production of copyrighted work, which is illegal and the training on copyrighted but publicly available work, which afaik isn't illegal. And I don't see how it could be illegal when the code is public (although I don't doubt that lawyers will find a way).
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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…
I hear this argument a lot but I think the answer is actually pretty mundane: the model behind Copilot was trained by OpenAI, not Microsoft. Microsoft has a large investment in OpenAI, but they don't own the company, and AFAICT OpenAI did all of the scraping for Copilot on their own, without any special access to MS code.
The article is once again mixing up the production of copyrighted work, which is illegal and the training on copyrighted but publicly available work, which afaik isn't illegal. And I don't see how it could be illegal when the code is public (although I don't doubt that lawyers will find a way).
The lawsuit is about attributions and licenses, not about copyright infringement.
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…
Not your code. Anyone's code that's uploaded to github by any third party. Under open source licenses, that's expressly permitted. However, it seems you're arguing that Github is not bound by the license under which they (and their users) acquired the code because of their TOS.
How many projects on github are put there by the original copyright holders? Perhaps it's more than 50%, but it certainly is less than 100%. So where is github's legal paperwork that shows that they're only processing the code that's copyrighted by the user who uploaded it, or that they received permission from third-party rights holders that did not agree to their TOS?
> “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…
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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.
> acquire that goodwill and monetize it Embrace Extend Extinguish
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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.
Google also used all of this to improve their OCR algorithms, almost certainly used in Google Cloud Vision[0], but I doubt this was a consideration when deciding if it was transformative/fair use. 0: https://cloud.google.com/vision
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Against a company which makes 6-7x that in yearly profits, that's still not an effective deterrent.
Exactly. That's why you're arguing for fines against people to be significantly more than 1/6th of their net pay, since harsher punishments are effective deterrents? Parking tickets should start at 50% of your yearly take home income. Didn't feed the meter an extra quarter? $10k minimum sounds fair.
Pay is not profits, it's revenue.
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.
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Learning from others is copyright infringement, better make sure none of your code contains any sequences longer than 150 characters that match any other code ever written.
> Learning from others is copyright infringement Isn't this the reason for clean room implementations?