Thought exercise: How can GitHub claim ANY license to my code that was uploaded by someone else without my permission or even notification? Lots of my code is there, uploaded by others.
GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
271–280 of 475 posts
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"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.
The company that owns Copilot believes in the aggressive enforcement of copyright.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It is known that it produces verbatim copies of sections of code, so the 'derivative' explanation doesn't hold water. For reference it's been shown to cough up code from Quake verbatim. This from John Carmack(?) also includes his profanity laden comments: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
To be fair, that's probably one of the most copied pieces of code already.
And it was (apparently) copied from something or someone at Xerox
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#274Earlier 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?
If programming is nothing but translating unoriginal old algorithms, then you should train copilot on those. Nobody would complain. The fact that they don't is an unassailable proof of the unsurprising fact that programmers add value to programs.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#275Earlier 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…
The coder that thinks that making the first decision about their own code entitles them to everyone else's.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yet they did not build and market a service to authors that would write novels for them based on their OCR-ed catalog.
Maybe they will? They still have that data and the kind of people to make such a service.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#277Copyright covers expression, but not the ideas themselves. So it should be ok to mine ideas from projects, open or not, as long as the model doesn't reproduce expression. And even expression can be copied if it is small enough, trivial, public knowledge, the only obvious way to do something or an API call. If you want idea protection you need to look at patents.
>And even expression can be copied if it is small enough This is what I would argue if I was Microsoft's lawyer. You can't win a copyright lawsuit over one bar of music, one dance move, or a few words. Similarly, copilot can't be considered to be infringing on anyone's copyright because the snippets it might copy verbatim are too short to be copyrightable.
Somebody needs to apologize to Biz Markie and all of hiphop for establishing precedents that say the opposite, and for all the work they have to go through to clear a sampled 50 year old drum fill (usually including credit as coauthors and publishing residuals.)
There are bands that are giving all of the profits of entire albums to the people whose sample they failed to clear on a single song.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#278I'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…
That's because there's no feedback loop of what you're saying, in the active lives of the people interfacing with GitHub. Consider an example of ingesting poison. If the poison tastes bad, I'll be sure to spit it out immediately, either by involuntary disgust, or because I associate with that negative feeling of being poisoned, something I don't want, so I react. But what if the poison tastes good? And what if it not…
your analogy is spot on and aligns with humanity very well.
Drugs, alcohol and sugar all fit this description very neatly.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Uploading someone else's code without permissions is, in itself, copyright infringement Suppose person A comitted a crime, that does not mean you are now allowed to profit from someone else's crime
But imagine Getty Images sells the stolen photo 10,000 times. They had no idea it was illegally stolen and fraudulently passed off as the fraudster's own work. If they get sued for infringement, they can just sue the actual fraudster for damages. Same will be for GitHub: if people really didn't have the legal authority to bind someone else's code to GitHub's TOS, then GitHub can go after the $x million of users that…
>GitHub can go after the $x million of users that have uploaded code they shouldn't have.
Ok, but can they go after them in an efficient manner that doesn't end up costing more than it's worth?
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#280AI advancements are shining a light on how warped our society has become. We _should_ invent technology to better our lives, but instead its become something to fear as it might destroy our livelihoods. I understand the threatening feeling AI brings, but rather than squashing innovation we should be rethinking the role of our economy, copyright, and intellectual property.