I don’t understand the author’s position in this article. It spends a long time talking about details of the licenses, but I can’t see any way the suit will actually be about licenses, because if it’s about licenses then it seems patently obvious to me that GitHub will lose very quickly, because they have undoubtedly violated the terms of the licenses. As I see it, the only leg GitHub can possibly stand on is the “fa…
That's entirely correct, and is why the suit will most likely [1] fail.
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…
And Dropbox can also be hosted yourself with a oneliner rsync-script…
The value GitHub provides is far from unique in anyway, but let’s not pretend it’s trivial. Especially for an open source project already struggling to get contributors to their main code base, even more so for any ops work.
I suspect that a lot of the people lining up on the other side against GitHub/Microsoft won't be so happy if the courts further lock down permissible uses under copyright across the board. More specifically, if Copilot breaks the "rules," so too does (probably--IANAL) pretty much every generative AI project out there. Restricting training to public domain datasets would be very limiting.
All copyrights and patents slow progress. If the desire for generative models is greater than the desire to hoover up cash, refine or end copyright and patent laws. Free Software people would build a statue to Microsoft if they started campaigning for an end to software copyrights.
>Free Software people would build a statue to Microsoft if they started campaigning for an end to software copyrights.
Some might. But FOSS licenses can exist because of copyright. So if, hypothetically, there weren't software copyrights, anyone could take any code and monetize it however they wanted with no restrictions. That might or might not be a big deal--the general trend has been towards more permissive licenses anyway.
> 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…
It seems a lot of this stems from how the DMCA does not require that these hosting providers actually check for code ownership at submission, or maybe just how they don't have an explicit checkbox for "I affirm that I can license this code to GitHub" every time someone is uploading code. If it is shown that the license in the TOS is valid, the legal question might boil down to "is the TOS License broad enough to wher…
> how the DMCA does not require that these hosting providers actually check for code ownership at submission
How does one check who owns a work if the work does not include the authorship information? (or if the work has been altered to have incorrect authorship information)
So really it boils down to attribution, therefore if GitHub were to disclose attribution to all the copyright owners of the code used to train the model, then this issue will be mute. It will be a long list, but just a list.
It would be very difficult to track what record in the training set contributed to what weight adjustment, especially after all the tokenization that is done.
s/mute/moot/; moot: having little or no practical relevance, typically because the subject is too uncertain to allow a decision.
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.
As someone who would vote to repeal copyright entirely, because I think its downsides outweigh its benefits, this is a good thing.
Agreed. I don't understand how people on threads like these turn into copyright hawks just because it seems to undermine their livelihoods, same as in the AI art threads. We should be abolishing copyright, not extending it.
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 associati…
Yeah, I guess the court will be the real test of what is allowed here.
"The person who uploaded the code lied about their permissions" won't be a valid defense in a copyright lawsuit by the actual copyright owner, at least in the case where there is no other copy of that code also on GitHub that was uploaded by the copyright holder. In the US what it will be is good evidence to support a claim by GitHub that they were an "innocent infringer"--someone who did not know they were infringin…
"someone who did not know they were infringing and had no reason to believe that they were." Can this be said by microsoft? They explicitly chose to not include hidden repositories by their paid customers, likely because they knew that those customers would sue them if proprietary code was used as training data. Apple seemed to have chosen not to include GPL in the app store for very similar reasons. Their term of se…
The comment I was responding to was about the case where person X uploads code to GitHub, and that code contains code from person Y whose license to X does not give X permission to grant GitHub the rights that GitHub requires from the uploader, and so GitHub's use of Y's code is without copyright permission.
I believe GitHub would likely be seen as an innocent infringer in that case.
The range of possible outcomes is enormous, I'll just wait by the sidelines but cherish the thought that moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision. They can't be trusted, this has been proven over and over again and yet people keep falling for it. It's the fox guarding the chickens. I wrote about my misgivings at the time: https://jacquesmattheij.com/what-is-wrong-with-microsoft-buy...
> The range of possible outcomes is enormous The most likely of which – if this lawsuit ends up winning – is that corporations will have new ways to sue everyone and that the world will be a worse place. Copyright expansion has never benefited the "little guy" such as Open Source authors, only large entities with deep pockets who can litigate to no end.
It's not so much copyright expansion as it is copyright re-affirmation. In this case it is especially open source authors whose rights are in play. Keep in mind that all of open source relies on copyright, without that everything is PD from Microsofts point of view, if they hosted it. Think of Copilot as a trial balloon, if they get away with it they will likely use that as the stepping stone to the next level and bit by bit your rights are salamied out of existence. This is the first slice, it should stop right here.