301–310 of 475 posts
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Humans are machines actually. Whether what Copilot does can actually qualify as "learning" vs. merely generating derivative works might actually be relevant.
Machines aren't humans.
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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.
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> 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 grabs licence to use your code however they see fit 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 i…
It's interesting, because Github certainly have the right to set whatever terms they like on their website. The dependency authors certainly have the right to set the licence terms on their code, and that gives me the right to vendor their work and include it in my upload to Github. But I, obviously, don't have the right to agree to Github's terms on behalf of the dependency authors.
I think the problem here is that Github assumes that everything I upload is my property, and that I have the ability to assign a licence to what I upload. This is not true for any project that vendors its dependencies.
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…
Has there been a law suit filed on the image generation side? Dalle and Stable Diffusion trained on images on the web, a lot of which weren't even freely licensed. So I would think similar legal arguments would apply there.
The big difference there is that you never get a 1 to 1 copy of the source content out of the image models, where you often do with copilot. Whether your use is transformative is a part of the fair use legal test.
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It might be a problem to treat it as copyright. Copyright applies to reproduction, distribution, public performance... if I go to a library or bookstore and I read books and look at their covers, copyright does not apply. Would an android that walks around learning things be subject to copyright? To what extent does it need a body and mobility to be more like a person and less as a scraper? It might seem stupid, but…
Funny thing is that recreations are not necessarily covered by copyright law. The clearest example of this is fonts, where (using imprecise terminology but I think it’ll be clear enough) the US only grants copyright protection to font files, but not the shapes—so tracing a commercial font is perfectly legal, even if you happened to end up with an identical result (though good luck proving to a court that that’s what…
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>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.
Hmmm I wonder if there is any work on federated github alternatives. Seems like a much more consequential network effect to tackle than social media tbh
> ForgeFed is an upcoming federation protocol for enabling interoperability between version control services. It’s built as an extension to the ActivityPub protocol, allowing users of any ForgeFed-compliant service to interact with the repositories hosted on other instances.
I think one of the interesting things that will be covered in this lawsuit is whether the licence under which the code is released applies at all in the case of screen scraping. The current understanding of screen scraping is that it is allowed, despite what is in the websites terms. Effectively if a human can access the content freely without having to actively agree to a license or terms you can scrape the content.…
> When it comes to open source code I suspect it will be found to be similar, if the code is freely visible on the web by a human without an active agreement to view it, then it will be possible to "scrape" it. I don't think the license the code is under will apply if that is the case. I don't see the scraping case applying here -- the idea that all human-readable code accessible on the public internet can be ingeste…
IMO that second case is a FAR more interesting question.
AI 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.
Would anyone have been able to sell a car if faster horses were already clogging up the streets?
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.
I don't think it would be a big deal if OpenAI/Copilot get shut down. Honestly it might be a good thing. Then we can generate new versions of these tools that are truly open using data that has been freely contributed, rather than obtained by for profit companies in shady cash grab.