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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

#351

Post by pdonis »

breck wrote: post #124
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…

[flagged]

If you want people to actually read your site, you might want to not set an unreadably small font size. In fact, you might not want to set a font size at all, since you are extremely unlikely to know more than the reader does about what font size works for them. Browsers have default font size settings for a reason.

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

#352

Post by mattstir »

kache_ wrote: post #109

yeah that's great but we still unlocked tons of productivity who cares man just build stuff if you don't want people to learn off your code just don't share it!

Interestingly, the same companies who made the paid service by analyzing all of that open-source code would never, ever consider open-sourcing the code for that service.

> if you don't want people to learn off your code

"Learn" is a strange verb to use here. No one at Microsoft or OpenAI was scraping all of GitHub so that they could learn. They took people's licensed works, fed it into a very sophisticated copy-paste machine, and started making money off of it.

> just don't share it!

It's almost like licenses and copyright exist to protect the rights of their holders or something.

The entire point of licenses is to be able to share your work in a way that respects your wishes. "Just don't share it" is completely non-productive.

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

#353

Post by TeMPOraL »

naasking wrote: post #213
nequo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That sounds to me somewhat close to "if I take an FFT of each of those copyrighted images, glue them together, and sell this as a picture, is that a derivative work?" - I'd say yes, or perhaps even a different encoding of the original work, since you can reverse the frequency domain representation and get the original spatial representation - the original images - back.

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

#354

Post by shepherdjerred »

thealchemistdev wrote: post #327
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…

I saw this a few months ago. local> ssh user@example.com user@example> git init --bare $DIR user@example> exit local> git clone user@example.com:$DIR I've seen VPS services for as low as $4 a month. I'm with you in camp baffled.

What about backups? Managing access to the repository? Making the repository easy to discover? Can you browse the code in a browser, or read the README without cloning?

Of course you could do all of these things with enough work. But why would the average developer want to? Do you really think most developers care so much about Microsoft owning GitHub?

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

#355

Post by dspillett »

bastardoperator wrote: post #350
mhitza wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really about disallowing amendments, but at least sending out a notice of the changing terms. Like you get with your privacy policy. I'm pretty sure I didn't receive one about them using my public (although unpopular) open source code into their NN mixer. Edit: Anyway a bit outside the point. It being, when your ever expanding set of services incorporate your ownership in ways unforseen when the agreement was mad…

They didn't change the terms, you can't expect privacy when you're out in public. I'm also curious how you're certain your project was used?

> you can't expect privacy when you're out in public

This isn't about privacy, it is about licensing (and possibly copyright). mhitza mentioned privacy as another policy, that you agree to upon sign-up like the terms of service, one for which updates are regularly announced.

> I'm also curious how you're certain your project was used?

Hasn't it been suggested that all public repositories at least could have been used? It makes sense to give the training pool as much information as possible.

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

#356

Post by jcranmer »

rockemsockem wrote: post #314
jcranmer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google couldn't get this argument to fly for software APIs-are-not-copyrightable at SCOTUS. And that was for an argument where pretty much every computer person except Oracle agreed that Google was right. Arguing that AI is mining ideas and not expressions is going to be a lot less successful when you've got a large pool of expert witnesses who are going to be able and willing to say that AI is only capable of mimick…

Wait, what do you mean Google couldn't get that argument to fly? Google won the case. Are you referring to the fact that the SCOTUS didn't directly address the copyrightability of APIs and instead ruled in favor of Google on the basis that Google's use was fair use *even if* APIs are copyrightable? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_... .

Yes. Google's argument that software APIs weren't copyrightable because of the idea-expression divide didn't find purchase. It won the case on other (fair use grounds). Indeed, if you read the opinion closely, there are a few places where it looks like there used to be a section in the opinion on software API copyrightability (given Breyer was the author, noncopyrightability is probably more apt) that was ripped out in later drafts, presumably because there wasn't the votes for it.

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

#357

Post by drstewart »

pessimizer wrote: post #258
drstewart wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> fines against people to be significantly more than 1/6th of their net pay Pay is not profits, it's revenue.

Look up the word net

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

#358

Post by drstewart »

yladiz wrote: post #169
drstewart wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Companies aren’t people (even if they are legally defined as such) so you can’t treat the way you fine them equally.

Stating something isn't proving it (even if you learned it as such), so you can't just state something as fact without proving it.

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

#359

Post by bastardoperator »

dspillett wrote: post #355
bastardoperator wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't change the terms, you can't expect privacy when you're out in public. I'm also curious how you're certain your project was used?

> you can't expect privacy when you're out in public This isn't about privacy, it is about licensing (and possibly copyright). mhitza mentioned privacy as another policy, that you agree to upon sign-up like the terms of service, one for which updates are regularly announced. > I'm also curious how you're certain your project was used? Hasn't it been suggested that all public repositories at least could have been used…

> This isn't about privacy, it is about licensing (and possibly copyright). mhitza mentioned privacy as another policy, that you agree to upon sign-up like the terms of service, one for which updates are regularly announced.

The terms of service say you grant GitHub an implicit license to display your code. They also say:

"We may modify this agreement, but we will give you 30 days' notice of material changes."

Are you claiming that hasn't happened?

> Hasn't it been suggested that all public repositories at least could have been used? It makes sense to give the training pool as much information as possible.

Has it? I don't like to make assumptions.

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

#360

Post by dspillett »

tremon wrote: post #254
dspillett wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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

Under other circumstances they don't need it. But if CoPilot is creating a derivative work including parts of that code without including the licence terms or attribution (as required by many licences) things are far more grey, or possible full black.

Some argue that the AI is unaware of the terms so can't be held responsible. Two possible counters for that: 1. it is the licence that gives you the right to use the copyrighted code, if you are unaware of the licence then why assume you have the righ tto use the code? 2. if I found some useful code that happened unbeknownst to me to be from MS, and used it in a way that I wasn't licensed to, and MS noticed, it is a pretty safe bet that they'd state ignorance of the copyright terms doesn't mean you can't be held to them.

Or another angle: the tool is allowing, even encouraging, people to use code or other materials in a way that infringes copyright (again: you don't have the right to use the code under most licences unless you give correct attribution and such) – the very conditions often stated as reasons for trying to ban other tools.

Plus of course the general argument: if this is entirely a non-issue, why is no Windows, Office, or SQL Server code in the training set? Surely they are great examples of how to do things to train the AI with?

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