Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Look up the word gross
GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
371–380 of 475 posts
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not what EEE refers to. "Embrace" does not mean "buy".
It can, I think. The EEE concept is useful enough to go slightly outside its original intended use.
So the idea here is
1. Acquire company for tens of billions.
2. Intentionally ruin own investment.
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
?
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Isn't this fundamentally saying, "The cost of not infringing copyright is massive, so we will glibly infringe!" Copyright is not a natural human right; it's a construct invented and conferred by governments in order to achieve certain objectives. (It's more like a state license than a right, to be honest; using "right" was a historical masterstroke from the original inventors). As such, if those objectives can be p…
> Copyright is not a natural human right; it's a construct invented and conferred by governments in order to achieve certain objectives. (It's more like a state license than a right, to be honest; using "right" was a historical masterstroke from the original inventors). I don't know of a better definition for "natural human right" than "a right/privilege/protection given to everyone automatically, even if they don't…
> "a right/privilege/protection given to everyone automatically, even if they don't know about it or claim it
That's not what copyright was, when it entered the legal landscape; and it still isn't in so many countries. And even where your definition is somewhat accepted, people disagree on what exactly it means (How long should it last? Can it be inherited? Does it apply to this or that? Etc etc). Even simply the fact that it can literally be bought and sold would indicate that it is not a human right at all - those are typically unalienable. It is a commercial right at best.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#374> “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…
> Isn't this fundamentally saying, "The cost of not infringing copyright is massive, so we will glibly infringe!" Copyright is not a natural human right; it's a construct invented and conferred by governments in order to achieve certain objectives. (It's more like a state license than a right, to be honest; using "right" was a historical masterstroke from the original inventors). As such, if those objectives can be p…
And the purpose of copyright is to aid and encourage the progress of science and the useful arts:
>[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically the GitHub TOS is in itself a license; much like how you can dual-license code, uploading to GitHub is its own license grant separate from the license of the code you're granting to anyone who wants to use it for their own purposes. LICENSE.txt/md is not the only way to grant access to code you write.
GitHub's TOS is subject to change so that doesn't hold water. Tomorrow they could claim in their TOS you owe them your firstborn if you upload code to GitHub but that doesn't mean that you are bound by those terms because they cross the reasonable expectation of what you are signing up for. Granting Microsoft a blanket license to use your code in any way they see fit was not a part of the deal for GitHub, and as far…
Well, that's why major TOS changes are accompanied by the option to discontinue using that service. Usually they say that continuing to use the service after a certain date constitutes your agreement to the new terms.
I think we're over here in our armchairs weirdly assuming that GitHub doesn't have any lawyers working for them. I think they know they're legally in the clear on CoPilot.
I'm not at all a lawyer, but in my opinion we observe that the non-automated version of AI-generated works (the act of making art and prose in the style of an existing copyright work based on the artist's observation of that work) is not illegal. The only thing that AI introduces is automation.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#376I'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'd like to know more about how MSFT qualifies for the moniker "they're the greatest enemy of free and open source software". From my understanding they've invested in many open web resources previously (like jQuery).
And they opened sourced .NET
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#377I'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…
This made me wonder. Is there a not-for-profit SCM host that does act like a library?
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#378Excellent. 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…
>lines here that should not have been crossed without the authors explicit permission, regardless of the utility of the tool they built. Fyi... Google Books (scanned and OCR'd books) eventually won against the authors filing lawsuits of copyright infringement. So there is some precedent that courts do look at the "utility" or "sufficiently transformative" aspect when weighing copyright infringement. https://www.googl…
> So there is some precedent that courts do look at the "utility" or "sufficiently transformative" aspect when weighing copyright infringement.
Curiously, from the article, copyright infringement is not alleged:
> As a final note, the complaint alleges a violation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for removal of copyright notices, attribution, and license terms, but conspicuously does not allege copyright infringement.
Perhaps the plaintiffs are trying to avoid exactly this prior law?
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#379> “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…
On the other side, they could argue that it's like a human learning how to code over a decade of looking at the internet, and that human doesn't need to DM every code author to ask if they can learn from their content (and the risk for the author is similar given the human might one day recall some author's code verbatim and not give attribution).
It is not a human though. It is a function approximated from inputs and outputs. The laws are different and the licenses call out derivative works.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
A checkbox would make no difference in the case where the uploaded has not been granted the right to agree to such terms with respect to the code in question, leaving the matter in the same situation.
I'd like to propose a "golden rule" test. If Copilot was truly not at risk of regurgitating large blocks of code verbatim, why didn't Microsoft train it on proprietary Microsoft code as well? Why was it limited to user-submitted code on GitHub? If there is any argument pointing to licensing or copyright or patents, it stands to reason those concerns would apply to any corpus of user-submitted code since users could e…
Perhaps you want to check the comment section here: https://lwn.net/Articles/914150/
user bluca works at microsoft, but i think their opinions are their own.