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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

#381

Post by bombolo »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #231
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the thing is that we explicitly allow humans to learn and develop their own skills learning from other humans, but we have our own taboos around directly copying peoples work without permission and passing it off as your own. The debate is that copilot isn’t a human, it’s a machine that outputs copied work on a statistical basis. Humans are allowed to be unoriginal, uncreative, boring, mediocre, and all sorts of…

Don't you have to work pretty hard to get copilot to reproduce snippets verbatim? My understanding is that, while its possible to make copilot reproduce snippets so long as they appear in a large number of files, this basically never happens under normal usage.

This argument doesn't work.

I don't know whether copilot is giving me infringing content or not. I'm always at risk that my question was one of the ones that trigger infringing replies.

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

#382

Post by jacquesm »

dangus wrote: post #375
jacquesm wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I see Copilot as a trial balloon. If they get away with it you can expect the next move to appropriate the body of open source that is GitHub. Why the archenemy of open source should suddenly be trusted to play nice is something I really can't grasp.

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

#383

Post by jrm4 »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #354
thealchemistdev wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Honestly -- if this is too much for the average developer then we have WAY too many underskilled, and perhaps useless, developers.

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

#384

Post by comex »

belorn wrote: post #319
tzs wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would that still be the case if Microsoft know that such infringement is likely to occur? Microsoft has been in the software industry for 50 years, has like Apple a app-store and has distributed software from millions of different rights owners. Can they with good faith argue that they had no idea that software often has multiple rights owner and thus a single person who upload software to github is unlikely to have…

> It is more likely they will argue fair use, but by not using closed repositories owned by paying customers, it seems to show that they themselves have doubt about the legal status of using other peoples copyrighted work for copilot.

Or they're worried about leaking secrets, which is a different matter entirely. The amount of copying needed to leak secrets is far lower than the amount needed to commit copyright infringement.

If Copilot is trained on Microsoft's code and accidentally regurgitates a comment, "// for 2024 Xbox", it has done one but not the other.

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

#385

Post by jrm4 »

fluoridation wrote: post #372
jrm4 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! ?

There are a lot of less-than-optimal possible outcomes between "create the best possible free open source library" and "utterly ruin."

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

#386

Post by kllrnohj »

baby wrote: post #324
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…

You say that like Github Copilot could have been trained in a different way. There's just too much utility and progress in Github Copilot to let this lawsuit win.

Why should Microsoft's ability to create a new revenue stream be more important than anyone else's ability to enforce their licensing terms?

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

#387

Post by LtWorf »

chrismorgan wrote: post #201
mukesh610 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO fair use is still not a strong argument for Microsoft. They commercialized the product and made money out of it. Fair use is only allowed if the work you're doing is purely for the greater good. I might be wrong though, IANAL.

You are wrong, though public interest is certainly the basis of the purpose of fair use doctrine. But the simplest way of demonstrating that fair use still allows commercialisation is probably this example: search engines absolutely depend on fair use if they include any content from the linked pages. (And some countries have even tried to call the act of linking copyright infringement, though they’ve tended to back…

Search engines link to the original website

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

#388

Post by robertlagrant »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #353
naasking wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, o…

> since you can reverse the frequency domain representation and get the original spatial representation - the original images - back

I'd have thought that's exactly what you can't do with CoPilot.

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

#389

Post by skissane »

b112 wrote: post #215
gnramires wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still think "training is fair use" still has a leg to stand on, though If that's the case, we need to serious re-consider how we reward Open Source as a society (I think that would be fantastic anyway!) -- we have people producing knowledge and others profiting directly from this material, producing new content and new code that's incompatible with the original license. You make GPL code, a make an AI that learns…

You make GPL code, a make an AI that learns from GPL code, shouldn't its output be GPL licensed as well? I think, for the desired outcome to occur, you should instead ask: You write close sourced code, then a make an AI that learns from that code, shouldn't its output be licensed as well? Ask the above, and suddenly Microsoft will agree.

> You write close sourced code, then a make an AI that learns from that code, shouldn't its output be licensed as well?

> Ask the above, and suddenly Microsoft will agree.

Does Microsoft actually agree? Many people have posted leaked/stolen Microsoft code (such as Windows, MS-DOS 6) to GitHub. Microsoft doesn't seem to make a very serious effort to stop it – sometimes they DMCA repos hosting it, but others have stayed up for ages. They could easily build some system to automatically detect and takedown leaks of their own code, but they haven't. Given this reality, if they trained GitHub Copilot on all public GitHub repos, it seems likely that its training included leaked Microsoft source code. If true, that means Microsoft doesn't actually have a problem with people using the outputs of an AI trained on their own closed source code.

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

#390

Post by altairprime »

judge2020 wrote: post #113
jacquesm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A number of points in Google's favor: they are not passing off Google books content as their own, they limit your access to a small fraction of the offering. The thing that surprised me about that ruling is that it was deemed final without a chance of an appeal.

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

Indeed; that would be an excellent topic for litigation, and they would fight it with every lawyer they have b/c it could invalidate their efforts to zero out human labor costs in all possible areas.
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