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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

#391
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not sudden - they've owned it for a while now.

What I can't understand is people feel locked into Github because of the social features. To me they seem the least important part of Github, particularly with so many OSS projects running communities on Discord or Slack.

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

#394
post #215

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.

Depends if you think the GPL means "copyright is great!" vs "let's use their biggest weapon against them..."

It's a surprisingly subtle distinction.

EDIT - if I squint hard enough in exactly the right way, there's a sense in which CoPilot etc aligns perfectly with the goals of the free software movement. A world in which you can use it as a code copyright laundry might be a world where code is actually free.

Is that any weirder than bizarre legal contortions such as the Google/Oracle "9 lines of code"? Or the whole dance around reverse engineering: "It's OK if you never saw the actual code but you're allowed to read comprehensive notes from someone who did"..?

There's a ton of examples like this. Tell me with a straight face that there's a clear moral line in either copyright or patent law as it relates to software.

IP is a mess and it's not clear who benefits. Is a world where code isn't subject to copyright so bad?

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

#395
post #324
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.

Could have been trained with the code owners' consent, or at least warning.

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

#396
Related. Others?

The lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI that could change rules of AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33546009 - Nov 2022 (5 comments)

An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33542813 - Nov 2022 (175 comments)

Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33485544 - Nov 2022 (288 comments)

We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33457063 - Nov 2022 (781 comments)

GitHub Copilot may steer Microsoft into a copyright lawsuit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33278726 - Oct 2022 (11 comments)

GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33240341 - Oct 2022 (1219 comments)

What Copilot means for open source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31878290 - June 2022 (137 comments)

Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847931 - June 2022 (300 comments)

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

#397
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…

It's been a bit over four years since the acquisition and Microsoft hasn't screwed it up yet. It's good to have a backup plan, but it's convenient to keep using it for now.

[deleted]

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

#398
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 refuse to believe that Microsoft is any different from before (not just wrt to foss but general attitude). Doesn't matter if there's a new CEO. Look at what they did to Minecraft logins. Or this.

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

#399
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.

And dropbox is just rsync with a bit of cute UI basically worthless. These comments are peak examples of how disconnected some hackernews users are from real life.

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

#400
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yet they did not build and market a service to authors that would write novels for them based on their OCR-ed catalog.

That's not really what Copilot proposes to do either.
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