Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 475 posts

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

#401

Post by tick_tock_tick »

brezelgoring wrote: post #10

Steve Ballmer once called Linux and the GPL License a cancer because to copy a portion of code from a copyleft project, minimal as it may be, would make the whole project require a copyleft license. If Github Co-Pilot includes GPL code then produced works should have GPL too, right? It is known that it produces verbatim copies of sections of code, so the 'derivative' explanation doesn't hold water. Alternatives may b…

> If Github Co-Pilot includes GPL code then produced works should have GPL too, right

No.

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

#402

Post by emodendroket »

gnramires wrote: post #202
kmeisthax wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Google won because Google Books was not actually a new concept; someone else had already built a book search engine the same way Google did, also got sued by the Authors Guild, and also prevailed. The only thing different about Google Books was that it'd give you two pages worth of excerpt out of the book. So it was very easy for a court to extend the fair use logic that they had already weaved into the l…

> 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…

> 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.

Is that new? If I include some excerpt from copyrighted material in my own work and it's deemed to be fair use, that doesn't limit my right to profit from the work, sell the copyright to someone else, and so on, does it?

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

#403

Post by gmiller123456 »

mpoteat wrote: post #228
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…

If this lawsuit succeeds, I have a startup idea that I think would be effective. Create a for-profit copyright registry for code snippets that are long enough to qualify for copyright protection. You can be the canonical owner of the copyright for a given piece of code! For a premium fee, we can generate and submit a patent on your behalf as well. Once I have a large corpus (perhaps millions of entries of code, most…

If the code snippets are so "obvious" that many people solve the problem axactly the same way, your going to have a lot of trouble asserting a copyright or patent over it.

But your idea is pretty much what almost all manufacturers do, and have been doing for decades.

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

#404

Post by chlorion »

judge2020 wrote: post #34
distcs wrote: post #11

> “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).

Why are wine developers and similar required to do clean room implementations to not be sued then?

Simply reading the leaked source code of Windows makes you not eligible to contribute to wine.

Why is Windows source code so much more important than mine?

The other thing is that copilot is not a human, so it doesn't matter anyways.

Humans are a special exception with laws, because they are intended to protect and benefit humans while also being fair. I don't think you can just substitute something in and assume that the same rules apply.

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

#405

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

What do you mean by "glue them together"?

If you overlap a hundred different FFTs, then the result is likely fine copyright-wise.

These networks are not [supposed to] contain much of the original data. Like the trivia point that Stable Diffusion has less than two bytes per source image, on average.

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

#406

Post by chlorion »

mellosouls wrote: post #42

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.

Nobody is asking for AI in general to be illegal, only training on code you don't own and then emitting it for profit.

Why can't they train on code that they own, such as the windows source code?

Why doesn't copyright law apply to open source code but applies strongly to windows source code?

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

#407

Post by EMIRELADERO »

chlorion wrote: post #404
judge2020 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Why are wine developers and similar required to do clean room implementations to not be sued then? Simply reading the leaked source code of Windows makes you not eligible to contribute to wine. Why is Windows source code so much more important than mine? The other thing is that copilot is not a human, so it doesn't matter anyways. Humans are a special exception with laws, because they are intended to protect and bene…

> Why are wine developers and similar required to do clean room implementations to not be sued then?

That's the neat part, they don't. It's essentially a self-imposed limitation which contradicts actual court rulings on the matter such as Sony v. Connectix, in which the court commented on clean-room being "inefficient" and the kind of inefficiency that fair use was "designed to prevent".

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

#408

Post by bastardoperator »

mellosouls wrote: post #42

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.

Completely agreed. It's crazy that people who claim to value freedom and being open quibble over copyright laws and licenses written for and by lawyers.

After reading the comments here, apparently everyone is a genius with code so special and unique, it would be unfathomable for two or more people to arrive at the same exact outcome.

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

#409

Post by shepherdjerred »

jrm4 wrote: post #383
shepherdjerred wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would consider myself pretty knowledgeable and I love going on tangents when setting up projects. I love tinkering and learning.

There is no situation in which I'd want to do all of the above work for every single repository I setup.

I have hundreds of repositories that I own on GitHub for things like school assignments and personal projects. If I start a weekend project as you describe then the first 4 hours are going to be setting my repository up.

Nobody wants to do this. Just because something is difficult or time consuming doesn't mean that it is good or useful. Doing this once would be a fun learning experience. Doing it more than once is a useless chore.

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

#410

Post by [deleted] »

iamevn wrote: post #345
crazygringo wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it is not okay to infringe copyright at a small scale but okay to do it in a large scale? No, I think you're missing the "transformative" part. The line of argument isn't "we're going to resell millions of codebases as-is for pure profit", which would be undisputed copyright infringement. The argument is that something highly transformative (e.g. training models) isn't infringement at all, because transformative…

I'm not sure I buy that training a model is transformative in the fair use sense. How is training a model different from lossy compression?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN