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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

#411

Post by hinkley »

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…

That sounds like leftpad but with more steps.

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

#412

Post by nickv »

I see lots of anti GitHub (really Microsoft) sentiment here, but doesn’t a ruling against GitHub have massive implications for any “all powerful ML trained AI model” period?

Like, we’re all swooning about ChatGPT, but how can chatGPT be legal if this isn’t? I literally can ask it “write me a song about cryptocurrency in the style of Taylor swift” and it will. It can’t do that it it didn’t train with Taylor Swift song lyrics.

Doesn’t this kill chatGPT? Doesn’t this law suit potentially kill lots of training models?

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

#413

Post by Dylan16807 »

jacquesm wrote: post #192
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Precisely. I made this exact point a while ago, how come Microsoft didn't submit the source code to Windows as part of the training data, that is at least code that they can plausibly claim they have the rights to.

There's a good point made over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34282407 that it might accidentally spit out some kind of secret that is much smaller than a copyrightable piece of code. That's not a risk for code in public repositories.

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

#414

Post by yakubin »

nickv wrote: post #412

I see lots of anti GitHub (really Microsoft) sentiment here, but doesn’t a ruling against GitHub have massive implications for any “all powerful ML trained AI model” period? Like, we’re all swooning about ChatGPT, but how can chatGPT be legal if this isn’t? I literally can ask it “write me a song about cryptocurrency in the style of Taylor swift” and it will. It can’t do that it it didn’t train with Taylor Swift song…

Good riddance.

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

#415

Post by Dylan16807 »

dspillett wrote: post #159
mch82 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you type the superscript footnotes? Edit: Wow, this is game changing. Markdown parsers need to implement superscript ascii character support! Lowercase ⁽ᵃ⁾ Uppercase ⁽ᴬ⁾ Numbers ⁽⁹⁹⁾

> implement superscript ascii character support They are _not_ in ASCII. A few are available in some 8-bit code-pages that expand on ASCII's 7-bit character set, otherwise you need to be working in a Unicode-supporting environment (which is most these days, thankfully).

I interpreted the phrase as superscript variants of characters that are in ASCII.

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

#416

Post by Dylan16807 »

bastardoperator wrote: post #321
jacquesm wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are simply not making much sense, and to compare physical slavery with copyright is ridiculous.

It made perfect sense. Laws change all the time... in some cases they're invalidated by the court.

> Laws change all the time

That still doesn't make breck right.

If I say "slave ownership can't be signed over by a ToS change" that's a true statement, despite me being anti-slavery.

Copyright could be many things. But that doesn't change what copyright is right now. And even if they are offensive, they don't "void logic".

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

#417

Post by yakubin »

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?

> But why would the average developer want to?

As for myself, I don’t like GitHub UI, which is slow, has low information density, and is generally lollipop-like; and its social media aspect, which often turns the bug tracker into a Twitter equivalent with viral bugs, emojis to cheer and boo people.

So I set up a cgit instance for myself. Patches can be sent over mail as attachments generated with git format-patch (attaching files to mails isn’t hard). Issues can similarly be sent over mail and described in a BUGS file.

That’s sufficient for my single person projects. Probably also for n-person projects for small values of n (let’s say 7). Past that I’d set up a Gerrit instance, which IMO has the best UX of all code review tools available, free or not; and a Redmine for ticket tracking.

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

#418

Post by hyperdimension »

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…

> The only thing that AI introduces is automation.

Hmm...Automated Inference? Automatic Infringement? Maybe we can make a nice backronym out of this.

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

#419

Post by TeMPOraL »

naasking wrote: post #367
TeMPOraL wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sure, ROT13 encoding is a derivative work because the entire original work is still there, encoded. Ditto for FFT. Large language models are not that. Sometimes parts of the original works are still encoded, which we've seen when some code is reproduced verbatim, and I'm sure that happens to people as well, ie. they see some algorithm and down the road have to write something similar and end up reproducing the exact…

> Ditto for FFT. Large language models are not that.

They're not, but the "giant table of token frequencies and associative keywords" reminded me of doing FFT on images, and I wanted to communicate the idea that transformations like this can actually retain the original information, and reproduce it back through inverse transform.

> by which I mean, LLMs are lossy encodings, not lossless encodings

Exactly. And while I doubt most training data is recoverable, "lossy encoding" is still a spectrum. As you move away from lossless, it's not obvious when, or if at all, the result is clear from copyright of original inputs' author. Compare e.g. with JPEG, which employs a less sophisticated lossy encoding - no matter how hard you compress a source image, the result would still likely retain the copyright of the source image author, as provenance matters.

(IANAL, though.)

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

#420

Post by int_19h »

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…

Automated code scanning working on similar principles is already in use in many large tech companies, but in reverse. Basically, to prevent shipping improperly licensed code, missing attribution notices etc.
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