GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by PeterisP » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:28 AM UTC

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…

Copyright grants an author of a copyrightable work the exclusive right to make more copies of it. However, if people independently come up with the same exact thing, copying has not occurred and that exclusive right was not violated (and then the court battle effectively becomes one about proving whether copying did in fact occur).

In copyright law there is no such concept as "code snippets that are long enough to qualify for copyright protection" or "canonical owners". Quite explicitly, copyright does not give a monopoly over an idea, but merely protects against the unlawful reproduction of an original work.

If you take some snippet from a work in which you own copyright and find that in the world multiple people have somehow managed to write the exact snippet, but they did it independently without copying it from you, then copyright law effectively states the following things:

1) They definitely aren't violating your copyright, and you have no claim on them whatsoever - independent creation is a complete defense to copyright infringement;

2) Perhaps this snippet might be judged uncopyrightable, as the existence of multiple independent recreations is some evidence that it lacks originality and thus would not qualify for copyright protection at all.

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

#422

Post by belorn » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:30 AM UTC

comex wrote: post #384

belorn wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infr…

When copilot was release there were people who got it to print out account and passwords that had been put into the training data. Microsoft should had at minium sanitized the training data so it would not include such information. There is also likely personal information stored in some of those open repositories.

Copyright infringement doesn't have a fixed size. It depend on context and what kind of information is copied. It demonstrate that copilot has not actually learned how to code (as many people like to claim), but is simply a algorithm for copying code. If it had learned to code like a human it wouldn't divulge secrets.

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

#423

Post by int_19h » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:31 AM UTC

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…

It very much depends on the exact ruling. Judges usually don't like to make rulings broader than they need to be, so it may well be something decided on a technicality. Or the ruling may rely on some particular property of the Copilot model that does not apply to ChatGPT.

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

#424

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:32 AM UTC

shepherdjerred wrote: post #409

jrm4 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

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

What the heck are you talking about?

The only work you'd have to do "for every single repository" is the single git command.

Getting a server, managing access and discoverability, setting it up for browser access, setting up backups, those are things you would do once.

If that's a waste of four hours, valid argument, but it's not a waste of four hundred hours. You're grossly exaggerating the cost.

Oh and you didn't mention keeping the server updated but that's probably ten minutes of effort once a month.

> Doing this once would be a fun learning experience. Doing it more than once is a useless chore.

Then there's no problem.

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

#425

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:32 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #405

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…

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.

> What do you mean by "glue them together"?

Stitch them side by side. Yes, this is not how those DNNs work, but the example was more about highlighting that "a giant table of token frequencies" by itself is probably reversible back to original data, or at least something resembling it.

> Stable Diffusion has less than two bytes per source image, on average.

I'm not convinced by this trivia point, though. Stable Diffusion is, effectively, a lossy compression of the training data. Nothing says lossy compression algorithms can't exploit some higher-level conceptual structures in the inputs[0], and applying lossy compression to some work doesn't automatically erase the copyrights of the original input's author.

--

[0] - SD isn't compressing arbitrary byte sequences, it's compressing images - which is a small subset of all possible byte sequences as large as the largest image used in training. "Less than two bytes per source image, on average" doesn't sound to me like something implausible for a lossy compressor that is focused on such small subset of possible inputs, and gets to exploit high-level patterns in such data.

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

#426

Post by PeterisP » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:35 AM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #26

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…

> Copyright is not something that can be signed over by a terms-of-use change of a hosting provider, I mean, it's obvious that uploading code requires you license the hosting provider a license to host it (which is not singing over copyright); although feel free to argue that the license doesn't or shouldn't extend to CoPilot usage.

The legal argument made in this court case is that there is a substantial difference as redistributing the source as-is (keeping all the attached copyright, attribution and license notifications) is explicitly permitted by every open source license; but in the CoPilot usage the attribution gets removed, which is something which even the repository owner (assuming they're not the only author/copyright holder) does not have the right to do themselves, much less grant permission to others.

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

#427

Post by int_19h » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:36 AM UTC

feoren wrote: post #269

toyg wrote: post #197

Earlier 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…

That's certainly not the conventional definition of "natural right", nor was it historically. Interestingly, Jefferson, when arguing against patents, made a point that regular property ownership is not a natural right:

"It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."

(https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s25...)

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

#428

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:37 AM UTC

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #399

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.

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.

That's not a fair comparison. The argument is more like a version of dropbox that's only used by programmers and owned by a company programmers should hate. And the rsync is capable of doing full multi-directional sync. In that scenario the hypothetical dropbox loses a ton of value.

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

#429

Post by int_19h » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:43 AM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #237

throwaway4aday wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an AI can generate an infinite number of stories that take place in the LotR world and do it well and faithfully in the style of JRR Tolkien then I would happily read it. You can only read the trilogy and The Hobbit so many times.

You'd happily read it, but that's an answer to a different question. You've already read LotR. An AI generated novel in a similar style doesn't take money from Tolkien's estate. Some people will want to read the AI generated knockoff. That number of people will usually be much smaller than the number of people who want to read the original and many of those people interested in the AI generated knockoff will also rea…

The proportion really depends on 1) the quality of what the AI generates, and 2) expectations imposed by the society - in particular, how consumption of AI-generated stuff is perceived as a matter signaling of one's social class. Both are going to evolve rapidly, so it's really hard to tell where we're going to be in 10 years.

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

#430

Post by int_19h » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:44 AM UTC

rockemsockem wrote: post #308

ascagnel_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When it comes to open source code I suspect it will be found to be similar, if the code is freely visible on the web by a human without an active agreement to view it, then it will be possible to "scrape" it. I don't think the license the code is under will apply if that is the case. I don't see the scraping case applying here -- the idea that all human-readable code accessible on the public internet can be ingeste…

I see lots of folks equate "trained on" to "available verbatim" and that simply isn't the case for the vast majority of training data. It becomes hard to have a productive discussion when there is such focus on the examples that are regurgitated verbatim (often by people with explicit knowledge of the expected output, so they would *know* that they are going to infringe if they republished it) to the exclusion of tal…

The reason why people focus on snippets regurgitated verbatim is because even one such snippet, if sufficiently long and non-trivial, could be sufficient to claim the model itself as a derived work.