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

#431

Post by PeterisP » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:46 AM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #89

visarga wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're facing a copyright extinction event. The whole concept is out of touch with the new reality - when you can generate 100 variations for your text, code or image with the click of a button, what does it even mean to hold copyright over the original? "In the style of" killed copyright in 2022.

How many people want to read AI generated text in the style of Lord of the Rings vs how many people want to read Lord of the Rings?

With sufficient quality of the model I can certainly imagine people preferring to read AI generated text in the style of Lord of the Rings instead of the original, as the AI generation can adjust the content and style towards the interests of the particular reader, customizing it to deliver what they want.

For example, one obvious observation from looking at fan fiction creations is that 'shipping' is popular, that certain people would strongly prefer certain characters to have romantic relations - and AI generated Lord of the Rings lookalike could have the story with the particular relationships that particular reader would prefer, based on an AI analysis of their earlier reactions to other books; this is not something that we have working today (as far as I know) but we're not that far from it becoming real.

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

#432

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:52 AM UTC

aliqot wrote: post #207

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub built goodwill over the years. There were many controversies, but there were also many die-hard fans. That didn't evaporate overnight. Microsoft bought GitHub (and minted 3 billionaires in the process) specifically to acquire that goodwill and monetize it.

> acquire that goodwill and monetize it Embrace Extend Extinguish

Uh, what's the extend that has happened since microsoft bought github?

Do you mean copilot? I would not classify that as extending anything. It's just a thing they made.

"Monetizing goodwill" is not an extend.

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

#433

Post by yladiz » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 1:59 AM UTC

drstewart wrote: post #358

yladiz wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies aren’t people (even if they are legally defined as such) so you can’t treat the way you fine them equally.

Stating something isn't proving it (even if you learned it as such), so you can't just state something as fact without proving it.

What?

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

#434

Post by mpoteat » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 2:03 AM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #421

mpoteat wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qu…

You don't need to prove anything in court to send someone a cease and desist. It's often cheaper to settle.

There does exist the concept of 'originality' in copyright law, which I was erroneously conflating with length.

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

#435

Post by cyanydeez » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 2:03 AM UTC

jasode wrote: post #20

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…

>lines here that should not have been crossed without the authors explicit permission, regardless of the utility of the tool they built. Fyi... Google Books (scanned and OCR'd books) eventually won against the authors filing lawsuits of copyright infringement. So there is some precedent that courts do look at the "utility" or "sufficiently transformative" aspect when weighing copyright infringement. https://www.googl…

GitHub is actively driving a product as opposed to duplicating and those products may go on to generate income

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

#436

Post by yladiz » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 2:08 AM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #315

yladiz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m skeptical of this interpretation since it seems to imply that you could upload copyrighted code and now GitHub has a license to do whatever they want with the code, which is obviously not true. An example would be someone uploading Microsoft Windows source code illegally, and GitHub can’t just use it because it was uploaded to their service. I would argue that this then extends to CoPilot, in that just because th…

The license is quite limited, but does include "improving the service over time" which might be their key to CoPilot being okayed by their legal team, at least originally: > 4. License Grant to Us We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as neces…

If that is in fact how CoPilot got the green light from their legal team and what the case will eventually hinge upon, I really wonder if the argument that CoPilot is part of the "service" will hold up. I can imagine a judge or jury not being convinced here because the majority of the paragraph is clearly about the general use of the service (parsing it into a search index so you can search in your repo; making backups so that service isn't disrupted in the case of some server failure; share it with others so that others can access the content you uploaded). In other words, if this is what they argue is the reason CoPilot is okay, I can imagine plaintiff's lawyers able to successfully argue against it on the basis that CoPilot isn't really part of the normal service like e.g. the repos are and the argument that it could fall into the "otherwise analyze" statement is flimsy as it's not clear what analyze is defined as and it's arguable that adding it to an AI training model is not the same as or similar to indexing for search.

I suspect that the main argument will hinge not on the permission though, but rather if the use of code that is copyrighted in an AI model is transformative enough to fall under fair use. Obviously it's to be decided but I would imagine that because it wasn't a human transforming the code and/or hand selecting the code to put into the AI model, that it won't be considered transformative and therefore the use of the code doesn't fall under fair use.

I'm very curious how this case will play out.

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

#437

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 2:14 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #425

Dylan16807 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Diffu…

> 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

That depends entirely on how many frequencies you're keeping.

> high-level patterns in such data

High level patterns across thousands of images are generally not copyrightable.

I might even describe the purpose of stable diffusion as extracting just the patterns and zero specifics.

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

#438

Post by dspillett » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 2:29 AM UTC

bastardoperator wrote: post #359

dspillett wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't expect privacy when you're out in public This isn't about privacy, it is about licensing (and possibly copyright). mhitza mentioned privacy as another policy, that you agree to upon sign-up like the terms of service, one for which updates are regularly announced. > I'm also curious how you're certain your project was used? Hasn't it been suggested that all public repositories at least could have been used…

> This isn't about privacy, it is about licensing (and possibly copyright). mhitza mentioned privacy as another policy, that you agree to upon sign-up like the terms of service, one for which updates are regularly announced. The terms of service say you grant GitHub an implicit license to display your code. They also say: "We may modify this agreement, but we will give you 30 days' notice of material changes." Are yo…

> > "We may modify this agreement, but we will give you 30 days' notice of material changes."

> Are you claiming that hasn't happened?

Your post that I replied to explicitly stated that it hasn't.

Is that the case or was that one if the assumptions you don't like to make?

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

#439

Post by jrm4 » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 3:01 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.

Nah. I'll still charge that it's laziness if this is your job. I get that this kind of practice is common, but I still find it lazy.

I compare it to using gmail as your professional email. It's a bad idea; even if it never bites you, because the cost is so little and the harm is so great if it ever screws up.

Except I can see why average joe user might not think about it, and I don't think developers have that excuse. You should know and understand that tech is risky enough. Same reason there was no excuse for the kik zero padding debacle. The fact that a LOT of people did a lazy dumb thing doesn't make it not dumb or lazy.

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

#440

Post by jrm4 » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 3:03 AM UTC

spandrew wrote: post #362

jrm4 wrote: 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'd like to know more about how MSFT qualifies for the moniker "they're the greatest enemy of free and open source software". From my understanding they've invested in many open web resources previously (like jQuery).

I did say "at one time," not necessarily now.

But if you've been watching, literally the only reason they don't hate it now is because they lost the open source v. proprietary battle.