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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

#441

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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.

Its not good will, its features and comfort. Github has the UI that almost every developer is used to, easy to use CI/CD, great issue and Pull request handling. And more importantly, everything is free. Even Ignoring the value and the features, Employers don't ask for your git link, they ask for your GitHub account. And since most projects are on GitHub having all of your projects there tooz makes it easier to see al…

Agreed. And I think the road to technology hell is paved with convenience and "free."

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

#442

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…

But the question realistically is, is it the developers responsibility because they are the ones creating the program.

It's not like copilot made you use the code, copilot didn't commit or release the app with the code.

Copilot didn't breach the copyright, you did. It's a tool. You used it. You released it.

Maybe there's a product which you can include to see what code of yours violates copyright in the future?

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

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The range of possible outcomes is enormous The most likely of which – if this lawsuit ends up winning – is that corporations will have new ways to sue everyone and that the world will be a worse place. Copyright expansion has never benefited the "little guy" such as Open Source authors, only large entities with deep pockets who can litigate to no end.

It's not so much copyright expansion as it is copyright re-affirmation. In this case it is especially open source authors whose rights are in play. Keep in mind that all of open source relies on copyright, without that everything is PD from Microsofts point of view, if they hosted it. Think of Copilot as a trial balloon, if they get away with it they will likely use that as the stepping stone to the next level and bi…

I don't see any rights being taken away from me. CoPilot doesn't copy my code, it just learns from it, just as you can. "Others can learn from this" is one reason I release stuff as open source in the first place.

People will quote that John Carmack Doom example where it copies the function verbatim, but as far as I can tell that's a rare thing, and it's a function that's been widely copied around without proper licensing; a human could also get it wrong by copying it from github.com/random-person/mit-project with the wrong license (and since then there's also been work to prevent this kind of thing).

Co-pilot isn't unique, or the first AI/ML project to use copyrighted works; all the GPT models use copyrighted works as their input. Some doubts have been raised over the legality of that too, but it's received nowhere near the amount of criticism that Co-Pilot has, certainly not on HN, and I've never seen anyone doubt the morality of it – only the legality.

If you were to go through my public open source code I'm sure you can find stuff that's very similar to some code from my previous employers or other open source projects. Not because I copy/pasted anything, but because my brain was trained on that dataset: you see or write something that works, you face a similar problem a few years later, you write a similar solution.

"Using existing works as input" is common throughout creative works. As Phil Anselmo once said: "with Pantera we took our five favourite bands and ripped 'em off to hell".

People are already getting sued because "that one melody sounds a bit similar to this other melody"; fair use is already widely ignored/disrespected. Much will depend on the exact details, but any win in this lawsuit has a very real chance of empowering that sort of nonsense.

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

#444
post #204

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Physical slavery was once the law of the land too. I like to think I would have been on the right side of history at that time, as well.

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

> and to compare physical slavery with copyright is ridiculous.

On the contrary, you cannot mathematically distinguish (c)opywrong laws as anything but a kind of slavery.

Define a person A as a slave to person B if person B has legal control over person A at all times.

Now imagine person A is hanging out with Person C. With (c)opywrong laws, Person B has legal control over a subset of person A's behavior in this scenario (they are forbidden from sharing certain files with Person C by Person B). Hence, Person A is a partial slave to Person B.

It is not metaphor, it is literally a subset of the same thing. Intellectual Slavery is just slavery from many masters.

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

#445
post #324

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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.

Why should Microsoft's ability to create a new revenue stream be more important than anyone else's ability to enforce their licensing terms?

You’re saying this like users of github copilot are out of the eq

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

#446
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not how the law works.

The law around copyrights is from a different era

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

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That requires the uploader to own copyright on that code. What if the uploader only has access to the code through the license?

Luckily by agreeing to the TOS you've indemnified Github against the consequences of that scenario.

I don’t think it works that way.

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

#448

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…

>"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.

Two bytes would only let you uniquely identify ~65k images though, which to me doesn't sound plausible for a lossy compressor.

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

#449
post #351
post #124

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[flagged]

If you want people to actually read your site, you might want to not set an unreadably small font size. In fact, you might not want to set a font size at all, since you are extremely unlikely to know more than the reader does about what font size works for them. Browsers have default font size settings for a reason.

> If you want people to actually read your site

The slowest day in the past 2 weeks got over 600 readers, with the peaks many times that.

> unreadably small font size

The font size is actually larger than the NYTimes used for 100 years (https://www.amazon.com/York-Times-Complete-Front-Pages/dp/07...). I'm pretty sure the smartest publishers in the world knew what they were doing.

So on both points, your data is wrong.

You are the exception, who prefers a larger font size. Nothing wrong with that. It's one button press: cmd&+. You can even set that as your default.

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

#450
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Second: Criticism of said corporate exploitation of community work is the actual entitled behaviour. Oh, it's also abusive." No. You are being abusive when you throw out insults to a commenter who argues something you disagree with - please don't try and obfuscate what you were doing, and check the HN guidelines before commenting further, as you are repeating the hostile and condescending tone and should know better…

Looking at this thread, I don't think you have much room to call someone else out for being condescending. I think it'd be useful for you to slow down and write a more considered position, taking time to address the valid concerns others have raised.

There are definitely valid concerns and counter arguments; they will be more powerful and persuasive when presented on their own merits rather than with the assumption and accusation the poster they are responding to is unethical, stupid or commenting in bad faith. I think I've been polite in response.

However, as I started the thread with a comment that I guess was more provocative (and perhaps more personally felt by others here) than I intended, I'll accept your criticism and bow out.

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