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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

#451

Post by anothernewdude »

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.

It doesn't actually. You can upload anything to github. The website doesn't stop you at all, even if you don't have the ability to grant anything to Github at all.

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

#452

Post by des1nderlase »

mattstir wrote: post #338
rockemsockem wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those tools will be similarly illegal if the court strikes down Copilot. Also it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to train things like Copilot and GPT-3, so can we really rely on innovation happening in open source without any way to recoup costs? I get that you might not like OpenAI/Copilot for creating these tools in the way that they did, but surely you have to see that this decision goes WAY beyond what…

You seem to completely miss the point about using data which was freely given. I would say that most of us like the idea of Copilot what OpenAI is accomplishing. The main issue stems from violating licenses which require attribution etc. As the article noted, one can get around attribution by getting express permission from the copyright holder (or by not using their work at all). The fact of the matter is that some…

So we are going to end up with a less powerful version of Copilot, which would benefit who? Copilot competitors?

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

#453

Post by teo_zero »

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…

> 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 same thing.

And if such algorithm is copyrighted, that would be infringing! It doesn't matter if you copy on purpose or by chance.

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

#454

Post by teo_zero »

jacquesm wrote: post #7
amelius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just hope it doesn't end in Microsoft paying some (from their perspective) small fine that is just the cost of doing business.

The range of possible outcomes is enormous, I'll just wait by the sidelines but cherish the thought that moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision. They can't be trusted, this has been proven over and over again and yet people keep falling for it. It's the fox guarding the chickens. I wrote about my misgivings at the time: https://jacquesmattheij.com/what-is-wrong-with-microsoft-buy...

> moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision

But what prevents Microsoft from harvesting open-source code from any hosting site? What have you gained?

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

#455

Post by robertlagrant »

fluoridation wrote: post #372
jrm4 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can, I think. The EEE concept is useful enough to go slightly outside its original intended use.

So the idea here is 1. Acquire company for tens of billions. 2. Intentionally ruin own investment. 3. ??? 4. PROFIT! ?

Well.

1. Acquire company for $7.5bn in stock, so fortunes are joined rather than cash paid

2. Still charge money for it

3. Create an AI product out of the open source bit of it, justifying the price tag, as well as build links to Microsoft dev tools to entice OSS back into the Microsoft ecosystem

4. Maybe profit, but almost certainly not loss

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

#456

Post by robertlagrant »

EamonnMR wrote: post #264
throwaway4aday wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I've used Copilot it never seems to copy whole sections of code. Can you provide examples of this? From what I've seen it is producing fairly generic boilerplate that has been modified based on the rest of the code in my repo so that it works with the other functions and even incorporates other pieces of my code in the same style that I'm using. The boilerplate aspect makes sense because this would be the mo…

Behold: https://twitter.com/StefanKarpinski/status/14109710611816816... Probably helps that this is from a codebase that's been forked quite a bit.

Can I circumvent the new OGL revocation by training an AI on 100 copies of the D&D rulebook, and using its output?

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

#457

Post by sfifs »

baby wrote: post #445
kllrnohj wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The mafia used to steal dresses from New York garment factory delivery trucks and hawk them door to door in poorer neighbourhoods. The users (poorer households) definitely got value out of this by being able to obtain dresses they could not afford, but doesn't make a case for what the mafia was doing was right.

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

#458

Post by saint-loup »

Here is a dedicated website from the plaintiffs team. https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/

Interestingly, Matthew Butterick (of Practical Typography fame) is co-counsel on this. Programmer, lawyer and typesetting expert, damn. https://matthewbutterick.com/

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

#459

Post by turtleyacht »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #432
aliqot wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Microsoft Open Source

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

#460

Post by naasking »

teo_zero wrote: post #453
naasking wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 same thing. And if such algorithm is copyrighted, that would be infringing! It doesn't matter if you copy on purpose or by chance.

You can't copyright algorithms, you can only copyright specific expressions of code.
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