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Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

theregister.com

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Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#61

Post by beeboobaa3 »

pennomi wrote: post #38
bityard wrote: post #3

This is pretty interesting, and I have conflicted feelings about the (seemingly obvious) outcome of this trial. I wonder, if MS and OpenAI win, does that mean it will be legal for anyone to take the leaked source code for a proprietary product, train an LLM on it, and then ask the LLM to emit a version of it that is different enough to avoid copyright infringement? That would be quite the double-edged sword for propr…

Or even those AI-powered decompilers people are working on… you could clone virtually any software with that. Surely there will be limitations.

The limitation is the amount of money & political power the owner of the software you're cloning has.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#62

Post by dmix »

munificent wrote: post #45

> Indeed, last year GitHub was said to have tuned its programming assistant to generate slight variations of ingested training code to prevent its output from being accused of being an exact copy of licensed software. If I, a human, were to: 1. Carefully read and memorize some copyrighted code. 2. Produce new code that is textually identical to that. But in the process of typing it up, I randomly mechanically tweak a…

That's a significant over simplification of how it works though to the point of almost not being a useful analogy.

If your analogy was you were a human who memorized every variation of a problem (and every other known problem) and there was a tiny perctange of a chance where you reproduced that exact varation of one you memorized, but then added an after the fact filter so you don't directly reproduce it...

It's more like musicians who basically copy a bunch of music patterns or chord progressions before then notice their final output sounds too similar to another song (which happens often IRL) then changes it to be more original before releasing it to the public.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#63

Post by klyrs »

satvikpendem wrote: post #19
klyrs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to think for oneself will diminish rapidly in an environment that rewards one for not doing so. Smart people still exist. They just aren't online.

From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…

Precisely the quote I was thinking of, thank you.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#64

Post by polishTar »

immibis wrote: post #39
polishTar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast inverse square root is now part of the public domain. Also, even if this weren’t the case you can’t sue for damages to other people (they’d need to bring their own suit)

Has it really already been 70 years since John Carmack died?

Ah, you're right. I was wrong to say "public domain".

It would be more correct to say Quake III Arena was released to the public as free software under the GPLv2 license.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#65

Post by CuriouslyC »

vkou wrote: post #52
CuriouslyC wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that the people who are being constantly victimized by paparazzi would like to know those rules that you just quoted, and have them be enforced.

If you had done a little research into this question, you'd realize that 1A use cases ('journalism') are treated by law quite differently than use of likeness for commercial intent. This is my whole point. There isn't a single, one-size-fits-all rule that a five year old can comprehend that describes any particular country's legal framework around the many, many different dimensions of tension between public and priv…

I'll happily take your picture against your will and put it on the internet with the tag "vkou mad at photographer, news at 11"

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#66

Post by wongarsu »

whimsicalism wrote: post #28
daedrdev wrote: post #4

> The anonymous programmers have repeatedly insisted Copilot could, and would, generate code identical to what they had written themselves, which is a key pillar of their lawsuit since there is an identicality requirement for their DMCA claim. However, Judge Tigar earlier ruled the plaintiffs hadn't actually demonstrated instances of this happening, which prompted a dismissal of the claim with a chance to amend it. I…

Huh. There have definitely been well publicized examples of this happening, like the quake inverse square root

It reads like the judge required them to show it happened to their code, not to any code in general. That's a much higher bar. There are thousands of instances of fast inverse square root in the training data but only one copy of your random github repositories. Getting to model to reproduce your code verbatim might be possible for all we know, but it isn't trivial.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#67

Post by whimsicalism »

wongarsu wrote: post #66
whimsicalism wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. There have definitely been well publicized examples of this happening, like the quake inverse square root

It reads like the judge required them to show it happened to their code, not to any code in general. That's a much higher bar. There are thousands of instances of fast inverse square root in the training data but only one copy of your random github repositories. Getting to model to reproduce your code verbatim might be possible for all we know, but it isn't trivial.

of course for standing. but it seems like with the right plaintiffs this could have gone forward

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#68

Post by ADeerAppeared »

daedrdev wrote: post #4

> The anonymous programmers have repeatedly insisted Copilot could, and would, generate code identical to what they had written themselves, which is a key pillar of their lawsuit since there is an identicality requirement for their DMCA claim. However, Judge Tigar earlier ruled the plaintiffs hadn't actually demonstrated instances of this happening, which prompted a dismissal of the claim with a chance to amend it. I…

Where it gets ethnically dubious is that:

1. The copilot team rushed to slap a copyright filter on top to keep these verbatim examples from showing up, and now claims they never happen.

2. LLMs are prone to paraphrasing. Just because you filter out verbatim copies doesn't mean there isn't still copyright infringement/plagiarism/whatever you want to call it. The copyright filter is only a legal protection, not a practical protection against the issue of copyright infringement.

Everyone who knows how these systems work understand this. The copilot FAQ to this day claims that you should run copyright scanning tools on your codebase because your developers might "copy code from an online source or library".

Github has it's own research from 2021 showing that these tools do indeed copy their training data occasionally: https://github.blog/2021-06-30-github-copilot-research-recit...

They clearly know the problem is real. Their own research agreed, their FAQs and legal documents are carefully phrased to avoid admitting it. But rather than owning up to the problem, it's "Ner ner ner ner ner, you can't prove it to a boomer judge".

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#69

Post by marcosdumay »

Legend2440 wrote: post #55
bityard wrote: post #3

This is pretty interesting, and I have conflicted feelings about the (seemingly obvious) outcome of this trial. I wonder, if MS and OpenAI win, does that mean it will be legal for anyone to take the leaked source code for a proprietary product, train an LLM on it, and then ask the LLM to emit a version of it that is different enough to avoid copyright infringement? That would be quite the double-edged sword for propr…

I mean you can legally do this by hand right now. That's how they cloned the IBM bios back in the day. IBM sued and lost.

No, that's not.

They cloned the bios by observing how it behaved and writing code that behaved the same way. Nobody even looked at the bios code.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#70

Post by jeroenhd »

bityard wrote: post #3

This is pretty interesting, and I have conflicted feelings about the (seemingly obvious) outcome of this trial. I wonder, if MS and OpenAI win, does that mean it will be legal for anyone to take the leaked source code for a proprietary product, train an LLM on it, and then ask the LLM to emit a version of it that is different enough to avoid copyright infringement? That would be quite the double-edged sword for propr…

A Wine fork built using an LLM trained on leaked Windows code might be pretty useful.
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