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Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

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Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#71

Post by archontes »

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…

You might not get your ass kicked. Copyright doesn't protect function, to the point where the court will assess the degree to which the style of the code can be separated from the function. In the even that they aren't separable, the code is not copyrightable.

https://www.wardandsmith.com/articles/supreme-court-announce...

https://easlerlaw.com/software-computer-code-copyrighted#:~:...

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#72

Post by axus »

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.

I thought there was a "clean room", where the people reading it and the people writing it were different; and they made a written specification instead of a Vulcan mind meld.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#73

Post by ars »

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…

> I assume that I would get my ass kicked legally speaking.

Maybe, maybe not. It's not as simple as you made it out to be. If you write a book with lots of stuff and you got inspiration from other books, and even put in phrases wholesale, but modified to use your own character names instead, I'm not convinced you would lose.

The court would look at the work as a whole, not single pieces of it.

They would also check if you are just copying things verbatim, or if you memorize a pattern and emit the same pattern - for example look at lawsuits about copying music, where they'll claim this part of the music is the same as that part.

It's really not as cut and dry as you make it out to be.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#74

Post by archontes »

Analemma_ wrote: post #57
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…

> How is it any different when a machine does the same thing? Because intent matters in the law. If you intended to reproduce copyrighted code verbatim but tried to hide your activity with a few tweaks, that's a very different thing from using a tool which occasionally reproduces copyrighted code by accident but clearly was not designed for that purpose, and much more often than not outputs transformative works.

Not in copyright. The work speaks for itself, and the function of code is not a copyrightable aspect.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#75

Post by dmix »

beeboobaa3 wrote: post #56
singleshot_ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy who owns the machine is really rich, while you are more or less (all due respect of course) not worth suing. That’s why I think the opposite of what you claim is true: if you were to do this, absolutely nothing would happen. When they do it, they will get sued over and over until the law changes and they can’t be sued, or they enter some mutually-beneficial relationship with the parties who keep suing.

> if you were to do this, absolutely nothing would happen Read up on the DMCA and the impact it has on e.g. nintendo emulators and the developers thereof

Those emulators are very popular though to the point of potentially impacting another business's bottom line. Where an individual putting it out a small block of code isn't exactly going to attract expensive lawyers.

I'm skeptical Github Copilot reproducing a couple functions potentially used by some random Github project is going to be a threat to another party's livelihood.

When AI gets good enough to make full duplicates of apps I'd be more concerned about the source. Thousands of smaller pieces drawn from a million sources and being combined in novel ways is less worrying though.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#76

Post by klyrs »

courseofaction wrote: post #51
satvikpendem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Awesome. Serves as a counter-example - would HN consider literacy to be damaging to the mind, or are we similarly mistaken by thinking that LLMs necessarily degrade the abilities of their users? Pre-writing 'texts' (such as the Iliad) were memorized by poets, which is reflected in their forms which made more use of memory-friendly forms like rhyming, consistent meter, and close repetition. Writing allowed greater com…

Does it serve as a counterexample? Or did the predicted loss of memory function come to pass?

Worth noting that people were smoking plain old opium back in those times; I'd be reluctant to apply their reasoning to fentanyl.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#77

Post by wongarsu »

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 source code of Windows XP is widely available. Same with a ~2 year old version of Bing, Bing Maps, Cortana etc. Yet that doesn't seem to have had major negative effects on those products. If anything having the Windows source code available seems to be a net boon for Windows development. Sometimes looking at the source is just better if the documentation is unclear.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#78

Post by 8organicbits »

falcolas wrote: post #30
satvikpendem wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that is true, but I don't think the people who use style transfer are actually passing it off as the original, they just like it for the aesthetic value of their own images. In other words, no one using the Van Gogh LoRA is actually trying to forge the Starry Night.

Given the value of an "authentic" painting of the Starry Night (or more realistically the value of something forged in, say, Samwise Didier's style) I can't agree with "no one". I have to imagine that it's likely quite popular to sell AI generated art that mimics or copies existing works.

I guess there's always a greater fool, but forging an oil painting using AI digital images seems pretty far fetched.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#79

Post by Spivak »

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…

No, because judges aren't robots applying the law like code. Intent matters. If you do this it will be painfully obvious that your intent is to duplicate a large body copywritten code.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#80

Post by ADeerAppeared »

dmix wrote: post #62
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…

> If you analogy was you were a human who memorized every variation of a problem (and every other known problem)

This is mere assumption. AI is supposed to work like that, but that's a goal, and not the result of current implementations. Research shows that they do memorize solutions as well, and quite regularly so. (This is an unavoidable flaw in current LLMs; They must be capable of memorizing input verbatim in order to learn specific facts.)

> and there was a tiny perctange of a chance where you reproduced that exact varation of one you memorized

This is copyright infringement. Actionable copyright infringement. The big music publishers go after this kind of accidental partial reproduction.

> but then added an after the fact filter so you don't directly reproduce it...

"Legally distinct" is a gimmick that only works where the copyright is on specific identifiable parts of a work.

Changing a variable name does not make a code snippet "legally distinct", it's still copyright infringement.

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