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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

#91

Post by vkou »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #65
vkou wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Okay? What will that prove? That you can be an ass?

Being an ass is generally not illegal. Particular behaviours might be, but no legal or social system intends to censure you for every possible one, and most people who are experts in law or ethics don't believe that they should.

If you identify particular problems with the particular paparazzi laws in your country, that's an interesting conversation, and maybe, if framed well, an interesting data point for this discussion, but is not in itself the 'last word' on it. Just because you can torture an analogy, doesn't mean the analogy has a lot of power.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#92

Post by BadHumans »

dmix wrote: post #75
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dup…

There is no impact to a company's bottom line when you are emulating a product they do not sell.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#93

Post by stefan_ »

singleshot_ wrote: post #58
pton_xd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then you sue the person who uploaded it to GitHub. > You don't get to go after GitHub because you have no contractual relationship with them What makes you say that? If someone eg uploads my copyrighted work to YouTube, I file a DMCA notice with YouTube to stop distributing my work. If YT ignores the notice then I can pursue them with a lawsuit. How is this situation different?

DMCA explicitly gives you a cause of action against the party who does not properly comply with your request. GP asserts that you lack a cause of action against GitHub before they fail to comply with DMCA but I’m not certain I agree.

DMCA is a narrow protection for operators of public websites like GitHub. I don't see what it has to do with GitHub taking the data submitted to it with dubious sourcing and developing their CoPilot whatever based on it. That has nothing to do with the privileges in DMCA.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#94

Post by daedrdev »

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

The article mentions that GitHub copilot has been trained to avoid directly copying specific cases it knows, and that although you can get it to spit out copyright code by prefixing the copyrighted code as a starting point, in normal us cases its quite rare.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#95

Post by dmix »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #80
dmix wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ord…

Meh I still see that as a big oversimplification. Context matters. Even if the copyright courts often ignore that for wealthy entities. Someone reproducing a song using AI and publishing it as their own copyright infringement, a person specifically querying an AI engine, that sucked up billions of lines of information and generates what you ask it do with a sma probability it will reproduce a small subset of a larger commercial project and sends it to someone in a chatbox is not exactly the same IMO.

This is Github Copilot after all. I use it daily and it autocompletes lines of code or generates functions you can find on stackoverflow. It's not letting giving you the source code to Twitter in full and letting you put it on the internet as a business under another name.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#96

Post by ADeerAppeared »

archontes wrote: post #71
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#:~:...

The simple version is that code is copyrightable as an expression. And the underlaying algorithm is patentable.

The legal term you're looking for here is the "Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison" test; What remains if you subtract all the non-copyrightable elements from a given piece of code.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#97

Post by JoshTriplett »

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 have a much smaller lobbying budget than the AI industry, and you didn't flagrantly rush to copy billions of copyrighted works as quickly as possible and then push a narrative acting like that's the immutable status quo that must continue to be permitted lest the now-massive industry built atop copyright violation be destroyed.

Violate one or two copyrights, get sued or DMCAed out of existence. Violate billions, on the other hand, and you magically become immune to the rules everyone else has to follow.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#98

Post by sweeter »

vkou wrote: post #40
CuriouslyC wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure wish I could non-consent to people observing me in the world, I'd like to move through society invisibly and only show myself when it benefitted me. Unfortunately, the only answer is to stay inside if I don't want people to see me.

> I sure wish I could non-consent to people observing me in the world, You aren't allowed to use photos featuring a non-consenting person to, for instance promote a product. You are allowed to use photos including a non-consenting person. There's a lot of complicated law, differing between different jurisdictions to cover this question, and to balance the needs of the public with commercial desires. It's not as simpl…

> consent Careful... A lot of people online have selective understanding when it comes to this concept. It's selfishness and self-centredness taken to it's extreme, and not seeing other people as humans, but as tools for their consumption to be used and tossed aside for pleasure or for profit. It's one of the most disgusting things I've layed eyes on.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#99

Post by ADeerAppeared »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #5
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 suspect that this is exactly what will happen; not just with code, but also prose and artwork. Someone is likely to design an LLM that is specifically trained to do exactly that. Lots of money to be made...

> Someone is likely to design an LLM that is specifically trained to do exactly that.

Perplexity AI.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#100

Post by abigail95 »

squarefoot wrote: post #82
ADeerAppeared wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pract…

> 1. Isn't that akin to destruction of evidence?

Not in any way I'm aware of - and would be required if they were served a DMCA notification/Cease and Desist against a specific prompt.

The people that think Copilot is infringng their copyright would be happy with that I would think? Unless they take a much stricter definition of fair use than current courts do.

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