Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 505 posts

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#101

Post by ADeerAppeared »

archontes wrote: post #84
purpleblue wrote: post #26

Can you insist or put instructions that AIs do not train on your code? If they train on your code but don't produce the exact same output, is there any protection you can have from that?

When are people going to get that this isn't a right folks have? If your code is readable, the public can learn from it. Copyright doesn't extend to function.

People aren't going to get it, because you don't get them.

People have the right to learn non-copyrightable elements from your code.

The claim is that AI learns copyrightable elements.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#102

Post by tomxor »

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#:~:...

US copyright does protect for "substantial similarity" [0]. And at the other end of the spectrum, this has been abused in absurd ways to argue that substantially different code has infringed.

In Zenimax vs Oculus they basically argued that a bunch of really abstract yet entirely generic parts of the code were shared, we are talking some nested for loops, certain combinations of if statements, and due to a lack of a qualitative understanding of code, syntax, common patterns, and what might actually qualify for substantively novel code in the courtroom, this was accepted as infringing. [1]

Point is, the legal system is highly selective when it comes to corporate interests.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/02/doom-co-creator-defen...

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#103

Post by nadermx »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #97
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,…

What about the copyrights purpose of furthering the arts and sciences?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#105

Post by archontes »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #101
archontes wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When are people going to get that this isn't a right folks have? If your code is readable, the public can learn from it. Copyright doesn't extend to function.

People aren't going to get it, because you don't get them. People have the right to learn non-copyrightable elements from your code. The claim is that AI learns copyrightable elements .

The comment chain you are replying to includes a request to not train an AI on one's code.

I agree it's certainly possible for AI to produce infringing output.

Nevertheless, people don't have the right to enforce a limitation on training.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#106

Post by lcouturi »

BadHumans wrote: post #92
dmix wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yuzu, the emulator that was sued by Nintendo, was emulating the Nintendo Switch, which is a product Nintendo does sell.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#107

Post by belorn »

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…

We are currently seeing the music industry reacting to AI learning a bunch of music patterns and chord progressions and outputting works that sounds very similar to existing music and artists. They are not liking it.

To just see how much they disliked it, youtube copyright strikes is basically a trained AI to detect music patterns to identify sound with slight variations or copyrighted songs and take videos down. Generating slight variations was one of the early method that videos used to bypass the take down system.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#108

Post by KnightHawk3 »

polishTar wrote: post #64
immibis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a large gap between public domain and GPL. For starters if Copilot is emitting GPL code for closed source projects... that's copyright infringement.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#109

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

A slight aside, but this is the subtitle:

> A few devs versus the powerful forces of Redmond – who did you think was going to win?

I hate that kind of obnoxious "journalism". Sometimes the little guy is actually wrong. To clarify, I'm not commenting on the specifics of this case, I just hate how fake our online discourse has been by appealing to "big guy evil" before even bringing up the specifics of the case.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#110

Post by talldayo »

tomxor wrote: post #102
archontes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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#:~:...

US copyright does protect for "substantial similarity" [0]. And at the other end of the spectrum, this has been abused in absurd ways to argue that substantially different code has infringed. In Zenimax vs Oculus they basically argued that a bunch of really abstract yet entirely generic parts of the code were shared, we are talking some nested for loops, certain combinations of if statements, and due to a lack of a q…

> Point is, the legal system is highly selective when it comes to corporate interests.

I don't even think it's that. In recent cases like Oracle v. Google and Corellium v. Apple, Fair Use prevailed with all sorts of conflicting corporate interests at play. The Zenimax v. Oculus case very much revolved around NDAs that Carmack had signed and not the propagation of trade secrets. Where IP is strictly the only thing being concerned, the literal interpretation of Fair Use does still seem to exist.

Or for a more plain example, Authors Guild. v. Google where Google defended their indexing of thousands of copywritten books as Fair Use.

Post reply on HN