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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

#141

Post by bawolff »

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?

I would think it is pretty obviously not.

Is taking away a drunk driver's keys (before they get in the car) destruction of the evidence of their drunk driving?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#142

Post by warkdarrior »

archontes wrote: post #105
ADeerAppeared wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And to give a concrete example, in my view it should be allowed to use any source code to train a model such that the model learns that code is bad or insecure or slow or otherwise undesirable. In other words, it should be allowed to train on anything as long as the model does NOT produce that training data verbatim.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#144

Post by idle_zealot »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #115
nadermx wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Copyright has utterly failed to serve that purpose for a long time, and has been actively counterproductive. But if you want to argue that copyright is counterproductive, I completely agree. That's an argument for reducing or eliminating it across the board, fairly, for everyone; it's not an argument for giving a free pass to AI training while still enforcing it on everyone else .

Could these "free passes" for AI training serve as a legal wedge to increase the scope of fair use in other cases? Pro-business selective enforcement sucks, but so long as model weights are being released and the public is benefiting then stubbornly insisting that overzealous copyright laws be enforced seems self-defeating.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#146

Post by tpmoney »

yellowapple wrote: post #126
Spivak wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's painfully obvious that the intent of GitHub Copilot is to duplicate a large body of copyrighted code.

It doesn't appear to be painfully obvious. Both because they're not losing court cases yet, and there's a huge swath of non copyrighted code being produced by co-pilot every day. By contrast the plaintiffs apparently were unable to induce Copilot to duplicate any parts of their code.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#147

Post by bawolff »

singleshot_ wrote: post #137
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

I enjoy how you removed the “I think” qualifier which suggested that it’s very possible that you’re right. I’m quite well read on the DMCA but admit you probably know far more about how Nintendo wields it. Still, I suggest that it’s a lot more likely that GitHub is going to get sued than you or GP. Finally, I believe using the legal system to bully independent software developers is, in legal terms, super lame. We ar…

DMCA (at least the take down requests part) is not really suing someone and not really about making money. Its about getting certain works off the internet.

You are probably more likely to be on the wrong end of a dmca take down request as a poor person since you dont have the resources to fight it, and its not about recovering damages just censorship.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#148

Post by devmor »

satvikpendem wrote: post #117
devmor wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legality of using someone’s copyrighted work to train a model to reproduce it without their consent is still under debate - but the morality of the act at least, is not related to its legality - be it positively or negatively; and I personally consider it abhorrent.

Under what morals do you consider it "abhorrent?" I bet got a straight answer from those I've asked about this as the counter arguments seem too easy to make.

It's just pure exploitation. You're using the product of someone's work to create a machine that takes away their work.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#149

Post by danpalmer »

WesternWind wrote: post #143

Wait... So Microsoft doesn't use Microsoft Teams, it uses Slack?

GitHub uses Slack, and has done since long before the Microsoft acquisition. GitHub also does a ton of chat-ops, or at least used to, so their migration from Campfire to Slack was a big move for the company, I doubt they want to move again.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#150

Post by carom »

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.

The public is not learning from it. A person or corporation is creating a derivative work of it. Training a model is deriving a function from the training data. It is not "a human learning something by reading it".
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