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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

#191

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

epolanski wrote: post #116
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #109

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.

I think you're misinterpreting the sentence. I think it merely implies MS has more resources to throw at the legal case.

I strongly disagree. I don't see how you can interpret that sentence, especially given the "who did you think was going to win?" part, and ignore the implication that Microsoft won solely because of their size and money.

There is actually zero evidence that the judge issued his ruling based on Microsoft's superior legal team, so why even put that sentence in there anyway?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#192

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ryandrake wrote: post #179
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> big guys gang up on little guys all the time And obnoxious individuals gum up enterprises. It's lazy to the point of dismissal to conclude based on bigness.

You can't predict right or wrong based on bigness, but you can very often predict who will win. EDIT: And by "win" I mean not who the judge will side with, but who will end up chugging along fine financially and who will end up broke.

> EDIT: And by "win" I mean not who the judge will side with, but who will end up chugging along fine financially and who will end up broke.

I can certainly agree with that sentence, but that is definitely not how the Register was referring to "win" (they clearly just meant the judicial outcome), so it's obnoxious to imply the legal ruling went Microsoft's way solely due to their greater resources.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#193

Post by jcranmer »

tpmoney wrote: post #184
jcranmer wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, go to far as to argue your example of Authors Guild v. Google is a good indication that most cases will probably go an AI platform's way. The more recent Warhol decision argues quite strongly in the opposite direction. It fronts market impact as the central factor in fair use analysis, explicitly saying that whether or not a use is transformative is in decent part dependent on the degree to which it replac…

I think that decision is much narrower than "market impact". It's specifically about substitution, and to that end, I don't see a good argument that Co-Pilot substitutes for any of the works it was trained on. No one is buying a license to co-pilot to replace buying a license to Photoshop, or GIMP, or Linux, or Tux Racer. Nor is Github selling co-pilot for that use. To the extent that a user of co-pilot could induce…

Of the various recent uses of generative AI, Copilot is probably the one most likely to be found fair use and image generation the least likely.

But in any case, Authors Guild is not the final word on the subject, and anyone trying to argue for (or against) fair use for generative AI who ignores Warhol is going to have a bad day in court. The way I see it, Authors Guild says that if you are thoughtful about how you design your product, and talk to your lawyers early and continuously about how to ensure your use is fair and will be seen as fair in the courts, you can indeed do a lot of copying and still be fair use.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#194

Post by [deleted] »

dmitrygr wrote: post #21
pledess wrote: post #20

I thought "the Copilot coding assistant was trained on open source software hosted on GitHub and as such would suggest snippets from those public projects to other programmers without care for licenses" was explicitly allowed by the GitHub Terms of Service: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... "If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a non…

Lots of my code is on github (eg https://github.com/syuu1228/uARM ), uploaded by others. I gave no license for its use in training. What now?

[deleted]

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#195

Post by bsza »

Should we move to modified versions of FOSS licenses that forbid AI training?

Found this: https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses

Legally sound or not, these should at least prevent your code from being included in Copilot's training data, hopefully without affecting any other use case. I'm going to use one of these next time I start a new project.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#196

Post by hardwaresofton »

bsza wrote: post #195

Should we move to modified versions of FOSS licenses that forbid AI training? Found this: https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses Legally sound or not, these should at least prevent your code from being included in Copilot's training data, hopefully without affecting any other use case. I'm going to use one of these next time I start a new project.

Note that wouldn’t be F/OSS — maybe OSS but the F wouldn’t be there.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#197

Post by userbinator »

wongarsu wrote: post #77
pennomi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MS probably hates that the source for XP/2K3 leaked because it means more people will put in effort to fix and extend/backport, even if it's not truly legal, when MS would rather coerce them into the latest most invasive and user-hostile version. Also because projects like NTVDMx64 show how some of their decisions have been political instead of technical as they like to claim.

Far less people care about Bing or Cortana.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#198

Post by cellis »

I would like to ask an obvious question to the legally inclined here. How is this any different than remixing a song (lyrics/audio)? It's not "identical", and doesn't output "verbatim" lyrics or audio. What is the distinction between and . By a quick Google search it seems remixes violate copyright.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#199

Post by bsza »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #196
bsza wrote: post #195

Should we move to modified versions of FOSS licenses that forbid AI training? Found this: https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses Legally sound or not, these should at least prevent your code from being included in Copilot's training data, hopefully without affecting any other use case. I'm going to use one of these next time I start a new project.

Note that wouldn’t be F/OSS — maybe OSS but the F wouldn’t be there.

Yes, that is clear. But personally I wouldn't want to write FOSS code anyway until Copilot learns to properly attribute FOSS code. Switching to a more permissive license later on shouldn't be an issue.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#200

Post by archontes »

carom wrote: post #150
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.

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".

It's an extreme stretch to say that the model weights are a derivative work of the training data given the legal definition of "derivative work".
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