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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

#201

Post by yazzku »

> The judge disagreed, however, on the grounds that the code suggested by Copilot was not identical enough to the developers' own copyright-protected work, and thus section 1202(b) did not apply.

How did they reach this conclusion? How can you prove that it never copies a code snippet verbatim, versus just showing that it does for one specific code snippet? The latter is a lot easier to show, but I don't know what is it exactly that the prosecution claimed. I guess the size of the copy also matters in copyright violations?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#202

Post by griftrejection »

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…

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Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#203

Post by griftrejection »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #162
deciplex wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes the little guy is actually wrong. He is, sometimes. Also sometimes, the moon passes exactly between the sun and Earth, a new star appears in the sky, the magnetic field of our planet reverses, a proton decays (jury is still out on that one, actually). Etc. Tools like Copilot are plagiarism machines. We know the data they're being trained on, and a conclusion of "that's plagiarism" is not - or anyway shoul…

> 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.

Won't anyone think of the corporations? :(

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#204

Post by griftrejection »

cellis wrote: post #198

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.

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Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#205

Post by archontes »

warkdarrior wrote: post #142
archontes wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you should update your view with 17 USC 106.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#206

Post by CobrastanJorji »

nadermx wrote: post #103
JoshTriplett wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You want to look at the Supreme Court case "Eldred v. Ashcroft." Eldred challenged Congress for retroactively extending existing copyrights, for extending the patent protections on existing inventions could not possibly further arts and sciences. They also argued that if Congress had the power to continually extend existing copyrights by N years every N years, the Constitutional power of "for a limited time" had no meaning.

The Supreme Court's decision was a bunch of bullshit around "well, y'know, people live longer these days, and some creators are still alive who expected these to last their whole lives, and golly, coincidentally this really helps giant corporations."

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#207

Post by ProAm »

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?

Literally the bank account behind the action...

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#209

Post by jfoster »

epolanski wrote: post #122

I am not strongly opinionated on this, but the very fact Microsoft used all the code it could find, bar their own has always looked suspicious to me.

Is that a fact? If true, not sure whether it would have bearing on the legal questions, but certainly would make it seem like their actions are not in very good faith. Would love to hear their explanation if it did get raised in court.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#210

Post by griftrejection »

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.

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