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?
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Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
211–220 of 505 posts
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
I agree. Nothing is going to be the final word until more of these cases are heard. But I still don't think Warhol is as strong even against other uses of generative AI, and in fact I think in some ways argues in their favor. The court in Warhol specifically rejects the idea that the AWF usage is sufficiently transformed by the nature of the secondary work being recognizably a Warhol. I think that would work the other way around too, that a work being significantly in a given style is not sufficient for infringement. While certainly someone might buy a license to say, Stable Diffusion and attempt to generate a Warhol style image, someone might also buy some paints and a book of Warhol images to study and produce the same thing. Provided the produced images are not actually infringements or transformations of identifiably original Warhol works, even if they are in his style, I think there's a good argument to be made that the use and the tool are non-infringing.
Or put differently, if the Warhol image had used Goldsmith's image as a reference for a silk screen portrait of Steve Tyler, I'm not sure the case would have gone the same way. Warhol's image is obviously and directly derived from Goldsmith's image and found infringing when licensed to magazines, yet if Warhol had instead gone out and taken black and white portraits of prince, even in Goldsmith's style after having seen it, would it have been infringing? I think the closest case we have to that would have been the suit between Huey Lewis and Ray Parker Jr. over "I Want a New Drug"/"Ghostbusters" but that was settled without a judgement.
I do agree that Warhol is a stronger argument against artistic AI models, but it would very much have to depend on the specifics of the case. The AWF usage here was found to be infringing, with no judgement made of the creation and usage of the work in general, but specifically with regard to licensing the work to the magazine. They point out the opposite case that his Campbell paintings are well established as non-infringing in general, but that the use of them licensed as logos for soup makers might well be. So as is the issue with most lawsuits (and why I think AI models in general will win the day), the devil is in the details.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#213> 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 probably do this all the time. Forget memorizing but undoubtedly you've read code, learned from it, and then likely reproduced similar code. Probably nothing terribly important, just a function here or there. Maybe even reproduced something you did for a previous employer.
arr.sort((a, b) => a - b);
comes to mind. I bet most js devs have written this verbatim.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#214> 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…
No clue.
But what if the generative AI were used to create music instead of code would the court have ruled differently?
CONSIDER:
In 2015, a federal judge order Thicke & Pharrell to pay 50% of proceeds to the Marvin Gaye estate for being “too similar” to the song, “Gots to Give It Up”.
Comparison and commentary: https://youtu.be/7_UiQueteN4?si=SkClbyBMOcucigRm
Comparison of both songs: https://youtu.be/ziz9HW2ZmmY?si=3_VZzfoLT-NrozoK
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#215> 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…
If you tell a programmer to implement a function foo(a, b) then there are actually only a tiny number of ways to do that, semantically speaking, for any given foo. The number of options narrows quickly as the programmer implementing it gets more competent.
Choosing function signatures is an art form but after that "copying" is hard to judge.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#216Earlier 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?
Copyright’s purpose is a cudgel to be wielded to enrich the holder for, ideally, eternity. If “eternity” is threatened, you use proceeds from copyright to change copyright law to protect future proceeds.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't copyright a mathematical operation. Only a particular implementation of it, and even then it may not be copyrightable if its a straightforward and obvious implementation. That said the implementation doesn't appear to be totally trivial and copilot apparently even copies the comments which are almost certainly copyrightable in themselves. https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://gith…
Its even simpler, iD is owned by ZeniMax. ZeniMax is owned by Microsoft.. who would they even sue?
"Trust no one... even yourself"
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yuzu, the emulator that was sued by Nintendo, was emulating the Nintendo Switch, which is a product Nintendo does sell.
Yuzu is not the only emulator taken down by Nintendo and Nintendo is not the only company that has gone after emulators.
In that case, could you clarify what instances of this you're referring to?
The death of Citra wasn't really a deliberate action on the part of Nintendo, it was collateral damage. Citra was started by Yuzu developers and as part of the settlement they were not able to continue working on it. Citra's development had long been for the most part taken over by different developers, but the Yuzu people were still hosting the online infrastructure and had ownership of the GitHub repository, so they took all of it down. Some of the people who were maintaining Citra before the lawsuit opened up a new repository, but development has slowed down considerably because the taking down of the original repository has caused an unfortunate splintering of the community into many different forks.
There is some speculation Nintendo was involved with the death of the Nintendo 64 emulator UltraHLE a long time back, but this was never confirmed. If indeed they did go after UltraHLE, then this would just like Yuzu be a case of them taking down an emulator for a console they were still profiting from, as UltraHLE was released in 1999.
The most famous example of companies going after emulators is Sony, which went after Connectix Virtual Game Station and Bleem!. Both were PS1 emulators released in 1999, a period during which Sony was still very much profiting from PS1 sales. Sony lost both lawsuits and hasn't gone after emulators since.
In 2017, Atlus tried to take down the Patreon page for RPCS3, a PS3 emulator. However, Atlus only went after the Patreon page, not the emulator itself, which they did because of their use of Persona 5 screenshots on said page. The screenshots were simply taken down and the Patreon page was otherwise left alone. Of note is that Atlus is a game developer, so they were never profiting from PS3 sales. However, they were certainly still profiting from Persona 5 sales, which had only released in 2016.
These are the only examples I can remember. Did I miss anything?
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
It reads like the judge required them to show it happened to their code, not to any code in general. That's a much higher bar. There are thousands of instances of fast inverse square root in the training data but only one copy of your random github repositories. Getting to model to reproduce your code verbatim might be possible for all we know, but it isn't trivial.
of course for standing. but it seems like with the right plaintiffs this could have gone forward
If it only copies code that has been widely stolen already then that's a lot weaker of a case and is something they can do a lot to prevent on a technical level.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you copy someone else's copyrighted work and then rearrange a few lines and rename a few things, you're probably still infringing.
For a book or a song, for sure, although that isn't really punished. Search the drama surrounding a popular YA author in the 10's, Cassandra Claire. For code since you can only copy the form and not the function that might actually be enough. People do clean room implementations because of paranoia, not because it's actually a necessary requirement.
Moving a few things around means your internal process already had copywrite infringement.