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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

#221

Post by Dylan16807 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #156
bawolff wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Well if the copyright filter is working they indeed aren't happening. Putting in safe gaurds to prevent something from happening doesn't mean you're guilty of it. Putting a railing on a balcony doesn't imply the balcony with railing is unsafe. > LLMs are prone to paraphrasing.…

> Well if the copyright filter is working they indeed aren't happening. Putting in safe gaurds to prevent something from happening doesn't mean you're guilty of it. Putting a railing on a balcony doesn't imply the balcony with railing is unsafe. Doesn't mean you weren't, at some point, guilty of it, either. It doesn't retcon things.

Yeah but I think the main concern in this situation is copilot moving forward, not their past mistakes.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#222

Post by LegionMammal978 »

archontes wrote: post #205
warkdarrior wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What copyrightable elements of the original work persist in the model, if it is incapable of outputting them? I can derive a SHA-1 hash from a copyrighted image, and yet it would be absurd to call that a derivative work.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#223

Post by eropple »

kibwen wrote: post #185
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is a specious argument. It is impossible for us to gesture at the works of art that do not exist because of draconian copyright. Humans have been remixing each others' works for millions of years, and the artificial restriction on derivative work is actively destroying our collective culture. There should be thousands of professional works (books, movies, etc.) based on Lord Of The Rings by now, many of which wo…

This is all true, and in a vacuum I agree with it. There's a pretty core problem with these kinds of assertions, though: people have to make rent. Never have I seen a substantiative, pass-the-sniff-test argument for how to make practical this system when your authors and your artists need to eat in a system of modern capital.

So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#224

Post by cmeacham98 »

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.

If copilot is ruled fair use it doesn't matter what your license is, fair use superceeds it.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#225

Post by gpm »

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.

> Legally sound or not, these should at least prevent your code from being included in Copilot's training data

Has microsoft said this or something?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#226

Post by woah »

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 would not get your ass kicked legally speaking. Copyright is not that broad. It's not a patent.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#228

Post by Bognar »

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.

Oh so that's why Copilot has a filter to prevent suggesting copyrighted code, because the intent is to duplicate copyrighted code. It all makes sense now.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#229

Post by boplicity »

pdonis wrote: post #178
adra wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Just because their lobbies tend to push the boundary of copyright into the absurd doesn't mean these industries aren't worth saving. There should be actually respectful lawmakers who seek for a balance of public and commercial interests.

> Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Citation needed. There are many ways to make money from producing content other than restricting how copies of it can be distributed. The owner should be able to choose copyright as a means of control, but that doesn't mean nobody would create any content at all without copyright as a means…

There's nothing preventing people from producing works and releasing them without copyright restriction. If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often.

As it is now, especially in the creative fields (which I am most knowledgeable about), the current system has allowed for a incredible flourishing of creation, which you'd have to be pretty daft to deny.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#230

Post by benced »

sagarpatil wrote: post #227

Off topic: How does the judiciary decide which judge to choose for such highly technical case?

District courts can set their own policies. The Northern California District - where this was filed - allocates a case according to the last 2 digits of the case number. Source: https://www.cand.uscourts.gov/judges/civil-docketing-assignm...
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