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Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

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Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#231

Post by munificent »

zmmmmm wrote: post #177
munificent wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clearly was not designed for that purpose, I'm not aware of evidence that support that claim. If I ask ChatGPT "Give me a recipe for squirrel lemon stew" and it so happens that one person did write a recipe for that exact thing on the Internet, then I would expect that the most accurate, truthful response would be that exact recipe. Anything else would essentially be hallucination.

i think you are misconceiving then how LLMs work / what they are You can certainly try to hit a nail with a screw driver, but that doesn't make the screw driver a hammer.

As I understand it, LLMs are intended to answer questions as "truthfully" as they can. Their understanding of truth comes from the corpus they are trained on. If you ask a question where the corpus happens to have something very close to that question and its answer, I would expect the LLM to burp up that answer. Anything less would be hallucination.

Of course, if I ask a question that isn't as well served by the corpus, it has to do its best to interpolate an answer from what it knows.

But ultimately its job is to extract information from a corpus and serve it up with as much semantic fidelity to the original corpus as possible. If I ask how many moons Earth has, it should say "one". If I ask it what the third line of Poe's "The Raven" is, it should say "While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,". Anything else is wrong.

If you ask it a specific enough question where only a tiny corner of its corpus is relevant, I would expect it to end up either reproducing the possibly copyright piece of that corpus or, perhaps worse, cough up some bullshit because it's trying to avoid overfitting.

(I'm ignoring for the moment LLM use cases like image synthesis where you want it to hallucinate to be "creative".)

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#234

Post by default-kramer »

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.

I'm not legally inclined, but... code and music are different? There must be different standards for when code is too similar, for when music is too similar, for when pictures are too similar, for when books are too similar.

Also, remixes almost always do contain verbatim lyrics and/or samples from the original song. LLM output isn't supposed to contain verbatim copies, but I've been told that sometimes it does. (I don't know much about LLMs and I don't think Copilot is useful. I want my 2010-era Intellisense back, when it was extremely fast and predictable.)

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#235

Post by Spivak »

Retric wrote: post #220
Spivak wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably not. Copyright infringement in the manner we're talking about presumes you already have license to access the code (like how Github does). What you don't have license to do is distribute the code -- entirely or not without meeting certain conditions. You're perfectly free to do whatever naughty things you want with the code, sans run it, in private.

The literal act of making modifications isn't infringement until you distribute those modifications -- and we're talking about a situation where you've changed the code enough that it isn't considered a derivative work anymore (apparently) so that's kosher.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#236

Post by AmericanChopper »

mvdtnz wrote: post #8

What were the plaintiffs even thinking when they submitted a claim based on identicality without being able to produce a single instance of copilot generating a verbatim copy. Even the research they submitted was unable to make a claim any stronger than "it's possibly in theory but we've never seen it".

A lot of people post AI outrage comments on HN that are clearly based on a rather poor understanding of the law and legal processes. This entire case and all of the plaintiffs statements about it reads like one of those comments.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#237

Post by BeefWellington »

skybrian wrote: post #133
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…

The machine alone doesn't do anything. The user and machine together constitute a larger system, and with autocomplete, the user is charge. What's the user's intent? I suspect that a lot of copyright violations are enabled by cut-and-paste and screenshot-taking functionality, and maybe we need to be careful with autocomplete, too? It's the user's responsibility to avoid this. We should be careful using our tools. Do…

> The machine alone doesn't do anything.

By the same token, the machine alone can't download pirated movies. Yet the sites hosting those movies are targeted as the infringers.

There's a point at which foisting this responsibility on the users is simply socializing losses. Ultimately Copilot is the one serving the code up - regardless of the user's request. If the user then goes on to republish that work as their own it becomes two mistakes. It'll be interesting to see if any lawyers are capable of articulating that well enough in any of these lawsuits.

> Is that confidence misplaced? Are other people more careless?

I would say yes, for two reasons. One is that using code of unknown provenance means you're opening yourself to unknown legal risks. The second is if you're rewriting it fully (so as not to run afoul of easily spotted copyright) that's not actually "clean room" and you're still open to problems. I'd also wonder what the point of using a code writing LLM is anyways if you're doing all the authorship yourself. It seems like doing double the work.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#238

Post by BeefWellington »

xorcist wrote: post #161
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…

Why stop there? Extrapolate that thought, keep generating more variants of the code, claim copyright, and seek rent from other people doing the same thing. To extrapolate full circle, there would be a business opportunity to generate as many variants as possible for the original author, to prevent all this from happening. As long as we're not required to register copyright there's no reason to think the above will pl…

> Why stop there? Extrapolate that thought, keep generating more variants of the code, claim copyright, and seek rent from other people doing the same thing. To extrapolate full circle, there would be a business opportunity to generate as many variants as possible for the original author, to prevent all this from happening.

This has already been done[1] in music, though in their case they released them to the public domain. Admittedly I think that was more of a protest than anything.

[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic...

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