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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

#241

Post by fragmede »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #97
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 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,…

works the same for banks and owing them money

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#242

Post by fragmede »

lcouturi wrote: post #218
BadHumans wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bnetd emulator, that let Diablo and StarCraft players not have to pay Blizzard for the privilege of buying the game, though that's a bit different.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#243

Post by Suppafly »

wongarsu wrote: post #66
whimsicalism wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. There have definitely been well publicized examples of this happening, like the quake inverse square root

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.

>It reads like the judge required them to show it happened to their code, not to any code in general.

Rightly so, you have to show some sort of damage to sue someone, not just theoretical damages.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#244

Post by fragmede »

BadHumans wrote: post #92
dmix wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those emulators are very popular though to the point of potentially impacting another business's bottom line. Where an individual putting it out a small block of code isn't exactly going to attract expensive lawyers. I'm skeptical Github Copilot reproducing a couple functions potentially used by some random Github project is going to be a threat to another party's livelihood. When AI gets good enough to make full dup…

There is no impact to a company's bottom line when you are emulating a product they do not sell.

Yes there is. If I can emulate Super Mario Odyssey on my PC, I don't need to buy a Nintendo Switch. If it wasn't available there, I'd have to buy a Nintendo Switch to play it. That's a lost sale for Nintendo. You could argue that I wasn't going to buy a switch anyway, but then we're getting too into hypotheticals.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#245

Post by mr_toad »

bityard wrote: post #3

This is pretty interesting, and I have conflicted feelings about the (seemingly obvious) outcome of this trial. I wonder, if MS and OpenAI win, does that mean it will be legal for anyone to take the leaked source code for a proprietary product, train an LLM on it, and then ask the LLM to emit a version of it that is different enough to avoid copyright infringement? That would be quite the double-edged sword for propr…

The misappropriation of the code (a trade secret) would likely be grounds for legal action against the people who stole it and the people who received it. A lot depends on jurisdiction.

But if it was made public and then if an unrelated third party were to re-write the code in such a way that it was non-infringing, then it would be non-infringing. That’s just a tautology.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#246

Post by TylerE »

adra wrote: post #152
JoshTriplett wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright has utterly failed to serve that purpose for a long time, and has been actively counterproductive. But if you want to argue that copyright is counterproductive, I completely agree. That's an argument for reducing or eliminating it across the board, fairly, for everyone; it's not an argument for giving a free pass to AI training while still enforcing it on everyone else .

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.

For that matter, if you think China ripping everyone else off is bad now… well, just wait until every company can do that.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#247

Post by TylerE »

boplicity wrote: post #229
pdonis wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Given that copyrighting is automatic at the instant of creation, that is, um, debatable.

Slapping 3 lines in LICENSE.TXT doesn’t override the Berne convention.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#248

Post by mr_toad »

pennomi wrote: post #38
bityard wrote: post #3

This is pretty interesting, and I have conflicted feelings about the (seemingly obvious) outcome of this trial. I wonder, if MS and OpenAI win, does that mean it will be legal for anyone to take the leaked source code for a proprietary product, train an LLM on it, and then ask the LLM to emit a version of it that is different enough to avoid copyright infringement? That would be quite the double-edged sword for propr…

Or even those AI-powered decompilers people are working on… you could clone virtually any software with that. Surely there will be limitations.

If you compiled it and the resulting binary was substantially similar to the original you’d likely get sued.
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