Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit • Hacker News Board

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#251

Post by bawolff » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 4:46 AM UTC

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.

Sure, which is why we require evidence of wrong doing. Otherwise its just a witch hunt.

After all, you yourself probably cannot prove that you didn't commit the same offense at some point in time in the past. Like Russel's teapot, its almost always impossible to disprove something like that.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#252

Post by Retric » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 4:47 AM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #235

Retric wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

First the case would be dismissed if Copilot had permission to make copies. Clearly they didn’t. Copyright cares about copies, for profit distribution just makes this worse.

> you already have license to access the code

This isn’t access, that occurs before the AI is trained. It’s access > make copy for training > AI does lossy compression > request unzips that compression making a new copy > process fuzzes the copy so it’s not so obvious > derivative work sent to users.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#253

Post by kortilla » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 4:55 AM UTC

munificent wrote: post #231

zmmmmm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cor…

They are all hallucinations. Calling lies hallucinations and truths normal output is nonsense.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#254

Post by skissane » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 4:56 AM UTC

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…

> I assume that I would get my ass kicked legally speaking. That reads to me exactly like deliberate copyright infringement with willful obfuscation of my infringement.

It looks like wilful obfuscation because the obfuscation is so simplistic. But as the obfuscation gets increasingly sophisticated, it becomes ever harder to distinguish wilful obfuscation from genuine originality.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#255

Post by brookst » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 5:04 AM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #67

wongarsu wrote: post #66

Earlier 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

But that’s like saying my lawsuit alleging Taylor Swift copied my song could have gone forward with a plaintiff who had, years ago, written a song similar to what Ms. Swift recorded recently. That”s true, but perhaps the lesson here is that damages that hinge on statistically rare victims should not extrapolated out to provide windfalls for people who have not been harmed.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#256

Post by bawolff » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 5:14 AM UTC

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?

I think the argument is that the machine is not doing that, or at least there isn't evidence that it is doing that.

Specificly no evidence that github is doing both 1 and 2 at the same time. There might be cases where it makes trivial changes to code (point 2) but for code that does not meet the threshold of originality. Similarly there might be cases with copyrighted code where the idea of it is taken, but it is expressed in such a different way that it is not a straightforward derrivitave of the expression (keeping in mind you cannot copyright an idea, only its expression. Using a similar approach or algorithm is not copyright infringement)

And finally, someone has to demonstrate it is actually happening and not just in theory could happen. Generally courts dont punish people for future crimes they haven't comitted yet (sometimes you can get in trouble for being reckless even if nothing bad happens, but i dont think that applies to copyrighg infringement)

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#257

Post by chii » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 5:19 AM UTC

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.

> If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often.

that's not the argument. The fact that there currently are restrictions on producing derivative works is the problem. You cannot produce a star wars story, without getting consent from disney. You cannot write a harry potter story, without consent from Rowling.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#258

Post by chii » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 5:21 AM UTC

skissane wrote: post #254

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…

> I assume that I would get my ass kicked legally speaking. That reads to me exactly like deliberate copyright infringement with willful obfuscation of my infringement. It looks like wilful obfuscation because the obfuscation is so simplistic. But as the obfuscation gets increasingly sophisticated, it becomes ever harder to distinguish wilful obfuscation from genuine originality.

> But sufficiently complex obfuscation of infringement is very hard to distinguish from genuine originality.

for the purposes of copyright, originality is not required, just different expressions. It's ideas (aka, patent) that require originality.

The 'sufficiently complex obfuscation' is exactly what people's brains go through when they learn, and re-produced what they learnt in a different context.

I argue that AI-training can be considered to be doing the same.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#259

Post by jenboy » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 5:23 AM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#260

Post by zmmmmm » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 5:32 AM UTC

munificent wrote: post #231

zmmmmm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cor…

I get that's what you and a lot of people want it to be, but it isn't what they are. They are quite literally probabilistic text generation engines. Let's emphasise that: the output is produced randomly by sampling from distributions, or in simple terms, like rolling a dice. In a concrete sense it is non-deterministic. Even if an exact answer is in the corpus, its output is not going to be that answer, but the most probable answer from all the text in the corpus. If that one answer that exactly matches contradicts the weight of other less exact answers you won't see it.

And you probably wouldn't want to - if I ask if donuts are radioactive and one person explicitly said that on the internet you probably aren't going to tell me you want it to spit out that answer just because it exactly matches what you asked. You want it to learn from the overwhelimg corpus of related knowledge that says donuts are food, people routinely eat them, etc etc and tell you they aren't radioactive.