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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

#281

Post by JoshTriplett »

eropple wrote: post #223
kibwen wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tomorro…

> What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow?

Top priority: UBI, together with a world in which there's so much surplus productivity that things can survive and thrive without having "how does this make huge amounts of money" as its top priority to optimize for.

Apart from that: Conventions/concerts/festivals (tickets to a unique live event with a crowd of other fans), merchandise (pay for a physical object), patronage (pay for the ongoing creation of a thing), crowdfunding/Kickstarter (pay for a thing to come into existence that doesn't exist yet), brand/quality preference (many people prefer to support the original even if copies can be made), commissions (pay for unique work to be created for you), something akin to "venture funding", and the general premise that if a work spawns ten thousand spinoffs and a couple of them are incredible hits they're likely to direct some portion of their success back towards the work they build upon if that's generally looked upon favorably.

People have an incredible desire both to create and to enjoy the creations of others, and that's not going to stop. It is very likely that the concept of the $1B movie would disappear, and in trade we'd get the creation of far far more works.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#282

Post by TechDebtDevin »

whimsicalism wrote: post #60
voxic11 wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

Not sure where you thought I said you could copyright a mathematical operation, I was clearly referring to the implementation due to the mention of “quake”. When it was reported, I was able to reproduce it myself.

Weren't people getting it to spit out valid windows keys also?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#283

Post by MagicMoonlight »

The issue I have is that these models are inherently trained to duplicate stuff. You train them by comparing the output to the original.

If I made an “advanced music engine” which rips Taylor swift files and duplicates them, I would be sued to oblivion. Why does calling it an AI suddenly fix that?

They should have to train them on information they legally own.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#284

Post by torginus »

archontes wrote: post #71
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 might not get your ass kicked. Copyright doesn't protect function, to the point where the court will assess the degree to which the style of the code can be separated from the function. In the even that they aren't separable, the code is not copyrightable. https://www.wardandsmith.com/articles/supreme-court-announce... https://easlerlaw.com/software-computer-code-copyrighted#:~:...

If I were to license a cover of a song for a music video, I'd have to license both the original song and the cover itself.

I'd say this is extremely relevant in this case.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#285

Post by giamma »

archontes wrote: post #71
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 might not get your ass kicked. Copyright doesn't protect function, to the point where the court will assess the degree to which the style of the code can be separated from the function. In the even that they aren't separable, the code is not copyrightable. https://www.wardandsmith.com/articles/supreme-court-announce... https://easlerlaw.com/software-computer-code-copyrighted#:~:...

Software like Blackduck or Scanoss is designed to identify exactly that type of behaviour. It is used very often to scan closed source software and to check whether it contains snippets that are copied from open source with incompatible licenses (e.g. GPL).

To be able to do so, these softwares build a syntax tree of what your code snippet is, and compare the tree structure with similar trees in open source software without being fooled by variable names. To speed up the search, they also compute a signature for these trees so that the signature can be more easily searched in their database of open source code.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#286

Post by constantcrying »

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.

Why? This is no different than copy pasting and modifying a bit of code from some documentation/other project/tutorial/SO. Surely if that were a basis for copyright infringement most semi-large software projects would be infringing on copyright.

I don't think anyone here should be willing to open the can if worms that is copy pasting small snippets of code and modifying them.

The judge seems to argue that the non-identical copies are at issue here and that they only happen under contrived circumstances. My moral opinion is that this is irrelevant and that even the defendant is the wrong person. Even verbatim copies of code snippets shouldn't be copyright infringement and suing the company providing the AI is wrong to begin with, as the AI or its providercan not possibly be the one to infringe.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#287

Post by ExoticPearTree »

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 don't think it works that way. During the course of your professional career as a developer you change jobs. And let's say that at every job you create APIs. Besides the particular functions those API provide, the API code itself (how you interact with clients, databases etc.) will be pretty much the same as whatever you did at previous jobs. Does this constitute copyright experience or is just experience?

My analogy is that if Copilot doesn't provide 100% code from another repository it is OK to be used by other people trained with code available on GitHub.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#288

Post by gkbrk »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #89
squarefoot wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Isn't that akin to destruction of evidence?

Legally? No. In spirit? ... Probably? Unlike most LLMs, Github copilot can trivially solve their copyright problem by just using only code they have the right to reproduce. They have a giant corpus of code tagged with license, SELECT BY license MIT/Equivalent and you're done, problem solved because those licenses explicitly grant permission for this kind of reuse. (It's still not very cash money to take open source w…

There is no difference when it comes to MIT and GPL here. If your model outputs my MIT licensed code, you still need to provide attribution in the form of a copyright notice as required by the MIT license.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#289

Post by whimsicalism »

brookst wrote: post #255
whimsicalism wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i think that is a weak analogy and also unnecessary bc it is already clear what i am saying

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#290

Post by DoItToMe81 »

TylerE wrote: post #246
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.

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

Trademark isn't copyright, so no.
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