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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

#291

Post by sim7c00 »

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…

it depends on how much tax you are paying really. if you pay billions in taxes annually, they might see past it. if the company you copied from pays billions in taxes anually. you will go to jail. if this isn't painfuly obvious by now...

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#292

Post by DoItToMe81 »

kelnos wrote: post #164
nadermx wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the copyrights purpose of furthering the arts and sciences?

That ship sailed long ago. While copyright can and is used at times to protect the "little guy", the law is written as it is in order to protect and further corporate interests. The current manifestation of copyright is about rent-seeking, not promoting innovation and creativity. That it may also do so is entirely coincidental.

Copyright was invented by a cartel of noblemen, the British Stationer's Company, who, due to liberal reform, were going to lose their publishing monopoly. The implementation of copyright law as they helped pen allowed them to mostly continue their position while portraying it as "protecting the little guy".

Funny how both the rhetoric and intentions are the same after three hundred years.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#293

Post by perlgeek »

From the article:

> The anonymous programmers have repeatedly insisted Copilot could, and would, generate code identical to what they had written themselves, which is a key pillar of their lawsuit since there is an identicality requirement for their DMCA claim. However, Judge Tigar earlier ruled the plaintiffs hadn't actually demonstrated instances of this happening, which prompted a dismissal of the claim with a chance to amend it.

So, the problem is really one of the lack of evidence, which seems... like a pretty basic mistake from the plaintiffs?

They could've taken a screencap video back when Copilot still produced code more verbatim, and used that as evidence, I assume.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#294

Post by bsza »

gpm wrote: post #225
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?

I assumed (heard somewhere) that they only include open source repos in the training data.

Turns out I was wrong. They don't care.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210708165143/https://twitter.c...

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#295

Post by ExoticPearTree »

fragmede wrote: post #244
BadHumans wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the same reasoning the music and movie industries use when they go after people downloading music. And contrary to the popular opinion, I think it is wrong: if people want to pay, they will pay. Same for movies: if people would really want to pay for a movie, they would go to a cinema. Or stream it after a week or two. But there are also people who would jump through hoops than pay for music or movies. And that is not a lost sale because there was never an intention to buy something in the first place.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#296

Post by banish-m4 »

voxic11 wrote: post #47
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

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…

Algorithms can and are definitely patented in utility patents in the US.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#297

Post by marsten »

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,…

There's a strong geopolitical angle as well. If you force American companies to license all training data for LLMs, that is such a gargantuan undertaking it would effectively set US companies back by years relative to Chinese competitors, who are under no such restrictions.

Bottom line, if you're doing something considered relevant to the national interest then that buys you a lot of leeway.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#298

Post by pas »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #282
whimsicalism wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

GPT4 regurgitated almost full NYT articles verbatim. It's strange that this lawsuit seems to be so amateurish that they failed to properly demonstrate the reproduction. Though of course it might require a lot of legal technicalities that we naively think are trivial but they might be not.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#299

Post by Kuinox »

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 are taking the plaintiff statement as is, which is wrong. You can blame the media that didn't made it clear that it was a statement from the plaintiff.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#300

Post by Kim_Bruning »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #165
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 .

[flagged]

Fashion is traditionally not copyrightable[1] , and the fashion industry is doing rather well.

Similarly our IT infrastructure is now built mostly on [a set of patches to the copyright system][2] called F/L/OSS that provided more freedom to authors and users, and lead to more innovation and proliferation of solutions.

So even just in the modern west, we can see thriving ecosystems where copyright is absent or adjusted; and where the outcomes are immediately visible on the street.

[1] Though a quick search shows that lawyers are making inroads.

[2] One way of describing it at least, YMMV.

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