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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

#301

Post by isodev »

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 would. And this is where some legislation "in the spirit of" would have helped. So Microsoft's huge legal arm can't just wiggle their way out on technicalities. Clearly, the law is not prepared to face the challenge of copyright violations on the scale created by the LLMs.

I also think it's not just copyright. It's simply not right to create a product on top of the collective work of all open source developers monetize them on the absurt scale Microsoft operates and never ever credit the original creators.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#302

Post by satvikpendem »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #50
satvikpendem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…

That's great! They nailed us, what, four thousand years ago?

Humans have been anatomically unchanged for 50,000 years, I'd imagine every generation lamented the young with their new technology, otherwise we wouldn't have seen so many examples in written history, it is just that we have no records from prehistory, by definition.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#303

Post by Kim_Bruning »

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,…

You will need to first demonstrate that actual copying took place. And that what copying that did take place was actually illegal or infringing.

As we're seeing in court, that's a very interesting question. It turns out that the answers are very counter-intuitive to many.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#305

Post by Kim_Bruning »

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…

My own business model is to create Things That Don't Exist Yet. This (typically bespoke work) is actually the majority of work in any era I think. For me, copyright doesn't do much, it mostly gets in the way.

If you pass the law tomorrow -all else being equal- my profits would stay equal or go up somewhat.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#306

Post by cdrini »

yazzku wrote: post #201

> The judge disagreed, however, on the grounds that the code suggested by Copilot was not identical enough to the developers' own copyright-protected work, and thus section 1202(b) did not apply. How did they reach this conclusion? How can you prove that it never copies a code snippet verbatim, versus just showing that it does for one specific code snippet? The latter is a lot easier to show, but I don't know what is…

I think there's a difference between a mathematical proof and legal proof. The mathematical proof would be "show that it never copies a code snippet verbatim", and you of course cannot prove that by example.

Legal proof is I think different (not a lawyer). They're more pragmatic. If, observing a lot of cases where it does not verbatim copy, and, if an expert provides a reasonable argument as to why it is unlikely to verbatim copy, that is enough legal proof for a judge to conclude that the output is not identical enough to the developers copyrighted code.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#307

Post by cdrini »

epolanski wrote: post #122

I am not strongly opinionated on this, but the very fact Microsoft used all the code it could find, bar their own has always looked suspicious to me.

I mean, I imagine it used a lot of their public code, like VS code, typescript, the new windows terminal, or anything on https://github.com/microsoft . They didn't use their private code, but they didn't use anyone else's private code either.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#308

Post by Kim_Bruning »

olliej wrote: post #88
Analemma_ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is it any different when a machine does the same thing? Because intent matters in the law. If you intended to reproduce copyrighted code verbatim but tried to hide your activity with a few tweaks, that's a very different thing from using a tool which occasionally reproduces copyrighted code by accident but clearly was not designed for that purpose, and much more often than not outputs transformative works.

Um, the entire intent of these "AI" systems is explicitly to reproduce copyrighted work with mechanical changes to make it not appear to be a verbatim copy. That is the whole purpose and mechanism by which they operate. Also the intent does not matter under law - not intending to break the law is not a defense if you break the law. Not intending to take someone's property doesn't mean it becomes your property. You mi…

I actually once tracked this claim down in the case of stable diffusion.

I concluded that it was just completely impossible for a properly trained stable diffusion model to reproduce the works it was trained on.

The SD model easily fits on a typical USB stick, and comfortably in the memory of a modern consumer GPU.

The training corpus for SD is a pretty large chunk of image data on the internet. That absolutely does not fit in GPU memory - by several orders of magnitude.

No form of compression known to man would be able to get it that small. People smarter than me say it's mathematically not even possible.

Now for closed models, you might be able to argue something else is going on and they're sneakily not training neural nets or something. But the open models we can inspect? Definitely not.

Modern ML/AI models are doing Something Else. We can argue what that Something Else is, but it's not (normally) holding copies of all the things used to train them.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#309

Post by cdrini »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #283

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.

They're not "inherently trained to duplicate"; I think that's a bit of a disingenuous oversimplification. They're trained to learn abstract patterns in large datasets, and remix those patterns in response to a prompt.

"You train them by comparing the output to the original." To the best of my knowledge this isn't correct; can you expand or cite a reference?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#310

Post by Kim_Bruning »

pas wrote: post #298
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read that case.

Absolutely there were a few outliers where a judge might want to look more closely. I'd be surprised if -under scrutiny- there wouldn't be any issues whatsoever that OpenAI overlooked.

However, it seemed to me that over half of the NYT complaints were examples of using the -then rather new- ChatGPT web browsing feature to browse their own website. In the case, they then claimed surprise when it did just what you'd expect a web browsing feature to do.

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