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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
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Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#313> 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,…
> acting like that's the immutable status quo
It is immutable.
What are you going to do about it? Confiscate everyone's home gamer PCs?
Even in the most extreme hypothetical where lawsuits shutdown OpenAI, that doesn't delete the stable diffusion models that I have on my external hard drives.
The tech is out there. It's too late.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#314It seems to me that regardless of the outcome of this case, some developers do not want to have their code used to train LLMs. There may need to be a new license created to restrict this usage of software. Or, maybe developers will simply stop contributing open source. In today’s day and age, where open source code serves as a tool to pad Microsoft’s pockets, I certainly will not publish any of my software open source, despite how much I would like to (under GPL) in order to help fellow developers.
If I were Microsoft, I’d really be concerned that I’m going to kill my golden goose by causing a large-scale exodus from GitHub or open source development more generally. Another idea I’ve considered is publishing boatloads of useless or incorrect code to poison their training data.
As I see it, people should be able to restrict how people use something that they gave them. If some people prefer that their code is not used to train LLMs, there should be a way to enforce that.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#315This 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…
By definition you are allowed to take leaked source coded and change it enough such that it avoids infringement, and this will avoid infringement.
The LLM has nothing to do with it, and isn't required here.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#316Should 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.
You can write whatever words you want on a piece of paper or uploaded to the info section of a GitHub repo.
That doesn't mean anyone has to follow it.
If it's legal to train on other people's stuff, without their permission, this would still apply to your code even if your code includes a license that said "I double extra declare that you can't train AI on this!!".
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#317It seems to me that regardless of the outcome of this case, some developers do not want to have their code used to train LLMs. There may need to be a new license created to restrict this usage of software. Or, maybe developers will simply stop contributing open source. In today’s day and age, where open source code serves as a tool to pad Microsoft’s pockets, I certainly will not publish any of my software open sourc…
> I certainly will not publish any of my software open source, despite how much I would like to (under GPL) in order to help fellow developers.
I think this is a rather radical approach. You're undermining the OSS movement because you dislike Microsoft (I do too). I think adding a clause or dual licensing your work is more effective at stopping big-tech funded AI crawlers than just not adhering to open source.
You can host your code on sourcehut or Codeberg (Forgejo), you don't NEED to host it on a Microsoft owned platform.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#318Earlier 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.
Books, music, and games are a lot older than copyright.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#319It seems to me that regardless of the outcome of this case, some developers do not want to have their code used to train LLMs. There may need to be a new license created to restrict this usage of software. Or, maybe developers will simply stop contributing open source. In today’s day and age, where open source code serves as a tool to pad Microsoft’s pockets, I certainly will not publish any of my software open sourc…
I am personally happy to share all my public code to support the development of better models. While I believe the benefits of contributing to open source outweigh the drawbacks, and I don't foresee a "large-scale exodus from GitHub", it's ultimately up to individual developers to decide how their code is used.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an extreme stretch to say that the model weights are a derivative work of the training data given the legal definition of "derivative work".
It is processed data at the end of the day. And no it is not like human reading. You can't read whole Github.
That doesn't make it a derivative work.
If I "process data" by doing a word count of a book, and then I publish the number of words in that book (not the words themself! Just a word count!) I haven't created a derivative work.
Processing data isn't automatically infringement.