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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

#321

Post by xinayder »

hyperpape wrote: post #132
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…

From the article: > The most recently dismissed claims were fairly important, with one pertaining to infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), section 1202(b), which basically says you shouldn't remove without permission crucial "copyright management" information, such as in this context who wrote the code and the terms of use, as licenses tend to dictate. > It was argued in the class-action sui…

What I got from this is, you can copy someone's copyrighted work provided you tweak a few things here and there. I wonder how this holds up in court if you don't have billions at your disposal.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#322

Post by copywrong2 »

tomxor wrote: post #102
archontes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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#:~:...

US copyright does protect for "substantial similarity" [0]. And at the other end of the spectrum, this has been abused in absurd ways to argue that substantially different code has infringed. In Zenimax vs Oculus they basically argued that a bunch of really abstract yet entirely generic parts of the code were shared, we are talking some nested for loops, certain combinations of if statements, and due to a lack of a q…

Copyright is abused often. Our modern version of copyright is BS and only benefits large corps who buy a lot of IP.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#323

Post by copywrong2 »

adra wrote: post #152
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 .

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.

Yeah many industries like:

- Big Corps that buy IP

- Patent Trolls

- Companies that fuck over artists

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#324

Post by copywrong2 »

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.

People do not put out their stuff. People get lured into contracts selling their IP to a shitty company that then publishes stuff, of course WITH copyright so they can make money while the artist doesnt

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#325

Post by sva_ »

roenxi wrote: post #215
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…

If you tell a programmer to implement a function foo(a, b) then there are actually only a tiny number of ways to do that, semantically speaking, for any given foo. The number of options narrows quickly as the programmer implementing it gets more competent. Choosing function signatures is an art form but after that "copying" is hard to judge.

> a function foo(a, b) then there are actually only a tiny number of ways to do that

I'd argue there are infinite ways to implement any function, just almost all of them are extremely bad.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#326

Post by bmitc »

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…

Regardless of the details here, it's become quite clear that the judicial system is for corporations. It doesn't matter whether they win, lose, or settle, as they win regardless, since the monetary benefits of what got them in court in the first place far outweigh any punishment or settlement cost.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#327

Post by williamcotton »

sulandor wrote: post #274
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…

> You can't copyright a mathematical operation. i agree from a philosophical pov, but this is clearly not the case in law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

The second step is to remove from consideration aspects of the program which are not legally protectable by copyright. The analysis is done at each level of abstraction identified in the previous step. The court identifies three factors to consider during this step: elements dictated by efficiency, elements dictated by external factors, and elements taken from the public domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari...

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#328

Post by witx »

jeroenhd wrote: post #70
bityard wrote: post #3

This 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…

A Wine fork built using an LLM trained on leaked Windows code might be pretty useful.

You'd get a Wine full of ads, the need for an account to use and the not so occasional BSoD /s

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#329

Post by sensanaty »

struant wrote: post #183
devmor wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just pure exploitation. You're using the product of someone's work to create a machine that takes away their work.

Why is doing a task with a machine suddenly objectionable when the same task performed by humans is perfectly fine?

A man with a small canoe catching a few fish with a fishing rod for his dinner is very different to a commercial fishing vessel trawling through the ocean with a massive net to catch thousands of fish at once. The two are treated differently under the law, and have different rules that apply to them due to the difference in scale.

Scale matters, and the scale that computers/these AIs operate under are absurd compared to a person doing it manually.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#330

Post by sensanaty »

satvikpendem wrote: post #277
devmor wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just pure exploitation. You're using the product of someone's work to create a machine that takes away their work.

Why does someone's work matter?

Why do you want the end result of the work if the work itself doesn't matter?
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