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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

#341

Post by eropple »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #281
eropple wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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),…

Yeah, this is what I was expecting. I have no love for Disney et al but I think that this is dire (aside from UBI, which would be great but is fictional without a large-scale shift in American culture).

"Everybody else gets paid for the work they do; you get paid for things around the work you do, if you're lucky" is a way to expect creatives to live that, to put a point on it, always ends up being "for thee, but not for me". It's bad enough today--I think you described something worse.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#342

Post by bryanrasmussen »

torginus wrote: post #284
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#:~:...

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.

if that is the case why do people ever license covers?

to clarify - I thought you just had to negotiate with the cover artist about rights and pay a nominal fee for usage of the song for cover purposes - that is to say you do not negotiate with the original artist, you negotiate with a cover artist and the whole process is cheaper?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#343

Post by satvikpendem »

sensanaty wrote: post #329
struant wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why does scale matter in terms of AI? Just because a computer can do it at scale doesn't mean it should be treated similarly to your analogy. Rather than using an analogy, please tell me why it matters that computers can do something like AI at scale rather than individuals doing it.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#344

Post by bena »

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 agree. I don’t see the difference.

That’s the entire reason “clean room reverse engineering” is done.

Using nothing but the binary itself, work out how things are done. Making sure that the reverse engineers don’t even have access to any material that could look like it came from the other organization in question. And that it is provable.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#345

Post by satvikpendem »

devmor wrote: post #336
satvikpendem wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does someone's work matter?

If it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t want to take it.

The word "work" is being overloaded here, their work as in output might matter but I am asking why they must work at all in the first place. If your answer is because they must procure money to survive, that is an economic failure, not one of AI. Jobs are simply a roundabout way of distributing money for output to be produced, if an AI can produce the output, the job need not exist. This is the same argument that has been used for centuries as automation advances in every field, but suddenly, when it comes for my white collar high tech industry? It's an outrage.

Even then, their work as output can matter but that doesn't necessarily mean they (should) have a per se right to their work without other people also using it, especially in cases where their work is not used as outputs directly, which is what plagiarism is. If that were the case, no one could learn from a other's work, regardless of whether that one is a person or a computer.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#347

Post by satvikpendem »

devmor wrote: post #338
struant wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Chiefly, scale and accountability. The work of a person can be mitigated and a person can be held accountable for their actions. Much of our society operates on the idea that we don’t need to codify and enforce every single good or bad thing due to these reasons; and having such an underpinning affords us greater personal freedom.

This does not actually answer the question of why it is bad (in your opinion) in the first place, it just states that bad things are mitigated. I am looking for a concrete answer to the former, not a justification of the latter. The former is what usually AI opponents can never answer, they assume prima facie that AI is bad, for whatever reason.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#348

Post by rrobukef »

cdrini wrote: post #309
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?

They are trained to duplicate, we just hope they do so by abstracting patterns. Various techniques stack the deck to make it difficult to memorize everything but it still happens easily, especially for replicated knowledge.

"You train them by comparing the output to the original." ->

You train neural networks by producing output for known input, comparing the output with a cost-function to the expected output, and updating your system towards minimizing the cost, repeatedly, until it stops improving or you tire of waiting. Cost functions must have a minimal value when the output matches exactly the expected to work mathematically. Engineering-wise you can possibly fudge things and they probably do so ... now.

I don't agree with your critiques. It isn't an oversimplification, published code literally works as stated.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#349

Post by alickz »

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…

who gets to copyright claim the various array sorting algorithms then?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#350

Post by megaman821 »

skissane wrote: post #267
chii wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But sufficiently complex obfuscation of infringement is very hard to distinguish from genuine originality. for the purposes of copyright, originality is not required, just different expressions. It's ideas (aka, patent) that require originality. The 'sufficiently complex obfuscation' is exactly what people's brains go through when they learn, and re-produced what they learnt in a different context. I argue that AI-…

Some different scenarios: (1) You leave your employer, don’t take any code with you, start your own company, reimplement your ex-employer’s product from scratch, but you do it in a very different way (different language, different design choices, different tech stack, different architecture) (2) You leave your employer, take their code with you, start your own company, make some superficial changes to their code to o…

Numbers 2, 3, & 4 are all illegal because they start with an illegal action.

If I find a dollar on the sidewalk and put it in my wallets, is that stealing? If I punch a man getting change at a hotdog stand and a dollar falls on the sidewalk and then I put that in my wallet, is that stealing?

It doesn't matter what the scenario is after you stole code from your former employer, all actions are poisoned after.

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