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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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a large gap between public domain and GPL. For starters if Copilot is emitting GPL code for closed source projects... that's copyright infringement.

That would be license infringement, not copyright infringement.

Copyright infringement is emitting the code. The license gives you permission to emit the code, under certain conditions. If you don't meet the conditions, it's still copyright infringement like before.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#352

> 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…

Days like this, I wonder what Borges would have made of such questions.

"Pierre Menard, author of redis"

I know from experience that parents are aggressively pushing their children into STEM to maximize their chances of being economically secure, but, I really feel that we need a generation of philosophers and humanists to sift through the issues that our technology is raising. What does it mean to know something? What does authorship mean? Is a translated work the same as the original? Borges, Steiner, and the rest have as much to contribute as Ellison, Zuckerberg, and Altman.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#353
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Patent System is not intended to be a test of exclusive original thought. The function of the Patent System is to incentivize search for solutions by temporarily securing exclusive right to market novel devices and processes for the discoverer.

Of non-obvious inventions. My argument being all inventions are obvious once attention is applied to that area and scope.

Requiring attention IMO takes something out of the realm of “obvious”. And the standard is “novel”.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#354
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given that copyrighting is automatic at the instant of creation, that is, um, debatable. Slapping 3 lines in LICENSE.TXT doesn’t override the Berne convention.

Are you claiming that an author cannot place their work in the public domain?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#357
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of non-obvious inventions. My argument being all inventions are obvious once attention is applied to that area and scope.

Requiring attention IMO takes something out of the realm of “obvious”. And the standard is “novel”.

Everything in the future is novel, so that's a moot qualifier.

Everything requires attention to be seen, once somethign becomes "obvious" is fully determined where you're looking and the scope you're zoomed in on.

E.g. "matter is solid" until you zoom in and realize matter is mostly made up of space.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#358
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you looked at who created these things by and large? For the most part, you have: - aristocrats that were wealthy that didn't need to "work" to survive and put food on the table - crafts people supported through the patronage of a rich person (or religious order) who deign to support your art - (kinda modern world) national governments who want to support their national art often as a fear that other larger nations cultural influences will dwarf their

Are you implying that these three pillars will be able to produce anywhere near the current amount of content we produce?

How in the world where digital copies are effectively free to copy and infinitum would a creator reap any benefits from that network effect?

A modern equivalent would be famous YouTubers who all they do all day is "watch" other people's hard earned videos. The super lazy ones will not direct people to the original, don't provide meaningful commentary, just consumes the video as 'content' to feed their own audience and provides no value to the original creator. The position to kill copyright entirely would amplify this "just bypass the original source" to lower value of the original creator to zero.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#359
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often. that's not the argument. The fact that there currently are restrictions on producing derivative works is the problem. You cannot produce a star wars story, without getting consent from disney. You cannot write a harry potter story, without consent from Rowling.

That's not actually true. There's nothing stopping you from producing derivative works. Publishing and/or profiting from other people's work does have some restrictions though.

There's actually a huge and thriving community of people publishing derivative works, in a not-for-profit basis, on Archive of Our Own. (Among other places.)

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#360
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I answered your question plainly, but I'll try to go into detail. I have a suspicion that you don't see this as the philosophical issue that AI detractors do, and perhaps that hasn't been clearly communicated to you in the answers you've received, leading to your distaste for them or confusion at why they don't meet your criteria.

I believe that this kind of generative AI is bad because it approximates human behavior at an inhuman scale and cannot be held accountable in any way. This upends the entire social structure upon which humans have relied to keep each other in-check since the advent of the modern concept of "justice" beginning with the Code of Hammurabi.

In essence: Because you cannot punish, rehabilitate or extract recompense from a machine, it should not be allowed in any way to approximate a member of society.

This logic does not apply to machines that "automate" labor, because those machines do not approximate human communication - they do not pretend to be us.

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