Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 505 posts

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#361

Post by satvikpendem »

klyrs wrote: post #76
courseofaction wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome. Serves as a counter-example - would HN consider literacy to be damaging to the mind, or are we similarly mistaken by thinking that LLMs necessarily degrade the abilities of their users? Pre-writing 'texts' (such as the Iliad) were memorized by poets, which is reflected in their forms which made more use of memory-friendly forms like rhyming, consistent meter, and close repetition. Writing allowed greater com…

Does it serve as a counterexample? Or did the predicted loss of memory function come to pass? Worth noting that people were smoking plain old opium back in those times; I'd be reluctant to apply their reasoning to fentanyl.

What are you talking about with your second paragraph? I can't tell if it's supposed to be an analogy or whether you actually think everyone was smoking opium back then.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#363

Post by warkdarrior »

nancyp wrote: post #362

Linux/OSS is cancer. Said who? Anything in public domain is for grab by them. Until the open tech community is chicken enough to not boycott their no open source stuff such as github and linked in a proof nothing will happen.

Sir, are you OK??

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#364

Post by satvikpendem »

devmor wrote: post #360
satvikpendem wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your argument can be applied to the printing press or the automatic loom, and before you say that AI is much more at scale, I do not think that it is any more at scale than producing billions of books and garments cheaply. If you instead say that AI is more autonomous than the prior which require human functionality, I will remind you that no AI today (and likely into the future) produces outputs autonomously with no human input (and indeed, many humans tweak those outputs further, making it more like photo editing than end-to-end solutions). Even if they could perfectly read your mind and output end-to-end, you must first think for them to do what you desire.

Should those machines then be subject to your same philosophies? I'd suspect you'd say "that's different" somehow but it is only because you are alive at this moment and these machines have been normalized to you that you do not care about them. Were you to be born in a few centuries, you would likely feel the same way most do about the prior machines, and indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who think that future generation's AI (probably simply called technology then) is problematic as you do today. Recency bias is one hell of a drug.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#365

Post by devmor »

satvikpendem wrote: post #345
devmor wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Remember, we are discussing art here, not white collar tech jobs. AI coming for my job would be unpleasant and devastating, but that, like you said, is an economic problem. That I agree on.

I don't think there is a way to continue this particular branch of this argument without devolving into a debate on the value of human life like a couple of Macedonian philosophers - suffice to say, my point of view is that the work of others has intrinsic value tied to intent, and machines do not have intent.

If no output of humans has intrinsic value, then once machines can approximate humans sufficiently there is no reason for humans to exist - and that is an outcome that I, as a human, reject with all of my being.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#366

Post by pdonis »

trogdor wrote: post #354
TylerE wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, they can't, because there is no legally reliable way to do it (briefly, because the law really doesn't like the idea of property that doesn't have an owner, so if you try to place a work of yours in the public domain, what you're actually doing is making it abandoned property so anyone who wants to can claim they own it and restrict everyone else, including you, from using it). The best an author can do is to give a license that basically lets anyone do what they want with the work. Creative Commons has licenses that do that.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#367

Post by warkdarrior »

Retric wrote: post #252
Spivak wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not. Copyright infringement in the manner we're talking about presumes you already have license to access the code (like how Github does). What you don't have license to do is distribute the code -- entirely or not without meeting certain conditions. You're perfectly free to do whatever naughty things you want with the code, sans run it, in private. The literal act of making modifications isn't infringement…

First the case would be dismissed if Copilot had permission to make copies. Clearly they didn’t. Copyright cares about copies, for profit distribution just makes this worse. > you already have license to access the code This isn’t access, that occurs before the AI is trained. It’s access > make copy for training > AI does lossy compression > request unzips that compression making a new copy > process fuzzes the copy…

Clearly Copilot had permission to make (unmodified) copies, the same way Github's webserver had permission to make (unmodified) copies. The lawsuit is about making partial copies without attribution.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#368

Post by pdonis »

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.

> the current system has allowed for a incredible flourishing of creation

No, the current system has allowed for an incredible flourishing of middlemen who don't create anything themselves but coerce creative people into agreements that give the middlemen virtually all the profits.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#369

Post by dspillett »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #68
daedrdev wrote: post #4

> The anonymous programmers have repeatedly insisted Copilot could, and would, generate code identical to what they had written themselves, which is a key pillar of their lawsuit since there is an identicality requirement for their DMCA claim. However, Judge Tigar earlier ruled the plaintiffs hadn't actually demonstrated instances of this happening, which prompted a dismissal of the claim with a chance to amend it. I…

Where it gets ethnically dubious is that: 1. The copilot team rushed to slap a copyright filter on top to keep these verbatim examples from showing up, and now claims they never happen. 2. LLMs are prone to paraphrasing. Just because you filter out verbatim copies doesn't mean there isn't still copyright infringement/plagiarism/whatever you want to call it. The copyright filter is only a legal protection, not a pract…

> The copilot team rushed to slap a copyright filter on top to keep these verbatim examples from showing up, and now claims they never happen.

More than that: the fact that they claimed it wasn't possible before adding the filter, to filter out the thing that said wasn't possible. This doesn't help me trust anything else they might say or have already said.

My take on that was always: if it isn't possible, then why are MS not training the AIs on their internal code (like that for Office, in the case of MS with their copilot product) as well as public code? There must be good examples for it to learn from in there, unless of course they thing public code is massively better than their internal works.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#370

Post by pdonis »

boplicity wrote: post #359
chii wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

> 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.)

Yes, and none of those people are making a living at creating things. That's why they are allowed by the copyright owners to do what they're doing--because it's not commercial. Try to actually sell a derivative work of something you don't own the copyright for and see how fast the big media companies come after you. You acknowledge that when you say there are "restrictions" (an understatement if I ever saw one) on profiting from other people's work (where "other people" here means the media companies, not the people who actually created the work).

It is true that without our current copyright regime, the "industries" that produce Star Wars, Disney, etc. products would not exist in their current form. But does that mean works like those would not have been created? Does it mean we would have less of them? I strongly doubt it. What it would mean is that more of the profits from those works would go to the actual creative people instead of middlemen.

Post reply on HN