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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

#381

Post by JoshTriplett »

eropple wrote: post #341
JoshTriplett wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 no…

The current model is "most people get paid for the work they do, but you get paid for people copying work you've already done", which already seems asymmetric. This would change the model to "people get paid for the work they do, and not paid again for copying work they've already done".

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#382

Post by scott_w »

itishappy wrote: post #380
scott_w wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While correct, the example given is that they COPY the code, then make adjustments to hide the fact. I suspect this is still a copyright violation. It’s interesting that a judge sees it differently when it’s just run through a programme. I’m not a legal expert so I’m guessing it’s a bit more complex than the headline?

No copy-paste was explicitly used. They compressed it into a latent space and recreated from memory, perhaps with a dash of "creativity" for flavor. Hypothetically, of course. The distinction is pedantic but important, IMHO. AI doesn't explicitly copy either.

But isn’t that the same as memorising it and rewriting the implementation from memory? I’m sure “it wasn’t an exact reproduction” is not much of a defence.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#383

Post by sleepybrett »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #278
kibwen wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a specious argument. It is impossible for us to gesture at the works of art that do not exist because of draconian copyright. Humans have been remixing each others' works for millions of years, and the artificial restriction on derivative work is actively destroying our collective culture. There should be thousands of professional works (books, movies, etc.) based on Lord Of The Rings by now, many of which wo…

> It is impossible for us to gesture at the works of art that do not exist because of draconian copyright. We can gesture at the tiniest tip of the iceberg by observing things that are regularly created in violation of copyright but not typically attacked and taken down until they get popular: - Game modding, romhacks, fangames, remakes, and similar. - Memes (often based on copyrighted content) - Stage play adaptatio…

> "- Speedruns, Let's Play videos, and streams (very often taken down)"

Very often taken down, only by nintendo.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#384

Post by sleepybrett »

xinayder wrote: post #321
hyperpape wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Weird Al should be in the clear then, he changes probably 85% of all the song lyrics in his covers.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#385

Post by sleepybrett »

remuskaos wrote: post #266
munificent wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clearly was not designed for that purpose, I'm not aware of evidence that support that claim. If I ask ChatGPT "Give me a recipe for squirrel lemon stew" and it so happens that one person did write a recipe for that exact thing on the Internet, then I would expect that the most accurate, truthful response would be that exact recipe. Anything else would essentially be hallucination.

Recipes are not copyrightable for that exact reason.

Substitue recipe for literally any other piece of unique information.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#386

Post by itishappy »

scott_w wrote: post #382
itishappy wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No copy-paste was explicitly used. They compressed it into a latent space and recreated from memory, perhaps with a dash of "creativity" for flavor. Hypothetically, of course. The distinction is pedantic but important, IMHO. AI doesn't explicitly copy either.

But isn’t that the same as memorising it and rewriting the implementation from memory? I’m sure “it wasn’t an exact reproduction” is not much of a defence.

I sure think so. I also think that (to first order) this is exactly what modern AI products do. Is a lossy copy still a copy?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#387

Post by sleepybrett »

wongarsu wrote: post #66
whimsicalism wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. There have definitely been well publicized examples of this happening, like the quake inverse square root

It reads like the judge required them to show it happened to their code, not to any code in general. That's a much higher bar. There are thousands of instances of fast inverse square root in the training data but only one copy of your random github repositories. Getting to model to reproduce your code verbatim might be possible for all we know, but it isn't trivial.

It could be forced, of course. I can republish my copyrighted code millions of times all over the internet. Next time they retrain there is a good chance my code will end up in their corpus, maybe many many times, reinforcing it statistically.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#388

Post by CodeWriter23 »

loceng wrote: post #357
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Moot in your opinion. The idea is to bring the future more expediently by providing temporary incentive to pioneers reaching into the future.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#389

Post by sleepybrett »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #89
squarefoot wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Isn't that akin to destruction of evidence?

Legally? No. In spirit? ... Probably? Unlike most LLMs, Github copilot can trivially solve their copyright problem by just using only code they have the right to reproduce. They have a giant corpus of code tagged with license, SELECT BY license MIT/Equivalent and you're done, problem solved because those licenses explicitly grant permission for this kind of reuse. (It's still not very cash money to take open source w…

Have the copyleft people, or anyone else, produced some boilerplate licenses that explicitly deny use in training models?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#390

Post by Zambyte »

adra wrote: post #358
Zambyte wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nati…

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

Do you think the vast "amount of content we produce" is actually propped up by copyright? Have you ever heard of someone who started their career on YouTube due to copyright? On the contrary, how often have you heard of people stopping their YouTube career due to copyright, or explicitly limiting the content they create? I have only heard of cases of the latter. In fact, the latter partially happened to me.

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

You are making an assumption that people should reap (monetary) benefits for creating things. What you are ignoring is that the world where digital copies are effectively free is also the world where original works are insanely cheap as well. In this world, people create regardless of monetary gain.

To make this point: how much money did you make from this comment that you posted? It's covered by copyright, so surely you would not have created it if not for your own benefit.

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