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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

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Weird Al explicitly seeks out permission from copyright holders and won't do a cover if he doesn't get their go-ahead [1].

Pretty much the exact opposite of all these AI companies :p

https://www.weirdal.com/archives/faq/

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#392

Can you insist or put instructions that AIs do not train on your code? If they train on your code but don't produce the exact same output, is there any protection you can have from that?

More thinking out loud than answering your question, but nightshade for code and other plain text formats would be cool.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#393
post #307

I am not strongly opinionated on this, but the very fact Microsoft used all the code it could find, bar their own has always looked suspicious to me.

I mean, I imagine it used a lot of their public code, like VS code, typescript, the new windows terminal, or anything on https://github.com/microsoft . They didn't use their private code, but they didn't use anyone else's private code either.

They claim to not use anyone's private code, but I wouldn't trust the psychopathic C-suite at M$ not to murder kittens and human babies if it made the line go up a quarter of a percentage point, yet alone something like this.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#394
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You just proved my point with your second sentence - that everything in the future will come.

And bringing things more expediently is the actual opinion here, unsupported, where arguably it actually slows down not only progress but the value of that progress not being as widely distributed as it otherwise would be.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#395
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Yes, and none of those people are making a living at creating things. Again, not true. One of the most famous examples is likely Naomi Novik, who is a bestselling author, in addition to a prolific producer of derivative works published on AO3. Many other commercially successful authors publish derivative works on this platform as well. > It is true that without our current copyright regime, the "industries" that pr…

> not true

Sorry, I meant they're not making a living at creating derivative works of copyrighted content. They can't, for the reasons you give. Nor can other people make a living creating derivative works of their commercially published work. That is an obvious barrier to creation.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#396
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that this is exactly what will happen; not just with code, but also prose and artwork. Someone is likely to design an LLM that is specifically trained to do exactly that. Lots of money to be made...

I was mainly inspired by this section: > Specifically, the judge cited the study's observation that Copilot reportedly "rarely emits memorized code in benign situations, and most memorization occurs only when the model has been prompted with long code excerpts that are very similar to the training data." That almost sounds like it'd be fine to train an "art transformation model" which takes an image and transforms it…

That sounds like the opposite from the quote. The art transformation model you propose WOULD emit memorized art in benign situations, so in that judge's opinion it WOULD count as plagiarism.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#398
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GitHub’s web server is not the same thing as Copilot and needs separate permission.

GitHub didn’t just copy open source code they copped everything without respect to license. As such attribution which may have allowed some copying isn’t generally relevant.

Really a public repo on GitHub doesn’t even mean the person uploading it owns the code, if they needed to verify ownership before training they couldn’t have started. Thus by necessity they must take the stance that copyright is irrelevant.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#399
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 up…

I disagree with the statement "they are trained to duplicate" because "to" implies a purpose/intent which is incorrect. I.e. "they are trained with the purpose of duplication". This is I believe pretty uncontroversially false. We already have methods to duplicate data. They are trained with the purpose of learning abstract patterns is much more correct. One of the biggest _problems_ of training is duplication, aka over-fitting. To say it's the purpose is imo disengenious.

Ah I see what they meant by that statement. It is true that supervised learning operates on labelled input/output pairs, and that neural networks generally use gradient descent/back propogation. (Disclaimer: it's been a few years since I've done any of this myself so don't quite remember it that well, and the field has changed a lot). Note since the parameter space of the neural network is usually _significantly_ smaller than the training data set, a network will not tend to minimise that cost function near 0 for an individual sample since doing so will worsen the overall result. There is inherent "fudging", although near identical output can potentially happen. The statement here is more reasonable and similar to the training process than the first.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#400
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, the ancient Greeks were smoking opium. Nobody said that "everyone" was doing it, but its use was pretty widespread in neolithic Europe even before Sumerians were cultivating poppies Mesopotamia, back in 3400BCE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium

I see, thanks for the clarification.
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