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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

#401

Post by immibis »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #33
devmor wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the matter of artwork there's no need for suspicion - it is and has been happening for a while now. There are entire online databases dedicated to providing non-consenting artist's "styles" as downloadable model parameters by name.

I sure wish I could non-consent to people observing me in the world, I'd like to move through society invisibly and only show myself when it benefitted me. Unfortunately, the only answer is to stay inside if I don't want people to see me.

Note that in Europe (broadly speaking), this is a right people have.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#403

Post by whythre »

copywrong2 wrote: post #322
tomxor wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US copyright does protect for "substantial similarity" [0]. And at the other end of the spectrum, this has been abused in absurd ways to argue that substantially different code has infringed. In Zenimax vs Oculus they basically argued that a bunch of really abstract yet entirely generic parts of the code were shared, we are talking some nested for loops, certain combinations of if statements, and due to a lack of a q…

Copyright is abused often. Our modern version of copyright is BS and only benefits large corps who buy a lot of IP.

Yep. Now it is a legal cudgel wielded most effectively by corporate giants. It has mutated to become completely philosophically opposed to what it was expressly created to protect.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#404

Post by scott_w »

itishappy wrote: post #386
scott_w wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I would have thought so but I’m not a lawyer. The article suggests DMCA is intended for direct copies so that’s why it failed here. Maybe more general copyright laws would apply for lossy copies.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#405

Post by adra »

Zambyte wrote: post #390
adra wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 limitin…

Spending 6 minutes of my life engaging in political discourse is a far swing from hundreds of individuals producing a movie that took millions of dollars to produce. Both are just as easily digitally repeatable, but the expensive content is likely way more beneficial to society as a whole. I am choosing to engage in this hobby because I receive the means to provide this content recreationally. I fail to see this scaling to anything of any real quality outside of some isolated instances. For instance, some video game enthusiasts are using the work of Bethesda to make a new game call fallout London. It's a knock off fallout game using the base code engine that Bethesda built for their commercial games. The game is exceptional in that it could actually achieve a mostly compatible level of a commercial product as long as you ignore that they're leveraging the engines and story which were developed by commercial interests. In the same time, 10's to hundreds of thousands of people are employed every year to produce video games for commercial reasons. Will they all stop making games if copyright was dead? No, but the vast majority would.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#406

Post by p0w3n3d »

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…

How is it anything different? You have no money. And Microsoft has. The problem on this is that it will give a huge leverage to rich companies over poor, because those rich can steal (memorize with AI) anything including music

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#407

Post by seanhunter »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #342
torginus wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You're maybe thinking about this in a way that's not helping you to understand the system and why it works the way it does. It's very clear when you think of a specific case.

Say you want to make a recording of "Valerie" by the Zutons. You need permission (a license) from the songwriters (the Zutons presumably) to do this. You usually get this permission by paying a fee. Having done that, you can do your recording. Whenever that recording is played (or used) you will get a performance royalty and they will get a songwriting royalty.

Say you want to use a cover of "Valerie" by the Zutons in your film or whatever. Say the Mark Ronson version featuring Amy Winehouse. You need permission (a license) from the person who produced that version (Mark Ronson or his company) and will need to pay them a fee, some of which goes to the songwriter as part of their deal with Mark Ronson which gave him the license to produce his cover in the first place.

The Zutons don't have the right to sell you a license to Mark Ronson's version so if that's the version you want you have to negotiate with him. Likewise he doesn't have the right to sell you a license like the license he has (ie a license to do a recording/performance) so if you want that you have to negotiate with them.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#408

Post by cdrini »

sensanaty wrote: post #393
cdrini wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're free to speculate, but they have on multiple occasions said they don't train on private repos. Furthermore, there's no real incentive for them to do so, since (1) there are a lot of public repos, and (2) training on private repos opens them up to leaking things like private keys which would be a nightmare. It just doesn't make a lot of sense for them to do it.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#409

Post by bawolff »

squarefoot wrote: post #265
bawolff wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think it is pretty obviously not. Is taking away a drunk driver's keys (before they get in the car) destruction of the evidence of their drunk driving?

This is not what I meant. By placing a copyright filter and claiming it never happened (please read the line I was replying to) before the system can be audited, they're indeed taking away the drunk driver's keys, which is a good thing, but also removing the offending car before Police arrives.

In this metaphor, removing the car of someone who was going to drink and drive but didn't, is certainly not a crime. Presumably though you mean removing the car after drunk driving actually took place - which might be, but probably depends a lot on if the person knew, and what the intent of the action was.

In the current case - its unclear if any crime took place at all, it seems clear that the primary intent was to prevent future crime not hide evidence of past ones. Most importantly the past version of the app is not destroyed (presumably). Github still has the version of the software without the copyright filter. If relavent and appropriate, the court could order them to produce the original version. It can't be destroying evidence if the evidence was not destroyed.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#410

Post by CodeWriter23 »

loceng wrote: post #394
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You continue to miss my point. Your point is a lazy, "the future will get here whenever it does" perspective. Mine is incentivizing discovery brings future innovations sooner.
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