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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

#411

Post by seadan83 »

torginus wrote: post #284
archontes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not get your ass kicked. Copyright doesn't protect function, to the point where the court will assess the degree to which the style of the code can be separated from the function. In the even that they aren't separable, the code is not copyrightable. https://www.wardandsmith.com/articles/supreme-court-announce... https://easlerlaw.com/software-computer-code-copyrighted#:~:...

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.

Cover songs have a special abd explicit law covering them. Not relevant.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#412

Post by seadan83 »

pdonis wrote: post #178
adra wrote: 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.

> 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…

Copyright laws prevent piracy. It is interesting to live in a country with no enforced copyrights and EVERYTHING is pirated. I think it is easy to not know about that context and just see the stick side of copyright vis-a-vis big money corporations

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#413

Post by TomatoCo »

crote wrote: post #172
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #5

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…

With how modern video codecs use data from previous frames you could make a not-entirely-specious argument that we already have a tool that can do this and it's called ffmpeg.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#414

Post by eropple »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #381
eropple wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

We converged on a system that protects the commercialization of copies because, in practice, "the first copy costs $X0,000" is not a viable way to pay your rent.

If we want art to be the province of the willfully destitute or the idle rich (and I do mean rich, the destruction of a functional middle class has compacted the available free time of huge swaths of society!), this is a good way to do it. I would rather other voices be included.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#415

Post by JoshTriplett »

sleepybrett wrote: post #383
JoshTriplett wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There are several other publishers who regularly go after gameplay footage of people playing their games. It's not as visible, because it's hard to notice the absence of a thing.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#416

Post by JoshTriplett »

eropple wrote: post #414
JoshTriplett wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

We converged on a system that protects the commercialization of copies because, in practice, "the first copy costs $X0,000" is not a viable way to pay your rent. If we want art to be the province of the willfully destitute or the idle rich (and I do mean rich , the destruction of a functional middle class has compacted the available free time of huge swaths of society!), this is a good way to do it. I would rather ot…

We converged on a system that makes copying illegal because that system was invented in an era when the only people who could copy were those with specialized equipment (e.g. printing presses). In that world, those who might do the copying were often larger than those whose works were being copied, and copyright had more potential to be "protective".

That system hasn't been updated for a world in which everyone can make perfect-fidelity copies or modifications at the touch of a key; on the contrary, it's been made stricter. And worse, per the story we're commenting on here, the much larger players who are mass-copying works largely by individuals or smaller entities have become effectively exempt from copyright, while copyright continues to restrict individuals and smaller entities, and the systems designed by those large players and trained on all those copied works are crowding individuals out of art and other creative endeavors.

I don't think the current system deserves valorizing, nor can it be credited as being intentionally designed to bring about most of the effects it currently serves.

I'm not suggesting that deleting copyright overnight will produce a perfect system, nor am I suggesting that it has zero positive effects. I'm suggesting that it's doing substantial harm and needs a massive overhaul, not minor tweaks.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#418

Post by squarefoot »

bawolff wrote: post #409
squarefoot wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, sorta. We're talking about software, therefore a piece of code that does something programmatically isn't like the drunk driver in a car that may cause more accidents, and although we aren't sure about that we prevent him/her to drive anyway just to be safe. The software would most certainly repeat its routine because it has be written to do so, that's why I wondered about destruction of evidence; by removing/modifying it, or placing filters, they would prevent it from repeating the wrongdoing, but also take away any means of auditing the software to find what happened and why.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#419

Post by cmcaleer »

giamma wrote: post #285
archontes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not get your ass kicked. Copyright doesn't protect function, to the point where the court will assess the degree to which the style of the code can be separated from the function. In the even that they aren't separable, the code is not copyrightable. https://www.wardandsmith.com/articles/supreme-court-announce... https://easlerlaw.com/software-computer-code-copyrighted#:~:...

Software like Blackduck or Scanoss is designed to identify exactly that type of behaviour. It is used very often to scan closed source software and to check whether it contains snippets that are copied from open source with incompatible licenses (e.g. GPL). To be able to do so, these softwares build a syntax tree of what your code snippet is, and compare the tree structure with similar trees in open source software w…

But there has to be a threshold. If a GPL project contains a function which takes two variables and returns x+y, and I have functionally identical code in a project I made with an incompatible license, it is obviously absurd to sue me.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#420

Post by FireBeyond »

immibis wrote: post #351
FireBeyond wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No.

Copyright infringement could be emitting the code in a manner that exceeds fair use.

The license gives you permission to utilize the code in a certain way. If Copilot gives you GPLed code that you then put into your closed source project, you have infringed the license, not Copilot.

> If you don't meet the conditions, it's still copyright infringement like before.

Licensing and copyright are two separate things. Neither has anything to do with the other. You can be in compliance with copyright, but out of license compliance, you can be the reverse. But nothing about copyright infringement here is tied to licensing.

To be clear: I am a person who trashed his Reddit account when they said they were going to license that text for training (trashed in the sense of "ran a script that scrubbed each of my comments first with nonsense edits, then deleted them"). I am a photographer who has significant concerns with training other models on people's creative output. I have similar concerns about Copilot.

But confusing licensing and copyright here only muddies waters.

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