31–40 of 156 posts
Copilot often feels like an automation of clean room reimplementation of protected materials.
I think that the author has a warped idea of how LLMs work, and that infects its reasoning. Also, I see no mention of the inequality of this new "copyright free code generation" situation it defends; As much as Microsoft thinks all code is ripe for taking, I can't imagine how happy they would be if an anonymous person drops a model trained on all leaked Windows code and the ReactOS people start using it. Or if employ…
> What is astonishing about the current debate is that the calls for the broadest possible interpretation of copyright are now coming from within the Free Software community. That should not be astonishing. The Free Software community has made it clear from day 1 that the GPL can only achieve its goals through enforcement of copyright. If the authors wanted their code to be made use of in non-Free software, they woul…
What is astonishing is that a large proportion of Free Software community relies on a platform owned by Microsoft.
This is missing the largest argument in my opinion. The weights are the derivative work of the GPL licensed code and should therefore be released under the GPL. I would say these companies release their weights or simply not train on copyleft code. It is truly amazing how many people will shill for these massive corporations that claim they love open source or that their AI is open while they profit off of the violat…
Since weights are not distributed only used by Github to provide the service, they need not worry about GPL atleast. I don't know about AGPL.
And for which jurisdictions has this been established? What is the legal argument that "weights" are derivative but output is not?
I'm surprised it's so clear cut as you say, but I haven't really been following the whole kerfuffle.
This is missing the largest argument in my opinion. The weights are the derivative work of the GPL licensed code and should therefore be released under the GPL. I would say these companies release their weights or simply not train on copyleft code. It is truly amazing how many people will shill for these massive corporations that claim they love open source or that their AI is open while they profit off of the violat…
This is missing the largest argument in my opinion. The weights are the derivative work of the GPL licensed code and should therefore be released under the GPL. I would say these companies release their weights or simply not train on copyleft code. It is truly amazing how many people will shill for these massive corporations that claim they love open source or that their AI is open while they profit off of the violat…
Since weights are not distributed only used by Github to provide the service, they need not worry about GPL atleast. I don't know about AGPL.
If you can get a decent facsimile of licensed code out the other end, how is it really any different from lossy compression? I doubt the courts would consider a lossy re-encode of a disney movie as free from copyright.
> What is astonishing about the current debate is that the calls for the broadest possible interpretation of copyright are now coming from within the Free Software community. That should not be astonishing. The Free Software community has made it clear from day 1 that the GPL can only achieve its goals through enforcement of copyright. If the authors wanted their code to be made use of in non-Free software, they woul…
> The Free Software community has made it clear from day 1 that the GPL can only achieve its goals through enforcement of copyright We should mention when we say this, although I think it is self-evident, that the preferable alternative is reducing the scope of copyright across the board -- be it with shorter time frames (I'd argue even twenty years total is too long!) or some other means. To programmers and develope…
Would reducing copyright duration actually help with that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since weights are not distributed only used by Github to provide the service, they need not worry about GPL atleast. I don't know about AGPL.
If those weights are a derivative of GPL'd code in a different form, and the results generate things derived from that derivative, then the generated code is still under license. "How much change is enough" has always been a gray area for courts and humans to decide. If you can get a decent facsimile of licensed code out the other end, how is it really any different from lossy compression? I doubt the courts would co…
That's not really Microsoft's problem as long as people aren't afraid of using Copilot to generate (potentially GPL'd) code. And from what I've generally seen from genAI discussions at work, people think very little about any legal implications.
I think that the author has a warped idea of how LLMs work, and that infects its reasoning. Also, I see no mention of the inequality of this new "copyright free code generation" situation it defends; As much as Microsoft thinks all code is ripe for taking, I can't imagine how happy they would be if an anonymous person drops a model trained on all leaked Windows code and the ReactOS people start using it. Or if employ…
These situations might trigger a lot of issues, but none related to copyright. If you work for MS, then move to another company, there is no copyright infringement if you simply generate new code based on whatever you read at MS. There might be some rule regarding non-competitive, etc, but these are not related to copyright.
The very basic question is how the LLM got trained and how it got access to the source. If MS source code would leak, you cannot sue people for reading it.
> The output of a machine simply does not qualify for copyright protection – it is in the public domain. The machine, such as it is, is generally not acting on its own. A person operates the machine, and presumably is on the hook for infringement on some level. Consider: what if one directs the machine to reproduce a specific body of code and it ostensibly does so. Was there copying? What if I have a person read out…
I've coded dozens of procedural asset/"art" generators. It's really surprising to me that, apparently, the output of my creative work (i.e. the novel algorithms) is not protected by copyright.