Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 505 posts

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#441

Post by account42 »

seadan83 wrote: post #412
pdonis wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Technically speaking, copyright laws create piracy as without them we would still have our free speech rights to share whatever we want without the approval from third parties and thus so-called piracy aka copyrigh infringement would not be a thing. Laws also hardly prevent sharing of copyrighted content, they only make it illegal.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#442

Post by account42 »

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?

Yes, and better quality content too as it doesn't need to be compromised as much to allow for commercial exploitation in the current model.

But these are also not the only ways to fund content. Patronage in particular does not need to be restricted to singular rich patrons but can be extended to any group of people that decide to come together to make something exist. This does already happen to some extend (e.g. Kickstarter) but is actually hobbled by copyright where the norm is that the creator retains all rights while individual contributors to the funding are restricted in how they are allowed to share the creation they helped realize.

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

By having fans willing to pay him to create new content.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#443

Post by account42 »

freejazz wrote: post #428
copywrong2 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah many industries like: - Big Corps that buy IP - Patent Trolls - Companies that fuck over artists

Why would anyone make video games if they couldn't make money from selling them?

Video games would actually be better of if the profit incentive was removed. Modern high-budget video games have become indistinguishable from slot machines that are optimized by literal psychologists to get you to waste as much of your money (and time) as possible without providing any meaningful experience. I'd rather see much fewer games created if what remains are games focused on having artistic and/or educational value rather than investment opportunities for wall street.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#444

Post by account42 »

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…

Many of the funding models Josh listed are directpayment for creative work being done. If anything, in the current model creative work is often not paid directly (unless done as work for hire where the creative doesn't get to own their creation) but instead is a gamble that you can later on profit from the "intellectual property".

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#446

Post by account42 »

stale2002 wrote: post #313
JoshTriplett wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a much smaller lobbying budget than the AI industry, and you didn't flagrantly rush to copy billions of copyrighted works as quickly as possible and then push a narrative acting like that's the immutable status quo that must continue to be permitted lest the now-massive industry built atop copyright violation be destroyed. Violate one or two copyrights, get sued or DMCAed out of existence. Violate billions,…

> acting like that's the immutable status quo It is immutable. What are you going to do about it? Confiscate everyone's home gamer PCs? Even in the most extreme hypothetical where lawsuits shutdown OpenAI, that doesn't delete the stable diffusion models that I have on my external hard drives. The tech is out there. It's too late.

Somehow this argument does not seem to hold for copyright enforcement of works that have been shared over BitTorrent and it's predecessors for decades.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#447

Post by freejazz »

account42 wrote: post #443
freejazz wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone make video games if they couldn't make money from selling them?

Video games would actually be better of if the profit incentive was removed. Modern high-budget video games have become indistinguishable from slot machines that are optimized by literal psychologists to get you to waste as much of your money (and time) as possible without providing any meaningful experience. I'd rather see much fewer games created if what remains are games focused on having artistic and/or education…

This is just your own sanctimony, go to a gamestop and ask people if they think we should have an IP regime where there is no gta or football games. What a ridiculous response.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#448

Post by freejazz »

sham1 wrote: post #436
freejazz wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone make video games if they couldn't make money from selling them?

Out of passion for the art. See also: free (libre) software video games released and distributed for free (gratis). Of course, money is a huge motivator, but so is self-expression.

Well they certainly aren't on level with each other in terms of motivation, so I don't think it's fair for you to say they are both huge motivators.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#449

Post by vharuck »

warkdarrior wrote: post #367
Retric wrote: 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 terms of service (TOS), in my non-lawyerly opinion, clearly states the license for uploaded works granted to them by users doesn't cover using the data to train an LLM or any kind of model beyond those used to improve the hosting service:

>You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time

>This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

I think the important questions are (1) whether "the Service" includes Copilot, and (2) whether GitHub is selling users' content with Copilot.

For (1), I'm unhappy to admit Copilot probably does fall under "the Service," which is nebulously defined as "applications, software, products, and services provided by GitHub." But I'll still say that users' could not agree to this use while GitHub was training The Copilot model but hadn't yet announced it. At that time, a reasonable user would've believed GitHub's services only covered repository hosting, user accounts, and the extra features attached to those (issue trackers, organizations, etc).

GitHub could defend themselves on point (2) by saying they aren't selling the code, instead selling a product that used the code as input. But does that differ much from selling an online service that relies on running user code? The code is input for their servers, and it doesn't need to be distributed as part of that questionable service. But it's a clear break from the TOS.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#450

Post by account42 »

sim7c00 wrote: post #291
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…

it depends on how much tax you are paying really. if you pay billions in taxes annually, they might see past it. if the company you copied from pays billions in taxes anually. you will go to jail. if this isn't painfuly obvious by now...

Doesn't seem that taxes are the deciding factor seing as how little the government cares about tax dodging done by corporations and the rich.
Post reply on HN