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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

#451

Post by freejazz »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #416
eropple wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> the much larger players who are mass-copying works largely by individuals or smaller entities have become effectively exempt from copyright

That's not true. I'm a copyright attorney and I spend my day extracting money from the largest players on behalf of individuals.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#452

Post by account42 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #219
whimsicalism wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

of course for standing. but it seems like with the right plaintiffs this could have gone forward

If it only copies code that has been widely stolen already then that's a lot weaker of a case and is something they can do a lot to prevent on a technical level.

Code that has been copied widely != code that has been widely stolen.

Open source licenses allow sharing under certain conditions.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#453

Post by account42 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #157
KnightHawk3 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a large gap between public domain and GPL. For starters if Copilot is emitting GPL code for closed source projects... that's copyright infringement.

That would be license infringement, not copyright infringement.

Without adhering to the conditions of the GPL you have no license to redistribute the code and are therefore infringing the copyright of the author.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#454

Post by account42 »

witx wrote: post #328
jeroenhd wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Wine fork built using an LLM trained on leaked Windows code might be pretty useful.

You'd get a Wine full of ads, the need for an account to use and the not so occasional BSoD /s

Plus probably worse off at running programs written for both old and new Windows versions than current Wine.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#455

Post by account42 »

lumb63 wrote: post #314

It seems to me that regardless of the outcome of this case, some developers do not want to have their code used to train LLMs. There may need to be a new license created to restrict this usage of software. Or, maybe developers will simply stop contributing open source. In today’s day and age, where open source code serves as a tool to pad Microsoft’s pockets, I certainly will not publish any of my software open sourc…

I get the sentiment but remember that OSS has always come with the caveat that someone you do not approve of benefits from your code. That part isn't really new with LLMs (which I'm definitely not a fan of). Really this goes for productive pursuit where you do not have total control of your clients. I think it's better to focus on how your work benefits those you want to benefit than to worry about how leeches also profit.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#456

Post by account42 »

snvzz wrote: post #264

All GitHub needs to do to make most happy is offer an opt-out toggle. It still doesn't.

That wouldn't and shouldn't make most people happy. Repository owner != author for all the code - that's kind of the point of open source.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#457

Post by account42 »

archontes wrote: post #200
carom wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public is not learning from it. A person or corporation is creating a derivative work of it. Training a model is deriving a function from the training data. It is not "a human learning something by reading it".

It's an extreme stretch to say that the model weights are a derivative work of the training data given the legal definition of "derivative work".

It's not more a stretch than saying that re-encoding a PNG as a JPEG is a derivative work even though the process is lossy and the resulting bits look nothing alike.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#458

Post by FireBeyond »

account42 wrote: post #453
FireBeyond wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be license infringement, not copyright infringement.

Without adhering to the conditions of the GPL you have no license to redistribute the code and are therefore infringing the copyright of the author.

Apparently, the court disagrees with you, and doesn't find "emitting" the code a copyright infringement.

It'd be a long bow to draw to say that what is akin to a search result of a snippet of code is "redistributing a software package".

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#460

Post by viridian »

justinclift wrote: post #270
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,…

> Violate one or two copyrights, get sued or DMCAed out of existence. Violate billions, on the other hand, and you magically become immune to the rules everyone else has to follow. Sounds like the same concept as commonly said of "murderer vs conqueror". Could probably be applied to many other fields for disruption too. Not the murderer bit (!), more the "break one or two laws -> scaled up massively to a potential ne…

"If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
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