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Generative AI profits off your code. Make them pay for it

paytotrain.ai

11–20 of 57 posts

Re: Generative AI profits off your code. Make them pay for it

#11
I see that your lawyers have reviewed the licensing terms. Great!

However, have they reviewed Microsoft's claims that their use of code for Copilot is open source? And if they have, is there somewhere I can read that analysis?

Now, Microsoft could be wrong on that claim, but until someone convinces me otherwise I'm going to assume their lawyers did their due diligence and they're correct. If Microsoft is correct about that it doesn't matter what you put in your license, and thus this is useless.

Re: Generative AI profits off your code. Make them pay for it

#13
post #2

TL;DR our lawyers wrote a clause to protect open source code from being used by generative AI companies for profit. You can find it here: paytotrain.ai A legal grey area exists as to whether publicly available creations (code or art) can be used to train datasets for generative AI projects without infringing their creators' underlying copyrights. Other types of claims, such as violation of license agreements and DMCA…

Thank you. Could you paste the Humans Only Clause here so we can read it? Here was my attempt to write a clause prohibiting language model training/inference: https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304fa... 3. Use in source or binary form for the construction or operation of predictive software generation systems is prohibited. How does the Humans Only Clause fix the flaws in my attempt? The Humans On…

That wouldn't license code. That's just license text that happens to be in a string. Not sure why this bugfix site is being used instead of just pastebin with text.

Re: Generative AI profits off your code. Make them pay for it

#14
post #4

If you put your code on Github, it's bound by the TOS, which states ( https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... ): > We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. 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 Servi…

It shouldn't even hinge on a TOS.

If Microsoft loses this case, it actually means Microsoft wins and we all lose.

Who has a large enough corpora of training data? Only institutional copyright holders.

This is probably going to play out like Oracle vs. Google when Google suddenly realized that they should lose and intentionally threw the case.

I'm so worried about this case. Treating copyrighted training data as fair use, and letting models learn as a child might learn from a book or movie, is the best way to proceed. It widens the playing field for both development and disruption.

Re: Generative AI profits off your code. Make them pay for it

#15
post #4

If you put your code on Github, it's bound by the TOS, which states ( https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... ): > We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. 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 Servi…

You casting doubt on this with a frontal assault. Read your post and wanted to check out the 'show' that was implied but all immediately my eyes fell upon this:

Add our “Humans Only Clause” to your MIT license. Your code is still open source — for human developers only.

Sore disappointed that there is no entertainment involved. That's actually a pretty cool idea.

So github doesn't have (could be wrong) a default license grant or a over-riding licensing agreement. Your project, your license. If you change the license of your project, that is entirely your choice.

As to the Q of should we be generous to our corporate masters or take this opportunity to stick to the man and get rewarded for our mind products and compensation for being geeks! Society does owe something, does it not? /G

It's worth having a discussion about it, imo.

Re: Generative AI profits off your code. Make them pay for it

#16
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, my content, but I don't necessarily have the ability to give them this, because people uploading code to Github don't always have the ability to grant them any license on the code uploaded.

The only way to add or read the license is to give them read and write access to all public repos in your Github account. Strange.

I can touch on this, the read and write access is for future iterations to be able to automatically add / append the license text to the file. Adding the licenses one by one is tedious.

Re: Generative AI profits off your code. Make them pay for it

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. Could you paste the Humans Only Clause here so we can read it? Here was my attempt to write a clause prohibiting language model training/inference: https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304fa... 3. Use in source or binary form for the construction or operation of predictive software generation systems is prohibited. How does the Humans Only Clause fix the flaws in my attempt? The Humans On…

That wouldn't license code. That's just license text that happens to be in a string. Not sure why this bugfix site is being used instead of just pastebin with text.

I'm presenting the license text in a creative and unusual way that real hackers might enjoy.

If that confused you, or you consider it "obnoxious", then you are not the target audience.

That's ok. Hacker News is not 100% hackers!

Re: Generative AI profits off your code. Make them pay for it

#19
post #14
post #4

If you put your code on Github, it's bound by the TOS, which states ( https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... ): > We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. 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 Servi…

It shouldn't even hinge on a TOS. If Microsoft loses this case, it actually means Microsoft wins and we all lose. Who has a large enough corpora of training data? Only institutional copyright holders. This is probably going to play out like Oracle vs. Google when Google suddenly realized that they should lose and intentionally threw the case. I'm so worried about this case. Treating copyrighted training data as fair…

I would happily contribute all of my public source code under whatever license to a dataset that required models to also be open sourced. I am not OK with Microsoft creating a derivative work (Copilot's model) off of GPL code and not releasing the weights under the GPL.

Re: Generative AI profits off your code. Make them pay for it

#20

I see that your lawyers have reviewed the licensing terms. Great! However, have they reviewed Microsoft's claims that their use of code for Copilot is open source? And if they have, is there somewhere I can read that analysis? Now, Microsoft could be wrong on that claim, but until someone convinces me otherwise I'm going to assume their lawyers did their due diligence and they're correct. If Microsoft is correct abou…

Yeah this is about as effective as making a FB post saying "I hereby revoke Meta's permission to use my photos". It's a surprisingly common theme on /r/oldpeoplefacebook
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