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FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

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Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#101

Post by austincheney »

xxpor wrote: post #13
davisr wrote: post #7

The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If megacorps like Microsoft can sue people into oblivion for violating their copyright terms, people can sue Microsoft into oblivion for violating theirs. I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game, but I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation be…

Software licenses have barely been tested in court, let alone how they apply to code injected and combined with other code via machine learning. You're extremely overconfident about how this will actually play out. For one, just because your code is covered by the GPL, it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable. It has to demonstrate creativity. That's why you don't have to worry about writing fo…

A software license, like any license, is a permission to operate.

> it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable

It is if you can prove reproduction apart from your own original work (fair use). Unlike patents copyright doesn’t protect uniqueness. It is only a shield from reproduction, and if reproduction is demonstrable to a court you are likely at risk.

https://cws.auburn.edu/OVPR/pm/tt/copyrightvplagiarism

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#102

Post by josefx »

xxpor wrote: post #13
davisr wrote: post #7

The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If megacorps like Microsoft can sue people into oblivion for violating their copyright terms, people can sue Microsoft into oblivion for violating theirs. I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game, but I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation be…

Software licenses have barely been tested in court, let alone how they apply to code injected and combined with other code via machine learning. You're extremely overconfident about how this will actually play out. For one, just because your code is covered by the GPL, it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable. It has to demonstrate creativity. That's why you don't have to worry about writing fo…

> it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable.

copilot is known to reproduce entire blocks of text including non functional parts like comments.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#103

Post by sangnoir »

hartator wrote: post #51
davisr wrote: post #7

The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If megacorps like Microsoft can sue people into oblivion for violating their copyright terms, people can sue Microsoft into oblivion for violating theirs. I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game, but I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation be…

> Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. Some of us think is detrimental to humanity at whole.

True, but while they exist,they should be evenly applied

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#105

Post by dylan604 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #96
dylan604 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My explanation will not be popular here on HN, but I'm never one to shy away. Especially when asked directly. Buying a book, buying an audio CD, or buying a DVD/Blu-ray is granting the holder permission to read,listen,view that product as a single instance. You can lend them out, but that's all you're really allowed to do with them. The text,audio/video is not owned by you to do with as you please. People obviously d…

> The fact that people feel like they can do anything without the common courtesy of asking for permission is troubling to me that we've lost something as a society. I see this sentiment a lot in FOSS spaces but I don't really understand why. The role of judicial process _isn't_ to provide a guiding moral philosophy around social organization. Depending on the government in question that's either a role of government…

In the realm of FOSS, I feel like it's not the same comparisons. The FOSS devs created the work, released that work with the express knowing that someone else could update/modify that work. Writing/art/videos are rarely released with copyright that allows this kind of modification. That's a huge difference. There are some FOSS releases that allow people to use for personal/private use while restricting commercial use. This is closer to the books/movies type of scenario.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#106

Post by belorn »

antocv wrote: post #100
belorn wrote: post #6

An interesting initiative from FSF, through I suspect the answer the most of the question will be answered when someone attempts a similar projects in a more traditional copyright-restrictive area. As an example I would like to see is a Cosinger, where the AI is trained using songs on youtube and streaming services. With the final product, a user start to sing and the algorithm attempt to sing along and give the sing…

A Cosinger would be illegal unethical, profit killing, anti democracy and ultimately anti our very own freedom to own intellectual property. /s The same difference as allowing Google to prosper while beating down ThePirateBay, another search engine.

I predict it is very likely we will see a court case where a smaller actor will take public available information as training data and get sued for copyright information. It will be interesting to see if, just like in the pirate bay case, the courts will be creative. In the TPB case, the accused was found guilty of an Swedish anti-biker gang law that was written with the intention to shut down biker bars.

When copilot came out, one thing it reminded me of was the ethical considerations of face generators in animation. The output naturally has some similarities with the training data, and it is trivial to use a limited set of actors in order to create faces with canny similarities of the actors. A question that people asked (here on HN if I recall) was if you needed permission from those actors to use in the training set, or if this would allow anyone to "steal" the face of public faces and create semi-look alike that can then be used in anything from porn to advertisement.

The law is undoubtedly going to catch up.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#107

Post by dylan604 »

liamwire wrote: post #97
dylan604 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My explanation will not be popular here on HN, but I'm never one to shy away. Especially when asked directly. Buying a book, buying an audio CD, or buying a DVD/Blu-ray is granting the holder permission to read,listen,view that product as a single instance. You can lend them out, but that's all you're really allowed to do with them. The text,audio/video is not owned by you to do with as you please. People obviously d…

> My explanation will not be popular here on HN How is this better than ’bring on the downvotes’? Moving on, I’ll put this to you: you claim training a ML model against copyrighted text is in violation of the ‘permission’ granted by the rights holder. However, flip this on its head for a moment – that’s basically all human brains do. Clearly, the greatest writers of our time haven’t written their works in a vacuum. R…

I don't agree to your premise. Humans can consume creative works and be influenced, this is not in question. Unless one is an impressionist, they aren't going to try to recreate exactly the works done by the artists they have been influenced by. Even if an artist does something inspired/influenced by, they have pretty much stated that. Musicians cite prior bands, as do writers, painters, etc all credit those influences.

I'm probably just a curmudgeon, but I don't understand the point of Copilot. So I'm probably not the best to opine about it. However, I am very opinionated about copyright in manner that typical flows against HN group think.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#108

Post by Karrot_Kream »

dylan604 wrote: post #105
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that people feel like they can do anything without the common courtesy of asking for permission is troubling to me that we've lost something as a society. I see this sentiment a lot in FOSS spaces but I don't really understand why. The role of judicial process _isn't_ to provide a guiding moral philosophy around social organization. Depending on the government in question that's either a role of government…

In the realm of FOSS, I feel like it's not the same comparisons. The FOSS devs created the work, released that work with the express knowing that someone else could update/modify that work. Writing/art/videos are rarely released with copyright that allows this kind of modification. That's a huge difference. There are some FOSS releases that allow people to use for personal/private use while restricting commercial use…

I mean sure, but these are both legally defined works with licenses that govern their use. The difference is in the style of license. FOSS doesn't get a special moral valence because individuals are authors and they offer their work for editing and remixing under narrow circumstances. I mean, if Jeff Bezos today were to release code he wrote by hand with GPLv3 and were to cry foul over Copilot, I doubt anyone would care (or he'd get made fun of online.) Why does FOSS get treated so differently?

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#109

Post by warkdarrior »

hartator wrote: post #51
davisr wrote: post #7

The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If megacorps like Microsoft can sue people into oblivion for violating their copyright terms, people can sue Microsoft into oblivion for violating theirs. I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game, but I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation be…

> Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. Some of us think is detrimental to humanity at whole.

If you abolish copyright, that will only make it easier for for-profit corporations to use FOSS. There will be nothing stopping them from using FOSS, unless people stop sharing their code altogether.
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