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Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

thehftguy.com

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Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#101

Post by goodpoint »

samwillis wrote: post #4

> Microsoft GitHub is the largest collection of open source code in the world. Microsoft GitHub is in a unique and dominant positions to host and access and distribute most of the open-source code in the world No, it's not in a "unique and dominant position". Open source code is freely available online, it's almost trivial to build a bot to scrape OS code from anywhere on the web (GitHub included). The comparison to…

> No, it's not in a "unique and dominant position". Open source code is freely available online, it's almost trivial to build a bot to scrape OS code from anywhere on the web (GitHub included).

Absolutely wrong. GitHub is doing way more than just hosting code. It hosts bugtrackers, CI and much more. For most FOSS project it's the ONLY place where you can go and submit a bug report.

It's not just a repository, it's a communication tool and refuses to interoperate with other platform.

This is monopoly, just like NPM and Linkedin. Microsoft never changes.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#102

Post by insanitybit »

ChatGTP wrote: post #82
scarface74 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it’s really not that hard to git clone git set origin… It’s much harder to copy Google’s index.

You think it's practical to do this with almost all the public repos on Github?

Yeah, I think so.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#103

Post by EamonnMR »

alkonaut wrote: post #83

That someone reads my code I expect. That someone reads my code and uses it to train a machine they money off I didn't expect, but I also can't say I object. However, that part of the argument feels like the less interesting CoPilot legal argument. The interesting one is: what's the license for use of the code it spits out? Any time CoPilot spits out a nontrivial piece of code that a) exists verbatim on Github and b)…

And if indeed it's treated as clean room, does open source need to just pack it in? Are all of our licenses rendered unenforceable?

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#104

Post by williamcotton »

gkbrk wrote: post #94
williamcotton wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can without attribution verbatim copy the parts of GPL code that is not covered by copyright, such as anything purely functional, like an optimized sorting algorithm. Copyright is for art. Patents are for utilities and tools. The art in GPL code is in the arbitrary decisions made about how to structure that code… the class structure and not the algorithms. You cannot copyright an algorithm and for very good reaso…

Microsoft is not training their code autocomplete on parts of GPL/MIT/etc code that is not covered by copyright. They are training it on all of the codebase.

What part of the codebase are the tools reproducing? The copyrightable aspects of software is generally at the structural level and not at the function level as most independent functions are utilitarian and not expressive in nature.

If these tools were not context dependent they would not be very useful. These tools aim to only reproduce the non-copyrightable aspects of code and in a context-aware manner.

I have yet to see a case where Copilot has returned code that is something other than the kind of functional, utilitarian code that is explicitly not covered by copyright.

Patents? Perhaps! But that’s another discussion.

If the purpose of processing copyrighted works is to learn the underlying structure and produce further works that are not independently derivative then the courts have a history of judging in favor of fair use.

Copyright is about artistic expression and not functionality.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#105

Post by belorn »

unreal37 wrote: post #61
htpltr wrote: post #48

Antitrust is one thing, but by cleanroom implementation standards (one team reads the source and writes a spec, another team writes the code) CoPilot is illegal to begin with. CoPilot reads and rearranges the IP that was created by millions of people who were working very hard and did not anticipate a code laundering machine when they wrote the code and the licenses.

That's quite an extreme set of statements, and I very much doubt what you consider "illegal" is actually illegal. When you publish something for others to view (text, images, code, whatever), others are allowed to view it. You can't anticipate how others view it, with their eyes or with screenreaders to assist. You can't stop them from reading it, thinking about it, discussing it with their friends, taking notes, sum…

Learning is very different from copying. I can take a movie and converts it to different formats and resolutions. I can use an AI algorithms to remove rough edges, and even add color to images which was taken in black and white. None of that would be covered by using the word learning, even if the program takes the movie as input and learns from it and outputs a work with is completely different from the original.

The word that seems to fit best is transforming and adapting. In order to adapt something, one has to first learn from the original in order to produce the derivative work. This is however covered by copyright, since the transforming and adapting is still considered a form of copying even if all people did was learning and producing something unique but similar to the original.

The license can say that "I will allow you to view this but you cannot create a derviate work from it".

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#106

Post by alwayslikethis »

williamcotton wrote: post #30
shanebellone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wow, that's horrible. I didn't know that sampling and mashups required an explicit license." The conclusion essentially boils down to "remixing is not fair use". Today's hip-hop is a direct result of that decision because sampling became prohibitively expensive.

It’s not legally fair use but no musicians consider it stealing. Remember, the session players who wrote those hooks and grooves were not given a copyright. They got paid a flat fee. They could not care less if their drum beat, bass line or horn part was reused in a creative new way. The lawyers of the copyright holders sure do care, though!

Copyright infringement is not stealing, full stop. It is just that, an infringement on a commercial interest that the government grants.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#108

Post by Lio »

unreal37 wrote: post #57
bilqis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say they don’t

I don't understand why people just automatically doubt things that companies say when they can be sued (or would otherwise destroy their business) if they are lying about it. Seems unnecessarily pessimistic.

People doubt Microsoft because they've historically run a very aggressive business and done things of questionable morality many times.

They've been to court and they've lost and it definitely hasn't destroyed their business one bit.

For example, Microsoft subsidiary LinkedIn routed customer email through their servers so that they could scrape it. They did that without customer knowledge via a dark patten.

They later apologised for doing it but still used it to propel the company's growth. In the end it didn't hurt anything but their reputation for respecting people's privacy.

Microsoft's own anti-trust history is littered with exceptional behaviour too. They are the size they are now by dint of super aggressive business practices.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#109

Post by alkonaut »

EamonnMR wrote: post #103
alkonaut wrote: post #83

That someone reads my code I expect. That someone reads my code and uses it to train a machine they money off I didn't expect, but I also can't say I object. However, that part of the argument feels like the less interesting CoPilot legal argument. The interesting one is: what's the license for use of the code it spits out? Any time CoPilot spits out a nontrivial piece of code that a) exists verbatim on Github and b)…

And if indeed it's treated as clean room, does open source need to just pack it in? Are all of our licenses rendered unenforceable?

It feels like there is zero chance it could be used as some sort of blanket copyright cleaner. If it is then I'll make my own "model" (Ok a 2 line python script) that produces royalty free bestseller novels if you just prompt it with the title (Its training is extremely simple it just responds with the content of the book file with the same filename!). The fact that in a LLM we don't quite understand the black box, and the novels are chopped into tokens doesn't mean that IF they are stringed back together they are still the same paragraph.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#110

Post by moneywoes »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #5
samwillis wrote: post #4

> Microsoft GitHub is the largest collection of open source code in the world. Microsoft GitHub is in a unique and dominant positions to host and access and distribute most of the open-source code in the world No, it's not in a "unique and dominant position". Open source code is freely available online, it's almost trivial to build a bot to scrape OS code from anywhere on the web (GitHub included). The comparison to…

> It's almost trivial to built a bot to scrape OS code from anywhere on the web. Seems like a logistical nightmare to me. Git repos interact spectacularly poorly with web scraping in general.

How so? Can’t someone just download the zip file and make a queue of downloads or does GitHub rate limit?
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