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We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

githubcopilotlitigation.com

121–130 of 824 posts

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#121

Ask HN: I want to modify the BSD 2-Clause Open Source License to explicitly prohibit the use of the licensed software in training systems like Microsoft's Copilot (and use during inference). How should the third clause be worded? The No-AI 3-Clause Open Source Software License Copyright (C) All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided tha…

IANAL, and I'm no fan of copilot, but I wonder if this kind of clause (your #3) is going to fly: you're preemptively prohibiting certain kinds of reading of the code (when code is read by the ML model in training). But is that something a license can actually do?

The legal footing that copyright gives you, on which licensing rests, certainly empowers you to limit things about how others may redistribute your work (and things derived from it), but does it empower you to limit how others may read your work? As a ridiculous example, I don't think it would be enforceable to have a license say "this code can't be used by left-handed people", since that's not what copyright is about, right?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#124
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally the standard BSD 2-Clause License, word for word, with an additional third clause: 3. Use in source or binary forms for the construction or operation of predictive software generation systems is prohibited. Hardly nonsense, but obviously you aren't equipped to judge. More about the BSD licenses: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses

Yes, that added clause is nonsense. On top of being nonsense, there is significant precedent. Remember the lawsuit of HiQ labs vs LinkedIn? Scraping, or viewing public data on a public webpage is legal. https://gizmodo.com/linkedin-scraping-data-legal-court-case-...

If the GPL can defeat Copilot, we need an more permissive MIT/BSD-style license to do the same.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#125
post #47

On page 18, they show Copilot produces the following code: >function isEven(n) { > return n % 2 === 0; >} They then say, "Copilot’s Output, like Codex’s, is derived from existing code. Namely, sample code that appears in the online book Mastering JS, written by Valeri Karpov." Surely everyone reading this has written that code verbatim at some point in their lives. How can they assert that this code is derived specif…

There is no way in hell that isEven is covered by copyright. "In computer programs, concerns for efficiency may limit the possible ways to achieve a particular function, making a particular expression necessary to achieving the idea. In this case, the expression is not protected by copyright." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... Think about how absurd this is. So if Microsoft was the first…

There are software patents on bit twiddling operations that people do end up having to work around.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#126

I am not against this lawsuit but I'm against the implications of this because it can lead to disastrous laws. A programmer can read available but not oss licensed code and learn from it. Thats fair use. If a machine does it, is it wrong ? What is the line between copying and machine learning ? Where does overfitting come in ? Today they're filing a lawsuit against copilot. Tomorrow it will be against stable diffusio…

AI companies are running against the clock to normalize training against copyrighted data.

Let me tell you the story of Google Books, also known as "Authors Guild Inc. v. Google Inc"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

In 2004, Google added copyrighted books to is Google Books search engine, that does search among millions of book text and shows full page results without any authors authorization. Any sane lawyer of the time would have bet on this being illegal because, well, it most certainly was. And you may be shocked to learn that it is actually not.

in 2005 the Authors Guild sues for this pretty straightforward copyright violation.

Now an important part of the story: IT TOOK 10 YEARS FOR THE JUDGEMENT TO BE DECIDED (8 years + 2 years appeal) during which, well, tech continued its little stroll. Ten year is a lot in the web world, it is even more for ML.

The judgement decided Google use of the books was fair use. Why? Not because of the law, silly. A common error we geeks do is to believe that the law is like code and that it is an invincible argument in court. No, the court was impressed by the array of people who were supporting Google, calling it an invaluable tool to find books, that actually caused many sales to increase, and therefore the harm the laws were trying to prevent was not happening while a lot of good came from it.

Now the second important part of the story: MOST OF THESE USEFUL USES HAPPENED AFTER THE LITIGATION STARTS. That's the kind of crazy world we are living in: the laws are badly designed and badly enforced, so the way to get around them is to disregard them for the greater good, and hope the tribunal won't be competent enough to be fast but not incompetent enough to fail and understand the greater picture.

Rants aside, I doubt training data use will be considered copyright infringement if the courts have a similar mindset than in 2005-2015. Copyright laws were designed to preserve the authors right to profit from copies of their work, not to give them absolute control on every possible use of every copy ever made.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#128
I think it's a great time to explain why this won't hit AI art such as Stable Diffusion, even if GitHub loses this case.

The crux of the lawsuit's argument is that the AI unlawfully outputs copyrighted material. This is evident in many tests with many people here and on Twitter even getting verbatim comments out of it.

AI art, in the other hand, is not capable of outputting the images from its training set, as it's not a collage-maker, but an artificial brain with a paintbrush and virtual hand.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#129
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A programmer can read available but not oss licensed code and learn from it Actually, we were forbidden to look at open source code at Microsoft (circa 2009) because it might influence our coding and violate licenses.

Do the TypeScript team code with their eyes closed?

Have you seen some of that codebase? ;)
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