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Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
121–127 of 127 posts
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#122Microsoft GitHub Co-pilot could be viewed entirely as just a more sophisticated indexer and search interface, a indexer of freely available source code on the public internet.
The concerns over copyrighted material ingested and exposed through AI system are the same for copyrighted material ingested by and displayed by our web 2.0 search engines.
So, Microsoft GitHub Co-pilot also indexes publicly accessible content but emits that content differently, however it does not exercise exclusive rights over what it indexes or control access to that content.
The Google Books and Author Guilds axis would have given exclusive monopoly access, distribution, and pricing of the largest collection of digital books in the world – so I don’t believe the comparison between the Google Books project and CoPilot is valid, because we have already accepted the concept of indexing and clipping content on the public internet.
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not Github's fault or Github's problem, from an antitrust perspective. If they went out of their way to make it difficult, you might have an argument but, as far as I know, they aren't. It's just practically difficult by the nature of the problem.
They rate limit, so they do make it difficult though
They rate limit to protect their infrastructure, not to make it difficult. This is not anticompetitive.
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
They rate limit, so they do make it difficult though
They rate limit to protect their infrastructure, not to make it difficult. This is not anticompetitive.
So they still have an advantage then ?
Microsoft can continually train on the majority open source and or public code with zero limitations while others can’t ?
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#125When I published stuff to GitHub, it had open licenses: i wanted anyone and everyone to make whatever use of it they could. I didn't foresee this use, and I'm not fond of Microsoft (to say the least); but it certainly falls into the area of things I explicitly allowed when publishing. I suspect many others who publish there feel the same way.
Best thing you can do now is start porting projects over elsewhere leaving history behind on that platform pointing users to the new home/mirrors. You could also consider a different license. I hope the FSF comes up with an exception like they did in the A of AGPL about how LLMs can use the data (or require the data to be open, etc.).
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
They rate limit to protect their infrastructure, not to make it difficult. This is not anticompetitive.
So they still have an advantage then ? Microsoft can continually train on the majority open source and or public code with zero limitations while others can’t ?
Yes, they have an advantage but that's not anticompetitive. That's just the reality of the world.
> It's just practically difficult by the nature of the problem.
What I said here is why. It's not easy to allow external parties to "just download the entirety of Github." It's not unreasonable to rate limit your infrastructure, especially if the person using it isn't paying you money.
The fact MS can train on the code more easily is irrelevant here. It's possible for a third party to download the code, it'll just take longer.
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
So they still have an advantage then ? Microsoft can continually train on the majority open source and or public code with zero limitations while others can’t ?
Yes, they have an advantage but that's not anticompetitive. That's just the reality of the world. > It's just practically difficult by the nature of the problem. What I said here is why. It's not easy to allow external parties to "just download the entirety of Github." It's not unreasonable to rate limit your infrastructure, especially if the person using it isn't paying you money. The fact MS can train on the code m…
Yup,
Well anyway, it's enough to inspire me to look for a new home for my projects.
Cheers.