An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

Post by Andrew_nenakhov » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 11:25 AM UTC

ssivark wrote: post #63

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #47

A hypothetical question: imagine a filmmaker, who had studied a lot of obviously copyrighted movies by famous renowned directors. This means he has trained his neural network using their copyrighted licensed content. Does he breach copyright when he composes and films a scene? Are visual quotes copyright theft? Homages? Did George Lucas infringe copyright when he was borrowing compositions from "Triumph of the will"?

Just because machine learning uses the word “learning” doesn’t mean it “learns” in the same way a human mind does — that analogy is doing a lot of load bearing in your argument, and needs proving why the program’s nature of creative remixing (for lack of a better word) is the same as a human’s. Right now it seems like you’re just reusing the same word for two phenomena we don’t understand, and therefore claiming they…

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 11:46 AM UTC

IncRnd wrote: post #102

dragonwriter wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does need reform but it is for the creators No, under the US Constitution it is for a specified public benefit as its purpose, the private benefit is a mechanism to achieve that. Under the Statute of Anne, it was nominally for creators (but this was lobbied for by printers after the expiration of earlier laws, and they were the prime beneficiaries in practice.) The earlier laws were explicitly for printers.

> No, under the US Constitution it is for a specified public benefit as its purpose, the private benefit is a mechanism to achieve that. Well, that's false. The actual US Constitution in Article I Section 8 Clause 8 says, "[The Congress shall have power] To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and disco…

Post by VBprogrammer » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 11:59 AM UTC

insanitybit wrote: post #93

VBprogrammer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting though experiment is how keen Microsoft would be to allow Copilot to be trained on the Office or Windows source code. If the output is truly free of copyright from its training materials then if not, why not?

Why would they do that, regardless of whether the output could be restricted via Copyright or not? Also, this case isn't about copyright, as the lawyer clearly explains.

Post by belorn » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 12:07 PM UTC

albertzeyer wrote: post #116

belorn wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can easily write an simplistic suggestion algorithm by doing the following: Hash the content. If the content has been viewed by the user in the past, halve the numerical hash value. Then sort the list. Doing this to a music list will create a list that is biased toward music the user has listened to before but will still seem random enough to look like intelligent suggestion that the system has learned to identify.…

How is this relevant to what I wrote? You are not learning with a neural network in your example. You are not adapting synaptic weights.

Post by albertzeyer » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 12:17 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #137

albertzeyer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this relevant to what I wrote? You are not learning with a neural network in your example. You are not adapting synaptic weights.

{a_{j}(t+1)=f(a_{j}(t),p_{j}(t),\theta _{j}),} The mathematics of artificial neural networks is math. It is only math. One can make it very complex or very simple but in the end it is just math and pointers.