GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#131

Post by deadbunny » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 3:44 PM UTC

lukan wrote: post #129

deadbunny wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe their target user isn't the one you're basing your opinion of what a user is? Take vi(m). It's not intuitive to your suggested target user and has a learning curve shaped like a cliff. So it fails to provide for what you consider a "user". However it serves it's actual target users very well. Arch doesn't position itself towards what you have presented as a user, Mint might however as they have very different t…

"Take vi(m)." Yeah, a code editor is by definition for developers. The question here was about the OS in general. And it is a pretty established fact, that linux is popular with developers, but not with mainstream normal people. Unless linux comes in the shape of android, where everything linux is hidden and locked down.

Maybe read a bit further in my reply and see my second argument about actual linux distros that address your point.

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#132

Post by lukan » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 3:50 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #128

lukan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, let's put it like this. I did study IT and even I struggle at times. Or quite often, if I want to do something new. And I absolutey would have no idea, how to do anything serious, without the terminal. But a terminal is programming. So yeah, even a newb can learn to paste some commands quite quickly - but troubleshooting even trivial things, gets you into highly technical stuff very quickly. Do you consider man…

You think troubleshooting on any other OS is less technical? Isn't my experience unless you count the OS refusing to give you information required to troubleshoot at all as user friendlyness.

Yes, I do think that. My father for example as a german electro engineer can use windows with ease and tries since years to establish Linux. It works enouhh for my mother for internet, as long as I come regulary to fix some update big. My father is a highly technical person, but no programmer. Also his english skills are very limited, so he does not really stand a chance in my opion with linux, despite him trying.

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#133

Post by lukan » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 3:56 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #127

lukan wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The only difference from GIMP or Photoshop is that the UI/UX has a different efficiency metric (mainly because interactive image manipulation is more efficient when you are interacting visually). But the operations are just as discoverable" I know. Which is why the year of the linux desktop was such a success. "Why does it matter to the person who makes their solution available that the common people won't?" They ha…

> They have all the right not to care, but it still is not helping the goal of being useful for normal people. That isn't the goal. I don't know why you keep saying that.

I know it isn't for you, but it is for me. The question here is, how is it for GNU in general. I understood the original point in a way, that it is.

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#134

Post by elpocko » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 4:17 PM UTC

kimixa wrote: post #40

elpocko wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've coded dozens of procedural asset/"art" generators. It's really surprising to me that, apparently, the output of my creative work (i.e. the novel algorithms) is not protected by copyright.

I've coded a JPEG compressor. It's clear the output of the machine isn't exactly the same of the input, being lossy, so I guess the output is not protected by copyright either.

The input to your JPEG compressor is an image that someone/something created, and the goal of your compressor is to replicate its input as closely as possible. It doesn't create new data, it merely encodes pre-existent data.

The input to my algorithms is a single number, and the goal is to create something new and distinctive that is clearly different from anything that existed before, and that wouldn't exist without the ingenuity of my algorithms.

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#135

Post by carom » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 5:24 PM UTC

JW_00000 wrote: post #63

carom wrote: post #20

This is missing the largest argument in my opinion. The weights are the derivative work of the GPL licensed code and should therefore be released under the GPL. I would say these companies release their weights or simply not train on copyleft code. It is truly amazing how many people will shill for these massive corporations that claim they love open source or that their AI is open while they profit off of the violat…

> The weights are the derivative work of the [GPL licensed] code This is not immediately obvious to me. A small though experiment: the Harry Potter books are clearly copyrighted works. If I generate a frequency list of all words in these books, i.e. a list of all words and how often they appear, that frequency list is derived from the original work, in the normal way we would use the word "derived". But is it a "deri…

The frequency count is not a function. The trained model is. Arguably, they at deriving a new function from ones covered by copyright. It is up to the courts for an official decision though.

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#136

Post by simion314 » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

cdrini wrote: post #58

simion314 wrote: post #24

Was proven with examples that LLM can produce exact text from it's input, this was such a problem that OpenAI had to add various filters to stop those things to repeat, this was also proven when the pre prompt was revealed. So we know for sure the LLM can spit out exact code with exact same names and comments, or exact paragraphs from books, so there is no question that it memorizes stuff and my explanation is that p…

I think there are a few different ways you can define "memory" and "memorization" here. When folks say "memorising" in the context of AI they mean "Does they AI have chunks of its training data fully/identically inside its neural network". To say "it doesn't memorize" is _not_ the same thing as saying "it has no memory". An AI also learns abstract information devoid from its textual representation. This would be an e…

My point is that bad trained models will remember chunks of the training data, maybe a theoretical perfect model will have no such problem.

I suppose you are aware of the case with ChatGPT and Dune’s Litany Against Fear memorization and the lengths OpenAI went to try and prevent the people to reproduce the issue to prove it is happening. If not google it, do you disagree that is not memorization ? That somehow the model manages to create the exact same text each time because it memorized some abstract concepts that are not in fact the exact representation fo this text ?

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#137

Post by lelanthran » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 5:56 PM UTC

lukan wrote: post #133

lelanthran wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have all the right not to care, but it still is not helping the goal of being useful for normal people. That isn't the goal. I don't know why you keep saying that.

I know it isn't for you, but it is for me. The question here is, how is it for GNU in general. I understood the original point in a way, that it is.

> I know it isn't for you, but it is for me.

Maybe, but your goal is irrelevant to the authors of the GPL.

> The question here is, how is it for GNU in general.

The goal for the FSF and their GPL is, and always was, freedom for the user of the software.

Ease-of-use was never an important consideration, much less a goal. This whole discussion from you in this thread is bizarre, TBH. You are projecting your goals onto the FSF's GPL, and judging it to be a failure based on your goals.

Your goals are irrelevant to them, just as their goals appear to be irrelevant to you.

#138

Post by gus_massa » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 7:20 PM UTC

JW_00000 wrote: post #63

carom wrote: post #20

This is missing the largest argument in my opinion. The weights are the derivative work of the GPL licensed code and should therefore be released under the GPL. I would say these companies release their weights or simply not train on copyleft code. It is truly amazing how many people will shill for these massive corporations that claim they love open source or that their AI is open while they profit off of the violat…

> The weights are the derivative work of the [GPL licensed] code This is not immediately obvious to me. A small though experiment: the Harry Potter books are clearly copyrighted works. If I generate a frequency list of all words in these books, i.e. a list of all words and how often they appear, that frequency list is derived from the original work, in the normal way we would use the word "derived". But is it a "deri…

What about N-grams frecuencies? 1-grams (aka characters) have too few information and are probably fine, using them you can only identify the language of the original work. With a few more you can identify the author and the book. I don't remember the exact number, but if you have the frecuencies of 10-grams you can probably reconstruct big chuncks of the book.

#139

Post by janosdebugs » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 9:05 PM UTC

koolala wrote: post #100

haksz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that the Pirate Party has expertise in nothing apart from perhaps protecting Internet freedoms. So the same persons that supported Napster and the Pirate Bay now want to circumvent copyright for open source software. An unholy alliance, but the recent comments from some Microsoft brass about everything on the Web being freeware seems to indicate that these are the talking points that Microsoft and its new…

If the Web is freeware... I wonder what options remain for licenced online information.

Content gating behind login screens. Scraping content behind a login screen could constitute a contract violation and would give rise to a lawsuit independent of copyright.

#140

Post by tpmoney » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 9:16 PM UTC

carom wrote: post #135

JW_00000 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The weights are the derivative work of the [GPL licensed] code This is not immediately obvious to me. A small though experiment: the Harry Potter books are clearly copyrighted works. If I generate a frequency list of all words in these books, i.e. a list of all words and how often they appear, that frequency list is derived from the original work, in the normal way we would use the word "derived". But is it a "deri…

The frequency count is not a function. The trained model is. Arguably, they at deriving a new function from ones covered by copyright. It is up to the courts for an official decision though.

So what if we made a function. What if someone scans all the works of Harry Potter and generates a program/function that uses the frequency and pairing of phonemes in Harry Potter character names to create a “Wizard Name Generator” to generate random but plausible sounding names. Would we expect a court to find the name generator is infringing on JK Rowling’s copyrights? Certainly it’s possible for the generator to generate a name verbatim from the books, but does that make the generator a derived work and infringing? If the authors of the generator put their generator on the web as Harry Potter Name Generator, we might expect the courts to tell them they can’t use the Harry Potter name, but if they put it under “Wacky Warlocks Wizard Wonder Namer” is the mere fact that the underlying function uses factual data about a work under copyright sufficient to strike it down? What if it used name frequencies from multiple fantasy series? How many series would it have to use as a source before we say that the name generator is not infringing on copyrights? Can it ever not be?