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

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

#141

Post by hyperman1 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #72
6stringmerc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong! At the point of creation something is granted copyright. Publishers in literature and music are right assholes who’ve created this system. Little middle men rent seeking. It does need reform but it is for the creators that’s why it’s tied to the creator and not date of publication. Fix your perspective buckaroo

> 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.

The earlier laws were explicitly against printers. They were for scribes, and indirectly for the church, states, and other powers that controlled the scribes and wanted to limit the spread of dissident views.

At least according to most histories of copyright I've seen. Wikipedia seems to agree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#Early_dev...

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

#142

Post by q-big »

badcppdev wrote: post #118
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"?

I like the scenario: Imagine I've hired an assistant with an eidetic memory who has read loads of books. I pay them to help me write a book and they reproduce a few paragraphs from a different book into my book. Am I violating copyright? Yes Imagine they change the character names in those paragraphs. Am I still violating copyright? Yes At some point you can change enough of the text to not violate copyright. The gre…

> At some point you can change enough of the text to not violate copyright. The grey area involves the courts.

> It feels very simple to me so I might be missing something.

In my opinion, you are missing something subtle:

In continental Europe, there is a different law tradition - civil law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system) ) - that is different from the Anglo-American common law tradition. To quote from the wikipedia article:

"The civil law system is often contrasted with the common law system, which originated in medieval England, whose intellectual framework historically came from uncodified judge-made case law, and gives precedential authority to prior court decisions. [...] Conceptually, civil law proceeds from abstractions, formulates general principles, and distinguishes substantive rules from procedural rules. It holds case law secondary and subordinate to statutory law."

So if you are attached to the civil law system, you seriously want to avoid this grey area involving the courts (which is much more accepted in common law) and instead want to codify into laws what you mean by this grey area.

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

#143

Post by tsukikage »

6stringmerc wrote: post #60
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"?

No. Next hypothetical.

The production of anime music videos is a fan activity where tiny clips from animated shows are pasted together, with a piece of music replacing the audio track. The result is typically 3-4 minutes long. The audio may or may not be original; regardless, the video content never is, barring some very very light editing.

These can be quite inventive works; nevertheless, no-one seriously argues that the video content does not breach the original animators' copyright.

The video content of an amv is a much better analogy for what copilot does to third parties' code than anything else I've seen in this post's discussion so far.

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

#144

Post by BeefWellington »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #131
ssivark wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and needs proving why the program’s nature of creative remixing (for lack of a better word If I ask Stable Diffusion to create a picture of Elon Musk wielding lightnings and riding a giant blue sparrow over a desert during a storm, the result would be more creative than what could be produced by most humans. I believe that counts as a proof.

This is necessarily not the case. The ML model has only been trained on things produced by humans, therefore its derived works. We have no idea what an ML model that hadn't been trained by looking at human art would actually produce, and whether or not it is creative.

Also it's pretty clear you haven't worked with many artists from that statement.

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

#145

Post by BeefWellington »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #115
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"?

The beauty of the law is that it does not take such philosophical things into consideration. The only thing that matters is the text of the law and it's documented interpretation in various court cases. That's why copyright is excluded from this court case because there are a lot of documented interpretations of fair use. Which also apply here. The simple layman's version of copyright is that copyright applies to a s…

All those examples you give are transformative in some way or other.

It's an interesting test of open source licensing because I'm not aware of any other area of copyright where works come with an explicit "if you use this somewhere else you must credit me as the initial author" in the implied/provided license.

Comparing music, literature, etc. to code is difficult because of both this difference and the existence of software patents. The manner in which infringement happens (and the scale) is often different as well.

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

#146

Post by BeefWellington »

bayindirh wrote: post #83
ufo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also plenty on code on the training set that violates OSS licenses (e.g. copying code without attribution)

Yes, however humans making mistakes knowingly or unknowingly doesn't make what Copilot does right. We just talked this with a couple of friends. I always cite what I got from where (it's just two occasions, but it's not zero), and always respect their licenses. I'm worried about both ways of the permeation: GPL to closed and closed to open. Open source is a widely misunderstood concept and people (and companies) are…

The emulators thing can also run afoul of patents, for example, so they're not purely copyright concerns there. It's not an easy/exact comparison to something that's LGPL licensed for example.

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

#147

Post by feet »

albertzeyer wrote: post #95
ssivark wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But effectively learning here really means the same thing: Based on the input (source code), you will adapt the synaptic weights between neurons, in a similar way for humans and for the artificial neural networks. Of course, it's not exactly the same. There are some differences in the details, and the artificial neural network is really much more simplified, and thus also less efficient at learning. But why is this r…

The implementation of artificial neural networks isn't even close to how a brain works.

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

#148

Post by hooby »

dragonwriter wrote: post #26
hooby wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright was originally intended to protect the creators of a work. Over many years it has now mostly become a tool for large companies to accumulate rights (on works they didn't create themselves) and monetize them. Maybe a reform is needed, to find a way back to the original purpose.

> Copyright was originally intended to protect the creators of a work. No, it wasn’t. Copyright was originally intended to protect the publishers of a work. It was later transformed to nominally focus on the creators, but even this was lobbied for by publishers in their own self-interest after the old law directly protecting them was allowed to lapse, and because it still had the same net effect since realizing value…

> Copyright was originally intended to protect the publishers of a work.

You are talking about modern US copyright law.

But copyright laws (laws around copy) predate the existence of publishers and the declaration of independence of the United States by over a 1000 years.

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

#149

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

BeefWellington wrote: post #144
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and needs proving why the program’s nature of creative remixing (for lack of a better word If I ask Stable Diffusion to create a picture of Elon Musk wielding lightnings and riding a giant blue sparrow over a desert during a storm, the result would be more creative than what could be produced by most humans. I believe that counts as a proof.

This is necessarily not the case. The ML model has only been trained on things produced by humans, therefore its derived works. We have no idea what an ML model that hadn't been trained by looking at human art would actually produce, and whether or not it is creative. Also it's pretty clear you haven't worked with many artists from that statement.

> The ML model has only been trained on things produced by humans, therefore its derived works.

Humans are also trained only on things produced by humans. The only exception is nature, but ML model can be trained on photos of nature, too. Also, you are missing the point.

> Also it's pretty clear you haven't worked with many artists from that statement.

1. I employed quite a few artists over the past 15 years.

2. I wasn't talking about artists. I was talking about regular humans. The vast majority of them are absolutely unable to create anything resembling Elon Musk riding on a giant sparrow.

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

#150

Post by albertzeyer »

feet wrote: post #147
albertzeyer wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But effectively learning here really means the same thing: Based on the input (source code), you will adapt the synaptic weights between neurons, in a similar way for humans and for the artificial neural networks. Of course, it's not exactly the same. There are some differences in the details, and the artificial neural network is really much more simplified, and thus also less efficient at learning. But why is this r…

The implementation of artificial neural networks isn't even close to how a brain works.

Yes but what difference exactly plays a role for the copyright question? And why?
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