171–180 of 473 posts
It's still amazing to me that (US-centric context here), it's well established that instructions how to turn raw ingredients into a cake are not protectable but code that results in transforming one set of numbers into another are protectable.
AI is just making the silliness of that distinction more obvious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the rate of product/services that machinery will produce will make that even a small tax to corporations producing everything autonomously will be enough to feed and give a quality of life to everyone with an UBI or partial time jobs. You really want to push for high productivity across all industries, even if that means sacrificing jobs in the short term, because history demonstrated after that, new and more hum…
So we give away the world to the 1% and are supposed to be satisfied with the "privilege" of being able to eat?
But yeah remaining 80-90% of population will have quality of life and bullshit jobs because it's how the world is right now outside of western countries bubble.
Attempts to litigate any license violation are going to get precisely nowhere I bet, but I find the actual license violation argument persuasive. This is an excellent example of how the AI singularity/revolution/whatever is a total distraction and that a much bigger and more serious issue is how AI is becoming so effective at turning the output of cheap/free human mental labour into capital. If AI keeps getting bette…
What happens when someone puts code up on GitHub with a license that says "This code may not be used for training a code generation model"? - Is GitHub actually going to pay any attention to that, or are they just going to ingest the code and thus violate its license anyway? - If they go ahead and violate the code's license, what are the legal repercussions for the resulting model? Can a model be "un-trained" from a…
By uploading your content to GitHub, you’ve granted them a license to use that content to “improve the Service over time”, as specified in the ToS[1]. That effectively “overrides” any license or term that you’ve specified for your repository, since you’ve already licensed the content to GitHub under different terms. Of course, people who are not GitHub are beholden to the terms you specify. [1] https://docs.github.co…
From the definitions section in the same doc:
> "Your Content" is Content that you create or own.
That will definitely exclude any mirrored open-source projects, any open-source project that has ever migrated to Github from another platform, and also many forked projects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By uploading your content to GitHub, you’ve granted them a license to use that content to “improve the Service over time”, as specified in the ToS[1]. That effectively “overrides” any license or term that you’ve specified for your repository, since you’ve already licensed the content to GitHub under different terms. Of course, people who are not GitHub are beholden to the terms you specify. [1] https://docs.github.co…
I think more specifically, the relevant bit is here: https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o... > We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This l…
On the extreme end, "analysis" is so broad that it could arguably cover breaking down a file of code into its constituent methods and just saving the ASTs of those methods verbatim for Copilot to regurgitate. That's obviously not an acceptable outcome of these terms per se, but arguably isn't any different in principle from what they're already doing.
Ultimately, as I understand, courts tend to prefer a common sense outcome based on a reasonable human understanding of the law, rather than an outcome that may be defensible through some arcane technical logic but is absurd on its face and counter to the intent of the law. If a party were harmed by an instance of Copilot-generated copyright infringement, I don't see a court siding with this tenuous interpretation of the ToS over the explicit terms of the source code license. On the other hand, it would probably also be impossible to prove damages without something like a case of verbatim reproduction, similarly to how having a developer move from working on proprietary code for one company to another isn't automatically copyright infringement.
I doubt that GitHub is doing anything as blatantly malicious as copying snippets of (GPL or proprietary) code to explicitly reuse verbatim, but if they're learning from license-restricted code at all then I don't see how they wouldn't be subjecting themselves and/or consumers of Copilot to the same risk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> By uploading your content to GitHub, you’ve granted them a license to use that content to “improve the Service over time”, as specified in the ToS. That's nonsense because they could claim that for almost any reason. E.g. assume Google put the source code of Google search in Github. Then Github copies that code and uses it in their own search, since that "improves the service". Would that be legal? It's like sellin…
If the pen was sold with a contract that said the seller has the rights to anything written with it, then yes. These types of contracts are actually quite common, for example an employment contract will almost certainly include an IP grant clause. Pretty much any website that hosts user-generated content as well. IANAL, but quite familiar with business law.
In the US, maybe. In most of the rest of the world, these sorts of overreaching "we own everything you do anywhere" clauses are decidedly illegal.
One interesting aspect, that I thing will make it difficult for GitHub to argue and justify its not a a license violation would be the answer to the following question: Was Copilot trained using Microsoft internal source code or will it be in the future ? As GitHub is a Microsoft company and OpenAI although a non-profit just got a massive one billion investment from Microsoft (presumably not for free), will it start…
There is plenty of leaked Windows source code on Github, so chances are that co-pilot would give quite good suggestions for implementing a Win32-compatible kernel. Then watch and see if Microsoft will try to argue that you are violating their copyright using code generated by their AI.
I think the distraction is against how disconnected reality is becoming from copyright/intellectual property regulations. It's still amazing to me that (US-centric context here), it's well established that instructions how to turn raw ingredients into a cake are not protectable but code that results in transforming one set of numbers into another are protectable. AI is just making the silliness of that distinction mo…
If I as an alleged human have learned purely from GPL code would that require code I write to be released under the GPL too? We should probably start thinking about AI rights at some point. Personally I'll be crediting GPT-3 as any other contributor because it sounds cool but maybe morally too in future
> "but eevee, humans also learn by reading open source code, so isn't that the same thing"
> - no
> - humans are capable of abstract understanding and have a breadth of other knowledge to draw from
> - statistical models do not
> - you have fallen for marketing