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We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

githubcopilotlitigation.com

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Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#181

Post by lbotos »

renewiltord wrote: post #123

It doesn't make sense. If I make a piece of software that curls a random gist and then puts it into your editor am I infringing or are you infringing when you run it or are you infringing when you use that file and distribute it somewhere?

> If I make a piece of software that curls a random gist and then puts it into your editor am I infringing

Depends on the license. If it's MIT and you serve the license, no, you are not infringing at all. A trimmed version of MIT for the relevant bits:

Permission is hereby granted [...[ to any person obtaining a copy of this software [..] to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, [...] subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

> are you infringing when you run it

Depends on the license

> are you infringing when you use that file and distribute it somewhere

Depends on the license

----

When copilot gives you code without the license, you can't even know!

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#182

Post by Someone »

elil17 wrote: post #67
sedatk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A programmer can read available but not oss licensed code and learn from it Actually, we were forbidden to look at open source code at Microsoft (circa 2009) because it might influence our coding and violate licenses.

That demonstrates that copyright laws are already stifling innovation.

It demonstrates that it stifles copying. That may make it easier for the copier to innovate, but doesn’t dispute the main argument for having copyright protection: that, without the protection of copyright, the code wouldn’t have been written.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#183

Post by PuddleCheese »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #128

I think it's a great time to explain why this won't hit AI art such as Stable Diffusion, even if GitHub loses this case. The crux of the lawsuit's argument is that the AI unlawfully outputs copyrighted material . This is evident in many tests with many people here and on Twitter even getting verbatim comments out of it. AI art, in the other hand, is not capable of outputting the images from its training set, as it's…

These models can actually output images that can be extremely close to the material present in training models:

- https://i.imgur.com/VikPFDT.png

I also don't know if I would anthropomorphize ML to that degree. It's a poor metaphor and isn't really analogous to a human brain, especially considering our current understanding, or lack thereof, of the brain, and even the limited insight we have into how some of these models work from the people who work on them.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#184

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #158

I'm not confident in this stance - sharing it to have a conversation. Hopefully some folks can help me think through this! The value of copyleft licenses, for me, was that we were fighting back against the notion of copyright. That you couldn't sell me a product that I wasn't allowed to modify and share my modifications back with others. The right to modify and redistribute transitively though the software license ga…

the problem is you can't launder copyrighted code with this because you don't see the copyrighted code in the first place.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#185

Post by TheCoelacanth »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #10

As a non-lawyer, I am very suspicious of the claim that "Plaintiffs and the Class have suffered monetary damages as a result of Defendants’ conduct." Flagrant disregard for copyright? Sure, maybe. The output of the model is subject to copyright? Who knows! But the copyright holders being damaged in some what? Seems doubtful. The best argument I could think of would be "GitHub would have had to pay us for this, and th…

Aren't there statutory damages for copyright infringement, i.e. there is a presumption that each work infringed is worth at least a certain amount without proving actual damages?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#187

Post by bogwog »

dmix wrote: post #63
adlpz wrote: post #36

It feels weird saying this but, for once, I hope the big evil corporation gets to keep selling their big bad product. I find the pattern matching and repetitive code generation really helpful. And the library autocomplete on steroids, too. Meh. Tricky subject.

TabNine has absolutely improved my life as a programmer. There's something really rewarding about having a robot read your mind for entire blocks of code. It's not just functions either, one of the most common things that it helps me with daily is simple stuff like this: Typing const x = { a: 'one', b: 'two', ... } And later I'll be typing y = [ a['one'], b[' It's really amazing the amount of busy-work typing in prog…

I don't think this is a good example of the value of these things. You can just as easily do that same thing with advanced text editor features. Sublime for example supports multi-cursor editing. Just hold alt+shift+arrow keys to add a cursor, then type in the brackets you want. Ctrl+D can be used to select the next occurrence of the current selection with multiple cursors, built-in commands from the command pallete can do anything to your current selection (e.g. convert case), etc.

All of that efficiency without having to pay a monthly subscription, wasting electricity on some AI model, and worrying about the legal/moral implications.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#189

Post by adlpz »

nrb wrote: post #160
adlpz wrote: post #36

It feels weird saying this but, for once, I hope the big evil corporation gets to keep selling their big bad product. I find the pattern matching and repetitive code generation really helpful. And the library autocomplete on steroids, too. Meh. Tricky subject.

Does anyone have a problem with it, so long as the material it trained on was with explicit permission/license and not potentially in violation of copyright? That's where the line is for it to be suspect IMO.

I guess I'm just afraid that it might not be as good as it is that way.

It's a bit like how GPT-3, Stable Diffusion and all those generative models use extensive amounts of copyrighted material in training to get as good as they do.

In those cases however the output space is so vast that plagiarism is very unlikely.

With code, not so much.

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