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GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

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Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#181

Post by tzs »

judge2020 wrote: post #97
belorn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With creative common and GPL there is a fairly common practice that work include multiple authors and rights holders. When a single user uploads such work to a hosting provider, the permission given to the provider will be limited to the permission that the user had. They can't give out permissions that they themselves do not have. It is a similar case when a single user uploads a movie or game to a pirate torrent si…

> They can't give out permissions that they themselves do not have. Then, chances are, it's technically illegal to upload those other contributors' code, although if that code is contributed via GitHub itself then the code in the pull request has already been licensed to GH. It boils down to copyright/DMCA not requiring that hosting providers ensure the code people say they have the rights to is valid at submission,…

"The person who uploaded the code lied about their permissions" won't be a valid defense in a copyright lawsuit by the actual copyright owner, at least in the case where there is no other copy of that code also on GitHub that was uploaded by the copyright holder.

In the US what it will be is good evidence to support a claim by GitHub that they were an "innocent infringer"--someone who did not know they were infringing and had no reason to believe that they were.

What that does is in the case where the plaintiff seeks statutory damages (which they almost certainly will¹) is lower the lower limit. Statutory damages are normally $750-30000 (amount determined by the court). If a defendant proves they are an innocent infringer that lower limit drops to $200. If the plaintiff can prove that the infringement was "willful" the upper limit goes up to $150000.

Statutory damages are per work infringed, not per infringement, so we aren't talking $200 or so multiplied by the number of copies GitHub distributed. We are talking of a likely award of $200 or so total (plus maybe attorney fees).

¹It is usually way too hard to determine actual monetary damages in cases like this, and actual damages are likely to be quite low anyway, so plaintiffs almost certainly will go for statutory damages.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#182

Post by mukesh610 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #102

I don’t understand the author’s position in this article. It spends a long time talking about details of the licenses, but I can’t see any way the suit will actually be about licenses, because if it’s about licenses then it seems patently obvious to me that GitHub will lose very quickly, because they have undoubtedly violated the terms of the licenses. As I see it, the only leg GitHub can possibly stand on is the “fa…

IMO fair use is still not a strong argument for Microsoft. They commercialized the product and made money out of it.

Fair use is only allowed if the work you're doing is purely for the greater good. I might be wrong though, IANAL.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#183

Post by Permit »

jcranmer wrote: post #91
samwillis wrote: post #18

I think one of the interesting things that will be covered in this lawsuit is whether the licence under which the code is released applies at all in the case of screen scraping. The current understanding of screen scraping is that it is allowed, despite what is in the websites terms. Effectively if a human can access the content freely without having to actively agree to a license or terms you can scrape the content.…

> I think one of the interesting things that will be covered in this lawsuit is whether the licence under which the code is released applies at all in the case of screen scraping. Screen scraping is essentially a question of whether or not the actions constitute something akin to hacking, which is almost completely orthogonal to copyright. The main intersection you get is that many screen scraping scenarios are about…

> When Google was scraping lyrics off of lyric sites--lyrics being totally and clearly copyrightable--it was dinged pretty hard for that.

Was google dinged for scraping the lyrics or publishing them verbatim? My understanding is that it was the latter.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#184

Post by robinsonb5 »

wtetzner wrote: post #163
judge2020 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically the GitHub TOS is in itself a license; much like how you can dual-license code, uploading to GitHub is its own license grant separate from the license of the code you're granting to anyone who wants to use it for their own purposes. LICENSE.txt/md is not the only way to grant access to code you write.

That requires the uploader to own copyright on that code. What if the uploader only has access to the code through the license?

Luckily by agreeing to the TOS you've indemnified Github against the consequences of that scenario.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#185

Post by iinnPP »

breck wrote: post #120

[flagged]

Thank you.

After pondering for months on this I have come to the same conclusions as you and reading your link made perfect sense.

We are fighting to work harder because we value currency above humanity. What a silly fight. Most jobs can already be done by an AI and we should work towards that, not the other way.

What is the point of free software again?

The tech is out of the bag. The hard part is done, the part where you are learning the unknown is infinitely harder than copying it afterwards. Nobody will ever control it.

Time to set ideas free.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#186

Post by jrm4 »

I'm still baffled as to why people treat Github like a public library despite being owned by what was at one time the greatest enemy of free and open source software in existence. Not saying they haven't changed their tune somewhat, but a library owned by Barnes and Noble is going to have very different incentives than an actual library.

Made all the more silly by the fact that it's Git. You could just host it yourself for five bucks a month and that's probably overpaying.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#187

Post by jacquesm »

judge2020 wrote: post #92
smoldesu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but GitHub's TOS doesn't (or at least shouldn't) change the conditions of the original license. You're giving GitHub a copy of the source code, not the ability to dictate your license for you. There's certainly a lot of legal ambiguity in the copyright sense, but one thing seems clear: Microsoft trained Copilot on code they weren't certain they could use.

Technically the GitHub TOS is in itself a license; much like how you can dual-license code, uploading to GitHub is its own license grant separate from the license of the code you're granting to anyone who wants to use it for their own purposes. LICENSE.txt/md is not the only way to grant access to code you write.

GitHub's TOS is subject to change so that doesn't hold water. Tomorrow they could claim in their TOS you owe them your firstborn if you upload code to GitHub but that doesn't mean that you are bound by those terms because they cross the reasonable expectation of what you are signing up for. Granting Microsoft a blanket license to use your code in any way they see fit was not a part of the deal for GitHub, and as far as I know it still isn't for code that you claim copyright on. If you release your code into the public domain or use a license that is so permissive that anybody can use it at will, even without attribution that would make it fair game.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#188

Post by Hugh95 »

ZhangSWEFAANG wrote: post #84

> Some open code carries relatively light requirements, for example: “Don’t use my code commercially (don’t sell it or use it in something you sell)” and, very basically. How can anyone even enforce this? Why can't I take some code, create a SaaS product for drug dealers, and then go sell it to my Opp Daquavion Marshawn III down the block? Who will ever find out?

[flagged]

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#189

Post by shadowfiend »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #156
dspillett wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are available in most fonts with reasonable-or-better Unicode coverage ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc... ). 1, 2 and 3 are available in ISO-8859-1 so can sometimes be used in 8-bit-only text, but I'd use them with care in that context. To type them easily you'll usually need composition (sometimes called chording) support. Some Linux (and other Unix) distributions still have this…

> On Android, unless you have a different keyboard in use which doesn't support this of course, long press on the number on the touch keyboard gives superscripts as an option chucks iPad out the window We only get the standard shift character as an option. E.g. 1 shows !, 2 shows @, etc. I’d use superscripts all the time if it was on the keyboard. Anyone know if MacOS can do it? Other than pressing the weird globe ke…

Easiest way I can think of is that you can use text substitution (System Settings -> Keyboard -> Text Replacements...) to set a string of characters that should substitute to the superscript characters (you can look it up with the globe key to set it up initially). So you could make e.g. [1] map to ¹, [2] map to ², etc. You could also use this trick on i(Pad)OS (Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Text Substitutions). In fact, the substitutions should sync across if you're logged into the same Apple ID.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#190

Post by TAForObvReasons »

dspillett wrote: post #123
judge2020 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a lot of this stems from how the DMCA does not require that these hosting providers actually check for code ownership at submission, or maybe just how they don't have an explicit checkbox for "I affirm that I can license this code to GitHub" every time someone is uploading code. If it is shown that the license in the TOS is valid, the legal question might boil down to "is the TOS License broad enough to wher…

A checkbox would make no difference in the case where the uploaded has not been granted the right to agree to such terms with respect to the code in question, leaving the matter in the same situation.

I'd like to propose a "golden rule" test. If Copilot was truly not at risk of regurgitating large blocks of code verbatim, why didn't Microsoft train it on proprietary Microsoft code as well? Why was it limited to user-submitted code on GitHub? If there is any argument pointing to licensing or copyright or patents, it stands to reason those concerns would apply to any corpus of user-submitted code since users could easily misrepresent the licensing.
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