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Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

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Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#181
post #168
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because you filter out verbatim copies doesn't mean there isn't still copyright infringement/plagiarism/whatever you want to call it. Actually, it does. The production of the output is what matters here.

If you copy someone else's copyrighted work and then rearrange a few lines and rename a few things, you're probably still infringing.

For a book or a song, for sure, although that isn't really punished. Search the drama surrounding a popular YA author in the 10's, Cassandra Claire. For code since you can only copy the form and not the function that might actually be enough.

People do clean room implementations because of paranoia, not because it's actually a necessary requirement.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#182
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright has utterly failed to serve that purpose for a long time, and has been actively counterproductive. But if you want to argue that copyright is counterproductive, I completely agree. That's an argument for reducing or eliminating it across the board, fairly, for everyone; it's not an argument for giving a free pass to AI training while still enforcing it on everyone else .

Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Just because their lobbies tend to push the boundary of copyright into the absurd doesn't mean these industries aren't worth saving. There should be actually respectful lawmakers who seek for a balance of public and commercial interests.

So true! Copyrights that last 20 years would be completely reasonable. Maybe with exponentially increasing fees for successive renewals, for super valuable properties like Disney movies.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#183
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under what morals do you consider it "abhorrent?" I bet got a straight answer from those I've asked about this as the counter arguments seem too easy to make.

It's just pure exploitation. You're using the product of someone's work to create a machine that takes away their work.

Why is doing a task with a machine suddenly objectionable when the same task performed by humans is perfectly fine?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, go to far as to argue your example of Authors Guild v. Google is a good indication that most cases will probably go an AI platform's way. It's a pretty parallel case to a number of the arguments. Indexing required ingesting whole works of copyright material verbatim. It utilized that ingested data to produce a new commercial work consisting of output derived from that data. If I remember the case correctly,…

> In fact, go to far as to argue your example of Authors Guild v. Google is a good indication that most cases will probably go an AI platform's way. The more recent Warhol decision argues quite strongly in the opposite direction. It fronts market impact as the central factor in fair use analysis, explicitly saying that whether or not a use is transformative is in decent part dependent on the degree to which it replac…

I think that decision is much narrower than "market impact". It's specifically about substitution, and to that end, I don't see a good argument that Co-Pilot substitutes for any of the works it was trained on. No one is buying a license to co-pilot to replace buying a license to Photoshop, or GIMP, or Linux, or Tux Racer. Nor is Github selling co-pilot for that use.

To the extent that a user of co-pilot could induce it to produce enough of a copyrighted work to both infringe on the content (remember that algorithms are not protected by copyright) and substitute for the original by licensing in lieu of, I would expect the courts to examine that in the ways it currently views a xerox machine being used to create copies of a book. While the machine might have enabled the infringement, it is the person using the machine to produce and then distribute copies that is doing the infringing not the xerox machine itself nor Xerox the company.

Specifically in the opinion the court says:

>If an original work and a secondary use share

>the same or highly similar purposes, and the secondary use

>is of a commercial nature, the first factor is likely to

>weigh against fair use, absent some other justification for

>copying.

I find it difficult to come up with a good case that any given work used to train co-pilot and co-pilot itself share "the same or highly similar purposes". Even in the case of say someone having a code generator that was used in training of co-pilot, I think the courts would also be looking at the degree to which co-pilot is dependent on that program. I don't know off hand if there are any court cases challenging the use of copyright works in a large collage of work (like say a portrait of a person made from Time Magazine covers of portraits), but again my expectation here is that the court would find that while the entire work (that is the magazine cover) was used and reproduced, that reproduction is a tiny fraction of the secondary work and not substantial to its purpose.

Similarly we have this line:

>Whether the purpose and character of a use weighs in favor

>of fair use is, instead, an objective inquiry into what use

>was made, i.e., what the user does with the original work.

Which I think supports my comparison to the xerox machine. If the plaintiffs against Co-Pilot could have shown that a substantial majority of users and uses of Co-Pilot was producing infringing works or producing works that substitute for the training material, they might prevail in an argument that co-pilot is infringing regardless if the intent of github. But I suspect even that hurdle would be pretty hard to clear.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright has utterly failed to serve that purpose for a long time, and has been actively counterproductive. But if you want to argue that copyright is counterproductive, I completely agree. That's an argument for reducing or eliminating it across the board, fairly, for everyone; it's not an argument for giving a free pass to AI training while still enforcing it on everyone else .

[flagged]

This is a specious argument. It is impossible for us to gesture at the works of art that do not exist because of draconian copyright. Humans have been remixing each others' works for millions of years, and the artificial restriction on derivative work is actively destroying our collective culture. There should be thousands of professional works (books, movies, etc.) based on Lord Of The Rings by now, many of which would surpass the originals in quality given enough time, and we have been robbed of them. And Lord Of The Rings is an outlier in that it still remains culturally relevant despite its age; most works will remain copyrighted for far longer than their original audience was even alive, meaning that those millions of flowers never get their chance to bloom.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#186
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clearly was not designed for that purpose, I'm not aware of evidence that support that claim. If I ask ChatGPT "Give me a recipe for squirrel lemon stew" and it so happens that one person did write a recipe for that exact thing on the Internet, then I would expect that the most accurate, truthful response would be that exact recipe. Anything else would essentially be hallucination.

i think you are misconceiving then how LLMs work / what they are You can certainly try to hit a nail with a screw driver, but that doesn't make the screw driver a hammer.

Perfect analogy.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Isn't that akin to destruction of evidence?

Legally? No. In spirit? ... Probably? Unlike most LLMs, Github copilot can trivially solve their copyright problem by just using only code they have the right to reproduce. They have a giant corpus of code tagged with license, SELECT BY license MIT/Equivalent and you're done, problem solved because those licenses explicitly grant permission for this kind of reuse. (It's still not very cash money to take open source w…

> Unlike most LLMs, Github copilot can trivially solve their copyright problem by just using only code they have the right to reproduce.

Absolutely not trivial, in fact completely impossible by computer alone. You can't determine if you have the right to reproduce a piece of code just by looking at the code and tags themselves. *Taps the color-of-your-bits sign.*

* I can fork a GPL project on Github and replace the license file with MIT. Okay to reproduce?

* If I license my project as MIT but it includes code I copied inappropriately and don't have the right to reproduce myself, can Github? (No) This one is why indemnity clauses exist on contracted works.

* I create a git repo for work and select the MIT license but I don't actually own the copyright on that code and so that license is worthless.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#188

A slight aside, but this is the subtitle: > A few devs versus the powerful forces of Redmond – who did you think was going to win? I hate that kind of obnoxious "journalism". Sometimes the little guy is actually wrong. To clarify, I'm not commenting on the specifics of this case, I just hate how fake our online discourse has been by appealing to "big guy evil" before even bringing up the specifics of the case.

I think you're misinterpreting the sentence. I think it merely implies MS has more resources to throw at the legal case.

they also have more resources to ensure they covered their liability surface before any legal case materialized

aka the plaintiffs were wrong and had no idea what they were talking about

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#189
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. There have definitely been well publicized examples of this happening, like the quake inverse square root

You can't copyright a mathematical operation. Only a particular implementation of it, and even then it may not be copyrightable if its a straightforward and obvious implementation. That said the implementation doesn't appear to be totally trivial and copilot apparently even copies the comments which are almost certainly copyrightable in themselves. https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://gith…

Its even simpler, iD is owned by ZeniMax. ZeniMax is owned by Microsoft.. who would they even sue?
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