We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot • Hacker News Board

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#191

Post by TheCoelacanth » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

flatline wrote: post #176

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…

Nobody is laundering away proprietary livenses, because that code is not open source and not in public github repos. And OSS capabilities are now present in copilot, which is neither free nor open. Furthermore these contributions are making their way into proprietary code and the OSS licensing becomes even further watered down. This is the epitome of what copyleft is against!

Code published on Github is not necessarily open source. There is a lot of code there that has no particular license attached, which means that all rights are reserved except for those covered in the Github TOS, which I believe just covers viewing the code on Github.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#192

Post by schleck8 » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

zeven7 wrote: post #157

schleck8 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely everyone reading this has written that code verbatim at some point in their lives Ironically their Twitter account uses a screenshot from a TV series as profile picture. I wonder how legal that is, even if meant as a joke. https://twitter.com/saverlawfirm Edit: It's been changed 2 minutes after I wrote this comment

This comment is 1 minute old and I only see a plain black profile picture. Or is your comment itself the joke?

They changed it, I'm 100 % sure. The profile picture was Saul from Breaking Bad. I assume they read the comments here and changed it in a matter of one or two minutes.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#193

Post by michaelmrose » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

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.

It being permissively licensed is virtually irrelevant because only a minority of code is so permissively licensed you can just do what you like under any license. Far more is do what you like within the scope of the license. For example GPL do with it what you like so long as any derivative work is also GPL.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#194

Post by foooobaba » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

It seems like we should come to agreement on what the license is intended for, given that when the licenses were created in a time before AI like this existed. If the authors did not intend their code to be used like this, should we not respect it? Also, does it make sense to create new licenses which explicitly state whether using it for AI training is acceptable or not - or are our current licenses good enough?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#195

Post by imoverclocked » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #159

belorn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common practice in copyright cases is to calculate damages based on the theoretical cost that the infringer would have paid if they have bought the rights in the first place. This method was used during the piratebay case to calculate damages caused by the sites founders. They did not actually calculate damages in terms of lost movie tickets or estimates vs actually sales number of sold game copies. When it came…

"Using such calculations they would likely estimate the man hours based on number of lines of code and multiply that with the average salary of a programmer." The average salary of a programmer in which country? So much programming is outsourced these days, and in some places programmers are very cheap.

Probably in the place where GitHub copilot is used and the location of the authority of the court.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#196

Post by SurgeArrest » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

I hope this case will fail and establish a good precedent for all future AI litigations and may be even prevent new ones. Your code is open source - irregardless of license, one might read it as a text book and then remember or even copy snippets and re-use this somewhere else unrelated to the original application. If you don't like this, don't make your code open source. This was happening and is happening independent of any license all over the world by majority of developers. What Copilot and similar tools did was to make those snippets accessible for extrapolation in new applications.

If these folks win - we again throw progress under the bus.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#197

Post by an1sotropy » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

awestroke wrote: post #57

If this leads anywhere I'll be pissed. I love CoPilot.

copilot is great, and ignorance is bliss, isn't it

The situation that this lawsuit is trying to save you from is this: (1) copilot blurps out some code X that you use, and then redistribute in some form (monetized or not); (2) it turns out company C owns copyright on something Y that copilot was trained on, and then (3) C makes a strong case that X is part of Y, and that your use of X does not fall under "fair use", i.e. you infringed on the licensing terms that C set for Y.

You are now in legal trouble, and copilot put you there, because it never warned that you X is part of Y, and that Y comes with such and such licensing terms.

Whether we like copilot or not, we should be grateful that this case is seeking to clarify some things are currently legally untested. Microsoft's assertions may muddy the waters, but that doesn't make law.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#198

Post by yjk » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

flatline wrote: post #176

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…

Nobody is laundering away proprietary livenses, because that code is not open source and not in public github repos. And OSS capabilities are now present in copilot, which is neither free nor open. Furthermore these contributions are making their way into proprietary code and the OSS licensing becomes even further watered down. This is the epitome of what copyleft is against!

Indeed, the ability to 'launder away' proprietary licenses when source is available means that companies in the future (that would otherwise provide source under a non-permissive license) will shift in favour of not providing source code at all.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#199

Post by bogwog » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

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.

This is what I hope comes out of the lawsuit. If a company wants to sell an AI model, they need to own all of the training data. It can't be "fair use" to take other peoples' works at zero cost, and use it to build a commercial product without compensation.

And maybe models trained on public data should be in the public domain, so that AI research can happen without requiring massive investments to obtain the training data.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#200

Post by kens » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

sedatk wrote: post #56

IceWreck wrote: post #34

I am not against this lawsuit but I'm against the implications of this because it can lead to disastrous laws. A programmer can read available but not oss licensed code and learn from it. Thats fair use. If a machine does it, is it wrong ? What is the line between copying and machine learning ? Where does overfitting come in ? Today they're filing a lawsuit against copilot. Tomorrow it will be against stable diffusio…

> 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.

Way, way back in 1992, Unix Systems Laboratories sued BSDI for copyright infringement. Among other things, they claimed that since the BSD folks had seen the Unix source code, they were "mentally contaminated" and their code would be a copyright violation. This led to the BSD folks wearing "mentally contaminated" buttons for a while.