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An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

katedowninglaw.com

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Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#21

Post by david_allison »

LesZedCB wrote: post #3

out of curiosity, would anybody else cease to have an issue copilot if it was an open source model? i'm not paying for copilot right now because i'm waiting for this to shake out. but i'd be happy to pay (even their current asking price) if i knew the model was also open source and could be self hosted. maybe this is the wrong way to ask the question, but hopefully it makes sense

It's not the license of the model, it's the license of the output.

As it stands, Copilot is a black-box which strips copyright from a piece of code.

I'd be fine if it were a level playing field and GitHub also trained it on private repositories - that's a signal that they don't care about copyright at all.

I'd be fine as a developer who releases GPL'ed code if the output was licensed as GPL - obviously no license violation.

I'd be fine (within a reasonable scale) if a developer contacted me and asked to use my code under MIT.

I'm not fine that Copilot allows people to take my code, 'change the variable names' and remove the license. Especially because I have no visibility of the fact that this has occurred.

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#23

Post by throwaway290 »

nomilk wrote: post #13

If organic neural networks are allowed to read and learn from open source code, why should an artificial one be any different?

For one, an organic network (for the sake of the argument I'll play along if you want to reduce a human to this) has rights, freedoms and ethical values and is not controlled by a single entity and has not specifically been instantiated to generate profit for such.

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#25

Post by guhayun »

throwaway290 wrote: post #8
visarga wrote: post #2

I think copyright itself might be on its way out. What meaning does a copyright have when I can click "Variations" on anything and get 4 suggestions in 10 seconds? Imagine how good they will be by 2030.

Copyright becomes especially important and valuable in these circumstances. Remember, original works is how your variation suggestion engine is trained. With remaining incentives taken away there is no more new stuff to train on, networks get trained on own output, the snake eats own tail.

>networks get trained on own output

And sometimes the network improves,depending on the quality or direction of the output,the client can a valuable critic even without being an expert in the field

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#26

Post by dragonwriter »

hooby wrote: post #15
visarga wrote: post #2

I think copyright itself might be on its way out. What meaning does a copyright have when I can click "Variations" on anything and get 4 suggestions in 10 seconds? Imagine how good they will be by 2030.

Copyright was originally intended to protect the creators of a work. Over many years it has now mostly become a tool for large companies to accumulate rights (on works they didn't create themselves) and monetize them. Maybe a reform is needed, to find a way back to the original purpose.

> Copyright was originally intended to protect the creators of a work.

No, it wasn’t. Copyright was originally intended to protect the publishers of a work. It was later transformed to nominally focus on the creators, but even this was lobbied for by publishers in their own self-interest after the old law directly protecting them was allowed to lapse, and because it still had the same net effect since realizing value meant licensing to a publisher in most practical cases, so the publishers were still major beneficiaries.

And, of course, US copyrights under the Constitution do not exist for the purpose of protecting creators, instead a private benefit for creators is a mechanism but the purpose is expressly to “promote the progress of science of useful arts”.

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#28

Post by throwaway290 »

guhayun wrote: post #25
throwaway290 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright becomes especially important and valuable in these circumstances. Remember, original works is how your variation suggestion engine is trained. With remaining incentives taken away there is no more new stuff to train on, networks get trained on own output, the snake eats own tail.

>networks get trained on own output And sometimes the network improves,depending on the quality or direction of the output,the client can a valuable critic even without being an expert in the field

Excellent, let's see how your client critiques and improves on a song, an artwork or some source code suggested by Copilot.

(By the way, do you have an objection to my point? I must have missed it.)

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#29

Post by az226 »

david_allison wrote: post #21
LesZedCB wrote: post #3

out of curiosity, would anybody else cease to have an issue copilot if it was an open source model? i'm not paying for copilot right now because i'm waiting for this to shake out. but i'd be happy to pay (even their current asking price) if i knew the model was also open source and could be self hosted. maybe this is the wrong way to ask the question, but hopefully it makes sense

It's not the license of the model, it's the license of the output. As it stands, Copilot is a black-box which strips copyright from a piece of code. I'd be fine if it were a level playing field and GitHub also trained it on private repositories - that's a signal that they don't care about copyright at all. I'd be fine as a developer who releases GPL'ed code if the output was licensed as GPL - obviously no license vio…

But Copilot doesn't take your code at best it has learned from a fraction of a fraction of your code and synthesized it with tens or thousands of like examples and the output may look similar to your code because it's trying to achieve the same thing. It's not like Copilot takes your entire repo and clones it and says "we washed the onerous license requirements away for ya".

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#30

Post by fhd2 »

geysersam wrote: post #20
nomilk wrote: post #13

If organic neural networks are allowed to read and learn from open source code, why should an artificial one be any different?

1. Humans are not neural networks. 2. Humans are not allowed to directly copy even rather short snippets of licenced code. 3. Humans do not have the capacity to memorize the entirity GitHub.

I can't shake the feeling that a lot of the logic around ML models having more or less the same "rights" as humans comes from misleading marketing that they, in any shape or form, resemble human intelligence. AI is a buzzword applied to any kind of algorithm for an activity that people previously thought couldn't be automated.

Back when I was young, graph pathfinding algorithms where called AI. A few decades later they are a well understood commodity and I haven't seen anyone call them AI for a while. Maybe that'll happen to LLMs too, given a few years?

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