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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

#211

Post by jacobr1 »

glerk wrote: post #145
celestialcheese wrote: post #133

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but this feels like it's more a law firm and individual looking to profit and make their mark in legal history rather than an aggrieved individual looking for justice. Programmer/Lawyer Plaintiff + upstart SF Based Law Firm + novel technology = a good shot at a case that'll last a long time, and fertile ground to establish yourself as experts in what looks to be a heavily litigated area o…

Quoted post unavailable.

It is a little different. The first patent troll that blazed the trail gets both more credit (for ingenuity) and blame (for the deleterious impact) in my opinion. I'll give the same internet points to these guys.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#212

Post by cube00 »

iudqnolq wrote: post #203
celestialcheese wrote: post #133

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but this feels like it's more a law firm and individual looking to profit and make their mark in legal history rather than an aggrieved individual looking for justice. Programmer/Lawyer Plaintiff + upstart SF Based Law Firm + novel technology = a good shot at a case that'll last a long time, and fertile ground to establish yourself as experts in what looks to be a heavily litigated area o…

One of the core principles of the American system of government is that we outsource enforcement to private parties. Instead of the public needing to fund enforcement with tax dollars private parties undertake risky litigation in exchange for the chance of a big payoff. There is a reasonable argument that's a horrible system. But it doesn't make sense to criticize the plaintiff looking for a profit - the entire syste…

Sounds like healthcare

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#213

Post by vesinisa »

glerk wrote: post #145
celestialcheese wrote: post #133

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but this feels like it's more a law firm and individual looking to profit and make their mark in legal history rather than an aggrieved individual looking for justice. Programmer/Lawyer Plaintiff + upstart SF Based Law Firm + novel technology = a good shot at a case that'll last a long time, and fertile ground to establish yourself as experts in what looks to be a heavily litigated area o…

Quoted post unavailable.

How come? When people contributed code publicly they attached a license how the code may be used. Is training an AI model on this allowed? I think there's a fair, important and novel legal question to be examined here.

Patent trolls usually file lawsuits that are just unmerited, but rely simply on the fact that mounting a defence is more expensive than settling.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#214

Post by efitz »

squokko wrote: post #163
celestialcheese wrote: post #133

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but this feels like it's more a law firm and individual looking to profit and make their mark in legal history rather than an aggrieved individual looking for justice. Programmer/Lawyer Plaintiff + upstart SF Based Law Firm + novel technology = a good shot at a case that'll last a long time, and fertile ground to establish yourself as experts in what looks to be a heavily litigated area o…

Just like good people can try to do good things and end up screwing things up badly, bad people can do bad things that have positive effects.

I fail to see the positive effect here.

Just like Google’s noble but misguided attempt to make all the world’s books searchable a few years back, what we have here is IP law getting in the way of a societal goodness.

Copyright and patent are not natural; they’re granted by law “to promote progress in the useful arts”. At first glance here it appears that GitHub is promoting progress and the plaintiffs are just rent-seeking.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#215

Post by jacooper »

SurgeArrest wrote: post #196

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 independe…

No thank you. I put a license to be followed, not to just be disregarded by an AI as "Learning material". No human perfectly reproduces their learning material no matter what, but Copilot does.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#216

Post by kmnc »

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…

I don’t understand this argument… if image AI gets good enough then generating exact copies of its training model seems trivial.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#217

Post by bjourne »

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…

You can "launder" away the license of any source code you have copied simply by deleting it! No snazzy neural network needed.. The litigants argument is that this is what GitHub CoPilot does. It allows others to publish derivative works of copyrighted works with the license deleted. Given that it apparently is trivial to get CoPilot to spit out nearly verbatim copies of the code that it was trained on, I don't think it satisfies the "transformative" requisite of the (American) Fair use doctrine.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#218

Post by henryfjordan »

celestialcheese wrote: post #133

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but this feels like it's more a law firm and individual looking to profit and make their mark in legal history rather than an aggrieved individual looking for justice. Programmer/Lawyer Plaintiff + upstart SF Based Law Firm + novel technology = a good shot at a case that'll last a long time, and fertile ground to establish yourself as experts in what looks to be a heavily litigated area o…

It can be and is both what you describe and a necessary feature of our adversarial legal system.

Github can't really go to a court by themselves and ask "is this legal?". There is the concept declaratory relief but you need to be at least threatened with a lawsuit before that's on the table.

So Github kinda just has to try releasing CoPilot and get sued to find out. The legal system is setup to reward the lawyer who will go to bat against them to find out if it is legal. The plantiff (and maybe lawyer, depending on how the case is financed) take the risk they are wrong just as Github had to.

It is setup this way to incentivize lawyers to protect everyone's rights.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#219

Post by heavyset_go »

celestialcheese wrote: post #133

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but this feels like it's more a law firm and individual looking to profit and make their mark in legal history rather than an aggrieved individual looking for justice. Programmer/Lawyer Plaintiff + upstart SF Based Law Firm + novel technology = a good shot at a case that'll last a long time, and fertile ground to establish yourself as experts in what looks to be a heavily litigated area o…

This is a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy. Stating that "they are no angels" doesn't detract from whether they're right or capable of effecting positive legal change.

Frankly, I don't care if anyone makes a name for themselves for doing this. In fact, I applaud them and would happily give them recognition should they be successful.

Similarly, I'd hope that there are opportunties for profit in this space, given that I don't want cheap lawyers botching this case and setting terrible legal precedent for the rest of us. Microsoft has a billion dollar legal team and they will do everything they can to protect their bottom line.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#220

Post by lovich »

iudqnolq wrote: post #203
celestialcheese wrote: post #133

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but this feels like it's more a law firm and individual looking to profit and make their mark in legal history rather than an aggrieved individual looking for justice. Programmer/Lawyer Plaintiff + upstart SF Based Law Firm + novel technology = a good shot at a case that'll last a long time, and fertile ground to establish yourself as experts in what looks to be a heavily litigated area o…

One of the core principles of the American system of government is that we outsource enforcement to private parties. Instead of the public needing to fund enforcement with tax dollars private parties undertake risky litigation in exchange for the chance of a big payoff. There is a reasonable argument that's a horrible system. But it doesn't make sense to criticize the plaintiff looking for a profit - the entire syste…

> But it doesn't make sense to criticize the plaintiff looking for a profit…

I don’t know man, I can simultaneously see the systemic issue that needs to be solved and also critique someone for subcoming to base needs like greed when they don’t have the need.

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