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

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#221

Post by bogwog » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:44 PM UTC

ChrisLTD wrote: post #206

bogwog wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a good example of the value of these things. You can just as easily do that same thing with advanced text editor features. Sublime for example supports multi-cursor editing. Just hold alt+shift+arrow keys to add a cursor, then type in the brackets you want. Ctrl+D can be used to select the next occurrence of the current selection with multiple cursors, built-in commands from the command pallete…

Multiple cursors wont do what the parent comment is talking about without a lot more work.

Why? You can copy and paste the entire section, and use multiple cursors to add in the brackets.

going from

     a: 'one',

to

     a['one'],

just requires you to add two brackets and remove the colon. With multiple cursors you can do that exact same operation for all lines in a few keystrokes.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#222

Post by karaterobot » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:44 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #86

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #10

As a non-lawyer, I am very suspicious of the claim that "Plaintiffs and the Class have suffered monetary damages as a result of Defendants’ conduct." Flagrant disregard for copyright? Sure, maybe. The output of the model is subject to copyright? Who knows! But the copyright holders being damaged in some what? Seems doubtful. The best argument I could think of would be "GitHub would have had to pay us for this, and th…

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…

The one thing we can say with complete certainty is that most programmers who had their code used without permission will not receive very much money at all if this class action lawsuit is decided in their favor.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#223

Post by opine-at-random » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:44 PM UTC

RamblingCTO wrote: post #8

lol @ "open-source software piracy" If I'm being honest I'm a bit annoyed at this. What's the problem and what's the point of this?

If you'd ever read even a single one of the licenses to the software I'm sure you use everyday, you'd understand. This is such an obvious and pathetic strawman.

I notice often on hackernews that people don't seem to understand anything about free or open-source software outside of the pragmatics of whether they can abuse the work for free.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#224

Post by jacooper » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:45 PM UTC

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #191

flatline wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Copilot includes all public repos on GitBub, so this includes source-available and Proprietary code too.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#225

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:45 PM UTC

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…

> If you're angry about it lobby for either no rules or properly funded government enforcement of rules.

No, there are plenty of other changes you might want to see.

For example, in the American system, judges are generally not allowed to be aware of anything not mentioned by a party to the case. There is no good reason for this.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#226

Post by onlycoffee » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:45 PM UTC

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…

It's the two words, "government enforcement", that bothers me. If your party is in control the words sound fine, otherwise, they sound ominous.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#227

Post by tiahura » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #125

williamcotton wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way in hell that isEven is covered by copyright. "In computer programs, concerns for efficiency may limit the possible ways to achieve a particular function, making a particular expression necessary to achieving the idea. In this case, the expression is not protected by copyright." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... Think about how absurd this is. So if Microsoft was the first…

There are software patents on bit twiddling operations that people do end up having to work around.

They do because it’s cheaper to hire a coder to twiddle than a lawyer to litigate.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#228

Post by yamtaddle » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

nicolashahn wrote: post #14

dmitrygr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if i made napster 2.0 and said that it is your job to make sure that you do not download anything copyrighted, that would be ok?

That's basically the situation for any torrent client

Well, if the trackers also hosted mixed-up blocks of data for all the torrents they tracked and their protection was "LOL make sure you don't accidentally download any of these tiny data blocks in the correct order to reconstruct the copyrighted material they may be parts of wink"

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#229

Post by humanwhosits » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

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…

> irregardless of license

Hard no. Please stop using open source code if this is how you think of it.

Without licenses being respected, we don't get open source communities.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#230

Post by cactusplant7374 » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

bjourne wrote: post #217

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…

Is stable diffusion any different when including a famous artwork or artist in the prompt? The images produced are eerily similar to training data.