Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 505 posts

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#271

Post by RF_Savage »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #97
munificent wrote: post #45

> Indeed, last year GitHub was said to have tuned its programming assistant to generate slight variations of ingested training code to prevent its output from being accused of being an exact copy of licensed software. If I, a human, were to: 1. Carefully read and memorize some copyrighted code. 2. Produce new code that is textually identical to that. But in the process of typing it up, I randomly mechanically tweak a…

You have a much smaller lobbying budget than the AI industry, and you didn't flagrantly rush to copy billions of copyrighted works as quickly as possible and then push a narrative acting like that's the immutable status quo that must continue to be permitted lest the now-massive industry built atop copyright violation be destroyed. Violate one or two copyrights, get sued or DMCAed out of existence. Violate billions,…

Violate billions or millions is what they used to nail warez folks with. So there is that.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#272

Post by Qwertious »

TylerE wrote: post #246
adra wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For that matter, if you think China ripping everyone else off is bad now… well, just wait until every company can do that.

If everyone could do it, it wouldn't be as big a deal - small western businesses would be on a more level playing field, since they would be almost as immune from being sued by big businesses as Chinese businesses are. As it is, small businesses aren't protected by patents (because a patent is a $10k+ ticket to a $100k+ lawsuit against a competitor with a $1M+ budget for lawyers) while still being bound by the restrictions of big business's patents. It's lose/lose.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#273

Post by skybrian »

BeefWellington wrote: post #237
skybrian wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machine alone doesn't do anything. The user and machine together constitute a larger system, and with autocomplete, the user is charge. What's the user's intent? I suspect that a lot of copyright violations are enabled by cut-and-paste and screenshot-taking functionality, and maybe we need to be careful with autocomplete, too? It's the user's responsibility to avoid this. We should be careful using our tools. Do…

> The machine alone doesn't do anything. By the same token, the machine alone can't download pirated movies. Yet the sites hosting those movies are targeted as the infringers. There's a point at which foisting this responsibility on the users is simply socializing losses. Ultimately Copilot is the one serving the code up - regardless of the user's request. If the user then goes on to republish that work as their own…

It is a lot of work to do a lot of rewrites, but it’s noncommercial and I’m not in a hurry. And autocomplete is still pretty useful.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#274

Post by sulandor »

voxic11 wrote: post #47
whimsicalism wrote: post #28

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…

> You can't copyright a mathematical operation.

i agree from a philosophical pov, but this is clearly not the case in law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#275

Post by Qwertious »

eropple wrote: post #223
kibwen wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

This is all true, and in a vacuum I agree with it. There's a pretty core problem with these kinds of assertions, though: people have to make rent. Never have I seen a substantiative, pass-the-sniff-test argument for how to make practical this system when your authors and your artists need to eat in a system of modern capital. So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorro…

Not the person you responded to, but:

>So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow?

Patreon (or liberapay etc). Take a look at youtube: so many creators are actively saying "youtube doesn't pay the bills, if you like us then please support us on Patreon". Patreon works. Some of the time, at least - just like copyright. Also crowdsourcing (e.g. Kickstarter), which worked out well for games like FTL and Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Although, I personally don't believe copyright should be abolished - it just needs some amendments. It needs a duration amendment - not a flat duration (fast-fashion doesn't need even 5 years of copyright, but aerospace software regularly needs several decades just to break profitable), but either some duration-mechanism or a simple discrimination by industry.

Also, I think any sort of functional copyright (e.g. software copyright) ought to have an incentive or requirement to publish the functional bits - for instance, router firmware ought to require the source code in escrow (to be published once copyright duration expires) for any legal protections against reverse-engineering to be mounted. Unpublished source code is a trade secret, and should be treated as such.

Also, these discussions don't seem to mention fanfiction, which demonstrates plenty of people write good works without being professionally paid and without the protection of copyright.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#276

Post by timeon »

archontes wrote: post #200
carom wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public is not learning from it. A person or corporation is creating a derivative work of it. Training a model is deriving a function from the training data. It is not "a human learning something by reading it".

It's an extreme stretch to say that the model weights are a derivative work of the training data given the legal definition of "derivative work".

It is processed data at the end of the day. And no it is not like human reading. You can't read whole Github.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#277

Post by satvikpendem »

devmor wrote: post #148
satvikpendem wrote: post #117

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 does someone's work matter?

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#278

Post by JoshTriplett »

kibwen wrote: post #185
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 wo…

> It is impossible for us to gesture at the works of art that do not exist because of draconian copyright.

We can gesture at the tiniest tip of the iceberg by observing things that are regularly created in violation of copyright but not typically attacked and taken down until they get popular:

- Game modding, romhacks, fangames, remakes, and similar.

- Memes (often based on copyrighted content)

- Stage play adaptations of movies (without authorization

- Unofficial translations

- Machinima

- Speedruns, Let's Play videos, and streams (very often taken down)

- Music remixes and sampling

- Video mashups

- Fan edits/cuts, "Abridged" series

- Archiving and preservation of content that would otherwise be lost

- Fan films

- Fanfiction

- Fanart

- Homebrew content for tabletop games

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#279

Post by dathinab »

whimsicalism wrote: post #28
daedrdev wrote: post #4

> The anonymous programmers have repeatedly insisted Copilot could, and would, generate code identical to what they had written themselves, which is a key pillar of their lawsuit since there is an identicality requirement for their DMCA claim. However, Judge Tigar earlier ruled the plaintiffs hadn't actually demonstrated instances of this happening, which prompted a dismissal of the claim with a chance to amend it. I…

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

yes, but you need to show that it happened _in your case_, not that it can happen in general.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#280

Post by adrian_b »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #96
archontes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not get your ass kicked. Copyright doesn't protect function, to the point where the court will assess the degree to which the style of the code can be separated from the function. In the even that they aren't separable, the code is not copyrightable. https://www.wardandsmith.com/articles/supreme-court-announce... https://easlerlaw.com/software-computer-code-copyrighted#:~:...

The simple version is that code is copyrightable as an expression . And the underlaying algorithm is patentable . The legal term you're looking for here is the "Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison" test; What remains if you subtract all the non-copyrightable elements from a given piece of code.

Algorithms have become patentable only very recently in the history of patents, without a rationale being ever provided for this change, and in some countries they have never become patentable.

Even in the countries other than USA where algorithms have become patentable, that happened only due to USA blackmailing those countries into changing their laws "to protect (American) IP".

It is true however that there exist some quite old patents which in fact have patented algorithms, but those were disguised as patents for some machines executing those algorithms, in order to satisfy the existing laws.

Post reply on HN