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

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#291

Post by sqeaky » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:00 PM UTC

karaterobot wrote: post #222

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…

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.

Money likely isn't the main goal (maybe it is for the lawyers), these are open source repos. Maybe they didn't consent to have their code used as training and that seems like the kind of thing consent should be needed for. Maybe this the AI spitting out copied snippets is a violation of open source licensing without attribution.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#292

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:00 PM UTC

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #271

As celestialcheese says [1], it seems like a manufactured case for the purpose of furthering someone's legal career rather than seeking remittance for any violations made by Copilot. But I like to put on my conspiracy hat from time to time, and right now is one such time, so let's begin... Though the motivations behind this case are uncertain, what is certain is that this case will establish a precedent. As we know,…

[deleted]

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#293

Post by stonemetal12 » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

naillo wrote: post #3

I'm kinda sceptical that this goes anywhere given that basically they say that whatever copilot outputs is your responsibility to vet that it doesn't break any copyright (obviously that goes against the promise of it and the PR but that's the small print that gets them out of trouble).

If I remember correctly that only works if you can prove that your system has "substantial non infringing use".

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#294

Post by spir » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

The part of GitHub Copilot to which I object is that it's trained on private repos. Where does GitHub get off consuming explicitly private intellectual property for their own purposes?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#295

Post by krono » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

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…

Farmers plant their crops out in the open too. Should Boston Dynamics be allowed to have their robots rob those fields empty and sell the produce without having to at least pay the farmer? They'd be walking and plucking just like any human would be.

Some source code might be published but not open source licensed. At least some such code has been taken with complete disregard of their licenses and/or other legal protections, and it's impossible to find and properly map out any similar violations for the purposes of a legal response.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#296

Post by Gigachad » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #286

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…

It looks like you're missing the entire purpose of copyleft vs public domain. The point is that copyleft source code cannot be used to improve proprietary software. That limitation is enforced with copyright. Proprietary software is closed source. You can't train your NN on it, because you can't read it in the first place. If someone takes your open source code and incorporates it into their proprietary software, the…

Copyleft wouldn’t need to exist without copyright because there would be no proprietary software to fight against.

Sure, there would be software with code not published, but if it was ever leaked which it often is, you could do whatever you want with it.

But in a world where copyright does exist, copyleft is a tool to fight back.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#297

Post by rowanG077 » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

Cort3z wrote: post #270

I’m not a lawyer, but here is why I believe a class action lawsuit is correct; “AI” is just fancy speak for “complex math program”. If I make a program that’s simply given an arbitrary input then, thought math operations, outputs Microsoft copyright code, am I in the clear just because it’s “AI”? I think they would sue the heck out of me if I did that, and I believe the opposite should be true as well. I’m sure my ow…

The brain is also just a "complex math program". Since math is just the language we use to describe the world. I don't feel this argument has any weight at all.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#298

Post by mike_d » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

karaterobot wrote: post #222

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…

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.

I don't care about the money. I support this because it will establish case law that other companies can't ignore licenses as long as they throw AI somewhere in the chain.

If "I took your code and trained an AI that then generated your code" is a legal defense, the GPL and similar licenses all become moot.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#299

Post by c0balt » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

mkeeter wrote: post #75

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…

Wine literally bans contributions from anyone that has seen Microsoft Windows source code: https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Who_can.27t_contribute...

Well they are a special case here however since they don't solve a specific problem nor build a programm per se but instead (re)build a programm after existing specs. Their explicit goal is to match the behaviour of another piece of software with a translation layer.

Forbidding people who have seen the "source" programm is most likely to protect their version from going from "matching behaviour" to "behaving like", as in the same code, point. This might also be intended to build a safeguard for good intentioned developers to not break their (most likely existing) own NDAs accidently.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#300

Post by heavyset_go » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:03 PM UTC

golemotron wrote: post #70

heavyset_go wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "it's your responsibility to not breach licenses or violate copyright" doesn't absolve your service from breaching licenses and violating copyright itself.

Yet we all use web browsers that copy copyrighted text from buffer to buffer all the time. This doesn't even include all of the copying that ISPs perform. It might be fair to say that the read performed in training has the same character since no human is involved. The real copyright violation would be using a derived work.

A browser isn't a amalgamation of billions of pieces of other works. A browser executes and renders code it's served.

Copilot's corpus is quite literally tomes of copyrighted work that are encoded and compressed in its neural network, from which it launders that work to create similar works. Copilot itself, the neutral network, is that corpus of encoded and compressed information, you can't separate the two. Copilot stores and distributes that work without any input from rightsholders, and it does it for profit.

A better analogy would be between a browser and a file server filled with copyrighted movies whose operator charges $10/mo for access. The browser is just a browser in this analogy, where the file server is the corpus that forms Copilot itself.