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Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

thehftguy.com

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Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#31

Post by samwillis »

bilqis wrote: post #27
samwillis wrote: post #4

> Microsoft GitHub is the largest collection of open source code in the world. Microsoft GitHub is in a unique and dominant positions to host and access and distribute most of the open-source code in the world No, it's not in a "unique and dominant position". Open source code is freely available online, it's almost trivial to build a bot to scrape OS code from anywhere on the web (GitHub included). The comparison to…

Github also has access to private repositories.

They don't use privet repositories to train Copilot.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#32

Post by lexandstuff »

shanebellone wrote: post #19
FeepingCreature wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's horrible. I didn't know that sampling and mashups required an explicit license. Looks like it's in the EU as well. edit: Hm, Pelham v Hütter C-476/17 might offer some grace for mashups under the quotation exemption at least. Though I wouldn't rely on that.

"Wow, that's horrible. I didn't know that sampling and mashups required an explicit license." The conclusion essentially boils down to "remixing is not fair use". Today's hip-hop is a direct result of that decision because sampling became prohibitively expensive.

The verdict was reached in December 1991. A lot of sampling has gone on since then.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#33

Post by 19h »

tpxl wrote: post #29
19h wrote: post #11

What a ridiculous article. Copilot does not violate antitrust law. GitHub is not a monopoly just because open source devs choose to host there. Devs are free to use GitLab or whatever. Comparing this to Google Books is silly. Google stole copyrighted books. Copilot uses freely shared open source code. No copyright issue. The article claims "Open source code on GitHub might be thought of as 'open and freely accessible…

> The MIT and Apache licenses explicitly allow reuse > No evidence Copilot [...] violated any licenses Both of these allow redistribution _if you include the license_. Copilot doesn't include any licenses in the code it distributes. You can argue whether that's fair use or not, but you can't argue that it doesn't respect the license.

You can configure Copilot to not return code that appears verbatim in public repositories. In that case it at least won't produce code you could legitimately argue would be covered by any individuals' specific license.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#34

Post by blowski »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #24
flockonus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears to be the exact opposite to me, `git clone --depth 1 ...` will give you a code that you can know exactly how to parse, vs. webpages that have all sorts of semantical issues.

Git clone is a very expensive operation. Git hosts generally will try to prohibit mass git clone:ing for this reason.

What makes it so expensive? I’d always assumed it downloaded the .git directory statically, and the computational bits were down by the local client.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#35

Post by williamcotton »

hanselot wrote: post #28
williamcotton wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no need to crawl for your own dataset: https://pile.eleuther.ai/

@article{pile, title={The {P}ile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling}, author={Gao, Leo and Biderman, Stella and Black, Sid and Golding, Laurence and Hoppe, Travis and Foster, Charles and Phang, Jason and He, Horace and Thite, Anish and Nabeshima, Noa and Presser, Shawn and Leahy, Connor}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.00027}, year={2020} } So if I understand this correctly, the Pile is for c…

I wonder why nobody is doing it? Perhaps everyone doesn't have access to petabytes of storage space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited proxy-jumps etc.

There are multiple private companies and public institutions that are currently training LLMs.

The work that it required to train an LLM is actually in support of fair use, just as it was with regards to Google scanning books.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#36

Post by dncornholio »

If you don't want your code to be public, licence it... You can put a licence.txt in your code, but people will ignore it. If you really don't want your code to be in public, don't publish it at all.

I personally think Copilot is training on all the code. It's not verifiable so I go with the worst case scenario. But it shouldn't be a problem if you don't publish code that's licensed.

Lines of code shouldn't even be copyrightable. But that's a whole other discussion.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#38

Post by neximo64 »

jackdaniel wrote: post #8
samwillis wrote: post #4

> Microsoft GitHub is the largest collection of open source code in the world. Microsoft GitHub is in a unique and dominant positions to host and access and distribute most of the open-source code in the world No, it's not in a "unique and dominant position". Open source code is freely available online, it's almost trivial to build a bot to scrape OS code from anywhere on the web (GitHub included). The comparison to…

This is addressed in the same paragraph - you can't scan/download "whole" github because you'll be throttled.

Are you actually throttled if you try to git clone or is that what the theory is, or is the assumption that it uses API calls to scrape through github?

Has anyone actually tried, because i've cloned lots of repos and have never been throttled. I'd go so far as to say the author of that post has never even tried it.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#39

Post by shanebellone »

lexandstuff wrote: post #32
shanebellone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wow, that's horrible. I didn't know that sampling and mashups required an explicit license." The conclusion essentially boils down to "remixing is not fair use". Today's hip-hop is a direct result of that decision because sampling became prohibitively expensive.

The verdict was reached in December 1991. A lot of sampling has gone on since then.

Correct, but this case shaped the sound and economics of hip-hop. Regardless, sampling now carries a cost; or legal repercussions.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#40

Post by quickthrower2 »

neximo64 wrote: post #38
jackdaniel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is addressed in the same paragraph - you can't scan/download "whole" github because you'll be throttled.

Are you actually throttled if you try to git clone or is that what the theory is, or is the assumption that it uses API calls to scrape through github? Has anyone actually tried, because i've cloned lots of repos and have never been throttled. I'd go so far as to say the author of that post has never even tried it.

21Tb of data, they might rate limit you! But might be possible via proxies. But only public repos.
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