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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

#331

Post by sigzero »

citilife wrote: post #42
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…

Say I produce a licensed library. Someone can pay me $5/year per license. I keep the code private and compile the code before sending it to customers. If you have co-pilot trained on my code base (which was private), that then reproduces near replica's of my code then they sell it for $5/year... Well, I'm eligible for damages.

I don't believe it does anything with private repos and that isn't what is being alleged.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#332

Post by heavyset_go »

drvortex wrote: post #308
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…

Your code is not in that thing. That thing has merely read your code and adjusted its own generative code. It is not directly using your code any more than programmers are using print statements. A book can be copyrighted, the vocabulary of language cannot. A particular program can be copyrighted, but snippets of it cannot, especially when they are used in a different context. And that is why this lawsuit is dead on…

Neutral nets can and do encode and compress the information they're trained on, and can regurgitate it given the right inputs. It is very likely that someone's code is in that neural net, encoded/compressed/however you want to look at it, which Copilot doesn't have a license to distribute.

You can easily see this happen, the regurgitation of training data, in an over fitted neural net.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#333

Post by thomastjeffery »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #68

If a software developer learns how to code better by reading GPL software and then later uses the skills they developed to build closed source for profit software should they be sued?

If a software developer writes a program to remember a million lines of GPL code, then uses that dataset to "generate" some of that code, then they are essentially violating that license with extra steps.

The extra steps aren't enough to exhonorate them. It's just a convoluted copy operation.

Is just like how a lossy encoding of a song is still - with respect to copyright - a copy of that song. The data is totally different, and some of the original is missing. It's still a derivative work. So is a remix. So is a reperformance.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#334

Post by RamblingCTO »

gcmrtc wrote: post #140
RamblingCTO wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I guess so. This website reads like bullshit bingo from some weird twitter dude trying to sell you his newest product: "AI needs to be fair & eth­i­cal for every­one. If it’s not, then it can never achieve its vaunted aims of ele­vat­ing human­ity. It will just become another way for the priv­i­leged few to profit from the work of the many." Blah blah. Can we get back to the hacking on stuff mentality?

Looks like that lawyer guy is not new on hacking stuff: https://matthewbutterick.com/ Not exactly the curriculum of a twitter weirdo.

Hah, funny. I've used Pollen before and think I've had contact with him a few years ago! The blah blah about AI elevating the world is still bs imho. I still disagree with his views (https://matthewbutterick.com/chron/this-copilot-is-stupid-an...) and this law suit.

I wasn't actually talking about him specifically btw when saying "this sounds like a crypto bro from twitter". The overly enthusiastic AI talk reminded me of that, that's what I wanted to say.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#335

Post by pmarreck »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #328
drvortex wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your code is not in that thing. That thing has merely read your code and adjusted its own generative code. It is not directly using your code any more than programmers are using print statements. A book can be copyrighted, the vocabulary of language cannot. A particular program can be copyrighted, but snippets of it cannot, especially when they are used in a different context. And that is why this lawsuit is dead on…

This is demonstrably false. It is a system outputting character-for-character repository code.[1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33457517

It can be modified to not do that (example: mutating the code to a "synonym" that is functionally but not visually identical).

It can also be modified to be opt-in-only (only peoples' code that they permit to be learned on, can use the product)

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#336

Post by Cort3z »

sigzero wrote: post #314
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…

> I’m not a lawyer, but Should have stopped there.

Why?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#337

Post by xtracto »

drvortex wrote: post #308
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…

Your code is not in that thing. That thing has merely read your code and adjusted its own generative code. It is not directly using your code any more than programmers are using print statements. A book can be copyrighted, the vocabulary of language cannot. A particular program can be copyrighted, but snippets of it cannot, especially when they are used in a different context. And that is why this lawsuit is dead on…

Say you publish a song and copyright it. Then I record it and save it in a .xz format. It's not an MP3, it is not an audio file. Say I split it into N several chunks and I share it with N different people. Or with the same people, but I share it at N different dates. Say I charge them $10 a month for doing that, and I don't pay you anything.

Am I violating your copyright? Are you entitled to do that?

To make it funnier: Say instead of the .xz, I "compress" it via π compression [1]. So what I share with you is a pair of π indices and data lengths for each of them, from which you can "reconstruct" the audio. Am I illegally violating your copyrights by sharing that?

[1] https://github.com/philipl/pifs

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#338

Post by heavyset_go »

smoldesu wrote: post #313
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…

> “AI” is just fancy speak for “complex math program” Not really? It's less about arithmetic and more about inferencing data in higher dimensions than we can understand. Comparing it to traditional computation is a trap, same as treating it like a human mind. They've very different, under the surface. IMO, if this is a data problem then we should treat it like one. Simple fix - find a legal basis for which licenses a…

I've been saying AI is computational statistics on steroids for a while, and I think that's an apt generalization of what ML is.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#339

Post by acdha »

deanjones wrote: post #322

This will fail very quickly. The licence that project owners publish with their code on Github applies to third parties who wish to use the code, but does not apply to Github. Authors who publish their code on Github grant Github a licence under the Github Terms: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... Specifically, sections D.4 to D.7 grant Github the right to "to store, archive, parse, and d…

I don’t see that being “quickly” - they’d have to get a judge to agree that passing your code off without attribution for other people to use as their own work is a normal service improvement. Given that it’s a separate feature with different billing terms, I’m skeptical that it’s anywhere near the given that you’re portraying it as.
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