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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

#351

Post by [deleted] »

nverno wrote: post #327
bugfix-66 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally the standard BSD 2-Clause License, word for word, with an additional third clause: 3. Use in source or binary forms for the construction or operation of predictive software generation systems is prohibited. Hardly nonsense, but obviously you aren't equipped to judge. More about the BSD licenses: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses

How would you ever prove the parameters of a model were generated by specific training data? Couldn't multiple sets of training data produce the same embeddings/parameters? I imagine there could be infinite possible sets of training data that would lead to the same results, depending on the type of predictive software.

[deleted]

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#353

Post by foooobaba »

leni536 wrote: post #305
foooobaba wrote: post #81

If github or google indexes source code using a neural net to help you find it, given a query, is that also illegal? If you think of copilot as something that helps you find code you’re looking for, is it all that different, and if so, why? In this case, wouldn’t the users of copilot be the ones responsible for any copyrighted code they may have accessed using copilot?

Both services already accept DMCA notices to take content down.

True, that’s another good point.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#354

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

xtracto wrote: post #337
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…

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 funni…

I was thinking of something similar as a counter argument and lo and behold, it’s a real thing maths has solved with a real implementation.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#355

Post by heavyset_go »

ugh123 wrote: post #306
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…

Attributions are fundamental to open source? I thought having source openly available was fundamental to open source (and allowed use without liability/warranty) as per apache, mit, and other licenses. If they just stick to using permissive-licensed source code then i'm not sure what the actual 'harm' is with co-pilot. If they auto-generate an acknowledgement file for all source repos used in co-pilot, and then asked…

Attribution and inclusion of copies of licenses are stipulations in almost all of the popular open source licenses, including BSD and MIT licenses.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#356

Post by moralestapia »

rowanG077 wrote: post #320
Supermancho wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The brain is also just a "complex math program". This is not a fact.

Explain yourself. There is not a understood natural phenomenon which we could not capture in math. If you argue behavior of the brain cannot be modeled using a complex math program you are claiming the brain is qualitative different then any mechanism known to man since the dawn of time. The physics that gives rise to the brain is pretty much known. We can model all the protons, electrons and photons incredibly accur…

>Explain yourself.

Why? Burden of proof is on you.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#357

Post by an1sotropy »

bugfix-66 wrote: post #138
an1sotropy wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, and I'm no fan of copilot, but I wonder if this kind of clause (your #3) is going to fly: you're preemptively prohibiting certain kinds of reading of the code (when code is read by the ML model in training). But is that something a license can actually do? The legal footing that copyright gives you, on which licensing rests, certainly empowers you to limit things about how others may redistribute your work (an…

The license conditionally permits (i.e., controls) "redistribution and use in source and binary forms". I think we can constrain use with the third clause. My question is, how should we word that clause?

Licenses get to set terms of redistribution. But training of the ML model -- the thing described by your #3 -- is not redistribution (imho). So maybe it's as unenforceable as saying left-handed people can't read your code.

The redistribution happens later, either when copilot blurps out some of your code, or when the copilot user then distributes something using that code (I'm curious which). At that point, whether some use of your code is infringing your license doesn't depend on the path the code took, does it? (in which case #3 is moot)

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#358

Post by elil17 »

Someone wrote: post #182
elil17 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That demonstrates that copyright laws are already stifling innovation.

It demonstrates that it stifles copying. That may make it easier for the copier to innovate, but doesn’t dispute the main argument for having copyright protection: that, without the protection of copyright, the code wouldn’t have been written.

I think in the case of open source code, most of it still would have been written if no copyright protections existed.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#359

Post by naikrovek »

heavyset_go wrote: post #332
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…

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.

> which Copilot doesn't have a license to distribute

when you upload code to a public repository on github.com, you necessarily grant GitHub the right to host that code and serve it to other users. the methods used for serving are not specified. This is above and beyond the license specified by the license you choose for your own code.

you also necessarily grant other GitHub users the right to view this code, if the code is in a public repository.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#360

Post by alpaca128 »

IshKebab wrote: post #253
jacooper wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thank you. I put a license to be followed, not to just be disregarded by an AI as "Learning material". No human perfectly reproduces their learning material no matter what, but Copilot does.

So are you ok with it being illegal for humans to learn from copyrighted books unless they have a license that explicitly allows learning? That does not sound like a pleasant consequence.

Would you use an AI text generator to write a thesis? No, there's a risk a whole chunk of it will be considered plagiarism because you have no idea what the source of the AI output is, but you know it was trained with unknown copyrighted material. This has nothing to do with the way humans learn, it's about correct attribution.

There is no technical reason why Microsoft can't respect licenses with Copilot. But that would mean more work and less training input, so they do code laundering and excuse it with comparisons to human learning because making AI seem more advanced than it is has always worked well in marketing.

Edit: And where do you draw the line between "learning" and copying? I can train a network to exactly reproduce licensed code (or books, or movies) just like a human can memorize it given enough time - and both of those would be considered a copyright violation if used without correct attribution. If you trained an AI model with copyrighted data you will get copyrighted results with random variation which might be enough to become unrecognizable if you're lucky.

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