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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

#361

Post by D13Fd »

mirekrusin wrote: post #247
herpderperator wrote: post #59

The title of the submitted PDF document: "Microsoft Word - 2022-11-02 Copilot Complaint (near final)"[0] I've noticed this a lot and it's quite funny seeing what the actual filename of the document was. Does this just get included as metadata by default when you export to PDF? [0] https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/pdf/1-0-github_complaint...

They should use github instead of sending "(final, 2nd revision, really final, amended)" emails.

If only you could, with Word docs. Sadly you can't in any meaningful way.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#362

Post by elil17 »

josho wrote: post #107
elil17 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That demonstrates that copyright laws are already stifling innovation.

I don’t quite agree. Msft took a conservative approach to copyright to protect their own business. Meanwhile open source software has had an immeasurable benefit to society. My computer, tv, phone, light bulb, etc all benefit from OSS—running various licenses, and only a subset using a copyleft like license.

The fact that the laws are inconsistent and expensive to defend against leads companies like Microsoft to take this conservative approach that slows down progress.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#363

Post by TAForObvReasons »

deanjones wrote: post #347
acdha wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Without attribution" is a condition of the licence that applies to third-parties. It is not a condition of the licence that applies to Github.

It's worth reading the passage in its entirety and how a court would interpret it:

> We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it

> This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program.

If Copilot is straight-up reproducing work, and it is a service that users have to pay to use, then it seems like Copilot is "sell[ing] your content" and thus the license does not apply.

More generally, a court is likely to look at the plain English summary and judge. Copilot is not an integral part of "the service" as developers understood it before Copilot existed.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#364

Post by Cort3z »

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…

People would likely not share any code if they could not trust that their work would be respected, and attributed. So yes, I believe it to be fundamental to open source.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#365

Post by bogwog »

bpicolo wrote: post #318
bogwog wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I hope comes out of the lawsuit. If a company wants to sell an AI model, they need to own all of the training data. It can't be "fair use" to take other peoples' works at zero cost, and use it to build a commercial product without compensation. And maybe models trained on public data should be in the public domain, so that AI research can happen without requiring massive investments to obtain the trainin…

> It can't be "fair use" to take other peoples' works at zero cost, and use it to build a commercial product without compensation. You just described open source software. That's the whole heart of this lawsuit, and equally Copilot. It was trained on OSS which is explicitly licensed for free use.

Ok you got me, that wording was lazy on my part. But that's a really bad take on yours:

> It was trained on OSS which is explicitly licensed for free use.

That's not what the lawsuit is about. It's not about money, it's about licensing. OSS licenses have specific requirements and restrictions for using them, and Copilot explicitly ignores those requirements, thus violating the license agreement.

The GPL, for example, requires you to release your own source code if you use it in a publicly-released product. If you don't do that, you're committing copyright infringement, since you're copying someone's work without permission.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#366

Post by deathanatos »

bpicolo wrote: post #318
bogwog wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I hope comes out of the lawsuit. If a company wants to sell an AI model, they need to own all of the training data. It can't be "fair use" to take other peoples' works at zero cost, and use it to build a commercial product without compensation. And maybe models trained on public data should be in the public domain, so that AI research can happen without requiring massive investments to obtain the trainin…

> It can't be "fair use" to take other peoples' works at zero cost, and use it to build a commercial product without compensation. You just described open source software. That's the whole heart of this lawsuit, and equally Copilot. It was trained on OSS which is explicitly licensed for free use.

Most companies building commercial products on top of FOSS are obeying the license requirements. (I have been through due diligence reviews where we had to demonstrate that, for each library/tool/package.)

The same cannot be said for Copilot: there have been prior examples here on HN showing that it can emit large chunks of copyrighted code (without the license).

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#367

Post by deanjones »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #363
deanjones wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Without attribution" is a condition of the licence that applies to third-parties. It is not a condition of the licence that applies to Github.

It's worth reading the passage in its entirety and how a court would interpret it: > We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it > This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Conten…

"as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time."

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#368

Post by brookst »

kube-system wrote: post #146
brookst wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal system takes intent into account. So if you produce napster 2.0 to be the best music piracy tool, and you test it for piracy, and you promote it for piracy... you're going to have trouble. If you produce napster 2.0 as a general purpose file sharing system, let's call it a torrent client, and you can claim no ill intent... you may have trouble but it's a lot more defensible in court. I would find it a big s…

> I would find it a big stretch to say Github's intent here is to illegally distribute copyrighted code. Almost everything on GitHub is subject to copyright, except for some very old works (maybe something written by Ada Lovelace?), and US government works not eligible for copyright. Now, many of the works there are also licensed under permissive licenses, but that is only a defense to copyright infringement if the t…

> Almost everything on GitHub is subject to copyright,

Agreed. Like I said, it's about intent. Can anyone say with a straight face that copilot is an elaborate scheme to profit by duplicating copyrighted work?

I don't think the defense is that it wasn't trained on copyrighted data. It obviously was.

I think the defense is that anything, including a person, that learns from a large corpus of copyrighted data will sometimes produce verbatim snippets that reflect their training data.

So when it comes to copyright infringement, are we moving the goalposts to where merely learning from copyrighted material is already infringement? I'm not sure I want to go there.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#369

Post by elil17 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #87
elil17 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That demonstrates that copyright laws are already stifling innovation.

That's the goal. To stifle using someone else's work. Like, copyright laws are also stifling my innovative business creating BluRays of Disney films and selling them on Amazon.

That sucks for little snippets of software though, doesn’t it? It’s like copyrighting individual dance moves (not allowed under the current system) and forcing dancers to never watch each other to make sure they’re never stealing.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#370

Post by gpm »

atum47 wrote: post #186

Forgive my ignorance, but who is going to benefit from this lawsuit? I have a lot of code on GitHub, can I, for instance, expect a check in the mail in case of a win?

(Not a lawyer, so this is really definitely absolutely not legal advice and if you're looking to profit you should speak to a lawyer... for instance the lawyers who just filed the lawsuit)

They're asking for two things, injunctive relief (ordering github/openai/microsoft to stop doing this) and damages.

I suppose the injunctive relief really benefits anyone who doesn't want AI models to exist, because that's what it's asking for.

The damages will go the members of the class certified for damages, with more going to the lead plaintiffs (those actually involved in the suit) and some going to the lawyers. They're asking for the following class definition for damages

> All persons or entities domiciled in the United States that, (1) owned an interest in at least one US copyright in any work; (2) offered that work under one of GitHub’s Suggested Licenses; and (3) stored Licensed Materials in any public GitHub repositories at any time during the Class Period.

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