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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

#371

Post by heavyset_go »

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…

> We can model all the protons, electrons and photons incredibly accurately.

We can't even accurately model a receptor protein on a cell or the binding of its ligands, nor can we accurately simulate a single neuron.

This is one of those hard problems in computing and medicine. It is very much an open question about how or if we can model complex biology accurately like that.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#372

Post by CogitoCogito »

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…

> There is not a understood natural phenomenon which we could not capture in math.

Does the brain fall in into the category of “understood natural phenomenon”? Is it “understood”? What does “understood” mean in this context?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#373

Post by mldq »

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…

This is the standard content display license that everyone uses. Even in your quoted text I don't see any hint that snippets can be shown without attribution or the code license.

It also says they can't sell the code, which CoPilot is doing.

Also, in a very high number of cases it isn't the author who uploads.

Repeating your line of argumentation (which occurs in every CoPilot thread) does not make it true.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#374

Post by renewiltord »

lbotos wrote: post #181
renewiltord wrote: post #123

It doesn't make sense. If I make a piece of software that curls a random gist and then puts it into your editor am I infringing or are you infringing when you run it or are you infringing when you use that file and distribute it somewhere?

> If I make a piece of software that curls a random gist and then puts it into your editor am I infringing Depends on the license. If it's MIT and you serve the license, no, you are not infringing at all. A trimmed version of MIT for the relevant bits: Permission is hereby granted [...[ to any person obtaining a copy of this software [..] to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copie…

Well, `curl` will download a gist without checking its license. So curl is infringing?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#375

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#376

Post by eropple »

naikrovek wrote: post #359
heavyset_go wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Host that code. Serve that code to other users. It does not grant the right to create derivative works of that code outside the purview of the code's license. That would be a non-starter in practice; see every repository with GPL code not written by the repository creator.

Whether the results of these programs is somehow Not A Derivative Work is the question at hand here, not "sharing". I think (and I hope) that the answer to that question won't go the way the AI folks want it to go; the amount of circumlocution needed to excuse that the not actually thinking and perceiving program is deriving data changes from its copyright-protected inputs is a tell that the folks pushing it know it's silly.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#377

Post by bugfix-66 »

an1sotropy wrote: post #357
bugfix-66 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

The BSD license also controls "use", not just "redistribution":

  Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
  modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
  are met:
That's word-for-word BSD license.

The only change I made is adding clause 3:

  3. Use in source or binary forms for the construction or operation
     of predictive software generation systems is prohibited.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#378

Post by tasuki »

m00x wrote: post #43

The only people who gain out of class lawsuits are the lawyers. This person (a lawyer) saw an opportunity to make money and jumped on it like a hungry tiger on fresh meat.

I have quite a bit of respect for Matthew Butterick. I don't think he's just a lawyer looking to earn a quick buck. He cares about software and wants to make the world a better place.

> But nei­ther Matthew Butterick nor any­one at the Joseph Saveri Law Firm is your lawyer

This is curious. None of them are my lawyers, but surely at least some of them are someone's lawyers? Isn't it wrong to put such a blanket disclaimer on a website which might well be read by their clients?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#379

Post by naikrovek »

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

No post body was provided.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#380

Post by bpicolo »

bogwog wrote: post #365
bpicolo wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Yeah, and I think that's fair re: licensing. Curious to see how it pans out.

Also, re: your edit, not quite. They require you to release modified source under certain conditions if you make modifications to it. If everybody had to release code using GPL to the world, every companies code would currently be released to the world. There's more nuance than that. The gnu site covers a lot of that nuance (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#UnreleasedMods)

LGPL is the one that enterprises won't touch with a 10 foot pole, due to more restrictive licensing, and more conditions under which you'd have to open source your own code.

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