A a GitHub user, is there a way to support GitHub against this lawsuit?
Obviously not financially as Microsoft has basically YES amounts of money.
We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
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Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#42As 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.
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#43The 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.
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#44I'm kinda sceptical that this goes anywhere given that basically they say that whatever copilot outputs is your responsibility to vet that it doesn't break any copyright (obviously that goes against the promise of it and the PR but that's the small print that gets them out of trouble).
So, if i made napster 2.0 and said that it is your job to make sure that you do not download anything copyrighted, that would be ok?
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 stretch to say Github's intent here is to illegally distribute copyrighted code. No judgment on whether the class action has any merit, just saying I would be very surprised if discovery turns up lots of emails where Github execs are saying "this is great, it'll let people steal code."
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#45I am not against this lawsuit but I'm against the implications of this because it can lead to disastrous laws. A programmer can read available but not oss licensed code and learn from it. Thats fair use. If a machine does it, is it wrong ? What is the line between copying and machine learning ? Where does overfitting come in ? Today they're filing a lawsuit against copilot. Tomorrow it will be against stable diffusio…
GitHub Copilot has been proven to use code without license attribution. This doesn't need to be as controversial as it is today.
If you're using code and know that it will be output in some form, just stick a license attribution in the autocomplete.
In fact, did you know this is what Apple Books does by default? Say, for example, you copy and paste a code sample from The C Programming Language. 2nd Edition. What comes out? The code you copy and pasted, plus attribution.
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#46I suspect this will be the first of many lawsuits over training data sets. Just because it is obscured by artificial neural networks doesn't mean it's an original work that is not subject to copyright restrictions.
Yeah yeah my code produces the complete works of Micky Mouse but it's it's okay because _algorithms_!
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#47On page 18, they show Copilot produces the following code:
>function isEven(n) {
> return n % 2 === 0;
>}
They then say, "Copilot’s Output, like Codex’s, is derived from existing code. Namely, sample code that appears in the online book Mastering JS, written by Valeri Karpov."
Surely everyone reading this has written that code verbatim at some point in their lives. How can they assert that this code is derived specifically from Mastering JS, or that Karpov has any copyright to that code?
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#48I am not against this lawsuit but I'm against the implications of this because it can lead to disastrous laws. A programmer can read available but not oss licensed code and learn from it. Thats fair use. If a machine does it, is it wrong ? What is the line between copying and machine learning ? Where does overfitting come in ? Today they're filing a lawsuit against copilot. Tomorrow it will be against stable diffusio…
At least in legal terms, the difference between humans and machines couldn't be more clear.
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#49I wonder if the plaintiffs' code would stand up to scrutiny of whether any of it was copied, even unintentionally, from other code they saw in their years of learning to program? I know that I have more-or-less transcribed from Stack Overflow/etc, and I have a strong suspicion that I have probably produced code identical to snippets I've seen in the past.
But have you done so on an industrial scale?
I'm just one person! Give me a team of 1000 and I'll get right on that.
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#50I'm kinda sceptical that this goes anywhere given that basically they say that whatever copilot outputs is your responsibility to vet that it doesn't break any copyright (obviously that goes against the promise of it and the PR but that's the small print that gets them out of trouble).
So, if i made napster 2.0 and said that it is your job to make sure that you do not download anything copyrighted, that would be ok?
Now, IANAL, but iirc, that is all 100% okay and legal. In fact, I can even download copyrighted music and movies without issue. So, I don't even need to make sure I don't download anything under copyright.
The issue isn't downloading copyrighted stuff.
Rather, it's making available and letting others download it. That was where you got in trouble.