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An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

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Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#41

Post by simion314 »

az226 wrote: post #29
david_allison wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the license of the model, it's the license of the output. As it stands, Copilot is a black-box which strips copyright from a piece of code. I'd be fine if it were a level playing field and GitHub also trained it on private repositories - that's a signal that they don't care about copyright at all. I'd be fine as a developer who releases GPL'ed code if the output was licensed as GPL - obviously no license vio…

But Copilot doesn't take your code at best it has learned from a fraction of a fraction of your code and synthesized it with tens or thousands of like examples and the output may look similar to your code because it's trying to achieve the same thing. It's not like Copilot takes your entire repo and clones it and says "we washed the onerous license requirements away for ya".

So why in your opinion Microsoft did not had the courage to also train copilot on proprietary code or on their own proprietary code? Because from my perspective I conclude that MS knows that things are not as simple so they did not want to "upset" some companies while they can afford to screw over the open source people.

Btw I would have been behind MS if they have done one of this 2

1 use all code they have access , including MS code and including private code in GitHub because that would show they actually belive that the AI works as advertised

2 make the model open , let people use it locally, improve it, test it for copyright issues, do whatever they want

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#42

Post by khalt »

World177 wrote: post #35
amarant wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the ToS. You've granted GitHub specifically license to use your code under the terms of the ToS, they effectively have 2 licenses. They can therefore choose under which licence they want to use your code, and will choose the most permissive one, or the one they have the best understanding of: in this case the ToS. Other parties are not granted license under the ToS, and so will have to abide by the AGPL.

License takes precedence when you don’t own the copyright. ToS takes precedence when legally allowed and you do own the copyright.

ToS regularly gets thrown out in Europe if considered unfair. Much of OSS is written in the rest of the world.

(Of course the GitHub ToS do not allow any CoPilot activities in the first place.)

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#44

Post by melagonster »

nomilk wrote: post #36
fhd2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't shake the feeling that a lot of the logic around ML models having more or less the same "rights" as humans comes from misleading marketing that they, in any shape or form, resemble human intelligence. AI is a buzzword applied to any kind of algorithm for an activity that people previously thought couldn't be automated. Back when I was young, graph pathfinding algorithms where called AI. A few decades later th…

An argument in favour of legality of web scraping is if a human can look at websites and collect data, then why shouldn't they be allowed to do the same programatically? This is the same but for use of open source code: if humans are allowed to use one specific (organic) neural network to read, process, and use open source code, then why shouldn't they be allowed to use some other neural network, artificial or otherw…

But the analogue on code is not machine learning, it should be automatically download code.

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#45

Post by izacus »

visarga wrote: post #2

I think copyright itself might be on its way out. What meaning does a copyright have when I can click "Variations" on anything and get 4 suggestions in 10 seconds? Imagine how good they will be by 2030.

There has never been more support for tightening and enforcing copyright than there is today. This is very unlikely to change due to megacorps like Microsoft, Disney, Apple et.al. having a massive vested interest to use it to extract maximum profits.

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#46

Post by visarga »

david_allison wrote: post #38
az226 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Copilot doesn't take your code at best it has learned from a fraction of a fraction of your code and synthesized it with tens or thousands of like examples and the output may look similar to your code because it's trying to achieve the same thing. It's not like Copilot takes your entire repo and clones it and says "we washed the onerous license requirements away for ya".

There's a minimum level of complexity and creativity which constitutes a copyright violation. It's up to a legal professional to draw the line, but I believe it can be a single line of code (`i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );`) If I saw 100 LOC which was very similar to something which I wrote, AND contained a log statement copied verbatim, it's very easy to imply that the entire piece of code is a derivative work. Let's…

Replicating copyrighted code from the training set only happens 1% of the time, it's the exception not the rule. And when it happens it's usually because the same text appears multiple times in the training set. So it will memorize boilerplate and popular code snippets, not unique stuff. Even a replicated piece of code 100 lines long is no big deal in my opinion, unless it contains some kind of unique thing never seen before, like an optimized matrix multiplication function. Certainly not FizzBuzz.

On the practical side, it is actually easy to filter out sequences of words that are too similar to the training set from the output of the model. You just generate another snippet until it is "original" enough.

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#47

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

A hypothetical question: imagine a filmmaker, who had studied a lot of obviously copyrighted movies by famous renowned directors. This means he has trained his neural network using their copyrighted licensed content. Does he breach copyright when he composes and films a scene? Are visual quotes copyright theft? Homages? Did George Lucas infringe copyright when he was borrowing compositions from "Triumph of the will"?

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#48

Post by synapse26 »

LesZedCB wrote: post #3

out of curiosity, would anybody else cease to have an issue copilot if it was an open source model? i'm not paying for copilot right now because i'm waiting for this to shake out. but i'd be happy to pay (even their current asking price) if i knew the model was also open source and could be self hosted. maybe this is the wrong way to ask the question, but hopefully it makes sense

Yes, I’d be one too. I have no legal opinions about this, but morally, Copilot just doesn’t hit me right. One of the purpose open source exist is for it to be, well, open. It’s so annoying seeing this tool Specifically use only open source code and then have the audacity to close source + paywall access to it.

I used to be a little more agreeable with Copilot with training money and all, but seeing Stable Diffusion is willing to open up hundreds of thousands in training, and more in engineering, and therefore create an active community dedicated to improving it everyday, I just can’t help but be so annoyed when one of the world’s biggest tech companies pulls such petty move.

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#49

Post by nomilk »

melagonster wrote: post #44
nomilk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An argument in favour of legality of web scraping is if a human can look at websites and collect data, then why shouldn't they be allowed to do the same programatically? This is the same but for use of open source code: if humans are allowed to use one specific (organic) neural network to read, process, and use open source code, then why shouldn't they be allowed to use some other neural network, artificial or otherw…

But the analogue on code is not machine learning, it should be automatically download code.

The specifics don't matter so much as the general idea that if a human can do it (anything), then why can't the human make a tool that can do it from them, thus saving them the work.

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#50

Post by Xylakant »

khalt wrote: post #42
World177 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

License takes precedence when you don’t own the copyright. ToS takes precedence when legally allowed and you do own the copyright.

ToS regularly gets thrown out in Europe if considered unfair. Much of OSS is written in the rest of the world. (Of course the GitHub ToS do not allow any CoPilot activities in the first place.)

That statement is dangerous. ToS often gets thrown out in business to consumer transactions where the business has a significantly better negotiation position (legal counsel,…) It’s a consumer protection mechanism. In business to business interactions, the chance of getting a ToS thrown out is much lower since it’s assumed that the playing field is much more level.
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