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GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

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Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#41

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

core-utility wrote: post #25

Wouldn't this kind of ruling effectively put a halt to ChatGPT and other AI's training on publicly accessible data? What's the difference between Copilot creating output based on code on Github, and ChatGPT giving answers based on a NYT article (without attribution)?

There is a difference between products and research in this case. Frequently, research is allowed by law as an exception, where building a product requires some more extensive agreement.

Unfortunately this is frequently abused where researchers build a model under the exemptions, and then others use that model commercially, even if they wouldn’t be allowed to build that model directly themselves.

Anyways, the scientific progress would continue, but products would halt until product developers get some kind of agreements with content creators (eg maybe people start adopting a new kind of open-ish license).

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#42

Post by mellosouls »

It will be a real shame if the fantastic achievement of OpenAI with copilot etc is smothered by ego.

Innovation in code should be heralded but if in the majority of cases the coder using Copilot and similar tools is just saving time on bog standard functions they could write themselves, it's difficult to understand why that needs to be attributed.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#43

Post by judge2020 »

core-utility wrote: post #32
judge2020 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it should be treated like a human. Your output is 99% similar to this ? Copyright infringement, you should have mixed your own thoughts and reasoning into your output. Humans can plagiarize just as easy as ChatGPT/CoPilot can generate verbatim text from its training set.

At what point can one say that the source is unique enough to qualify for protection? Otherwise, I can't use `print "Hello world"` because I didn't mix my own thoughts and reasoning into the output.

It's no different from how current copyright works for us humans. Something is only copyright protected if it's a "sufficiently original" work and "possesses at least a minimal degree of creativity" https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#44

Post by NicoleJO »

qayxc wrote: post #12
jacquesm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The range of possible outcomes is enormous, I'll just wait by the sidelines but cherish the thought that moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision. They can't be trusted, this has been proven over and over again and yet people keep falling for it. It's the fox guarding the chickens. I wrote about my misgivings at the time: https://jacquesmattheij.com/what-is-wrong-with-microsoft-buy...

[flagged]

This is so irrelevant it's annoying. None of those other companies sell the data after stripping the copyrights. Stop comparing them.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#45

Post by NicoleJO »

bluGill wrote: post #36
amelius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just hope it doesn't end in Microsoft paying some (from their perspective) small fine that is just the cost of doing business.

While the fine is a cost of doing business, if they don't change behavior they can be sued again, and courts tend to impose very large fines if they discover you were already fined for this and didn't change afterwards.

The "fine" is 9 billion dollars.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#46

Post by distcs »

judge2020 wrote: post #34
distcs wrote: post #11

> “Your honor, we needed so many works that it was simply not practical to ask permission of the creators.” I don’t find this argument convincing given the ability today to license many content types at scale for TDM, including images, music and yes, journal articles (See “Full disclosure” above), but it is an argument often offered by infringers. Why is this type of argument even valid? Isn't this fundamentally sayi…

On the other side, they could argue that it's like a human learning how to code over a decade of looking at the internet, and that human doesn't need to DM every code author to ask if they can learn from their content (and the risk for the author is similar given the human might one day recall some author's code verbatim and not give attribution).

> On the other side, they could argue that it's like a human learning how to code over a decade of looking at the internet

And that would make sense and it would be argued on its own merit. The judge/jury will decide if this argument is correct and legal.

But the article implies that there are lawyers and infringers out there who are arguing that they could not have possibly afforded the cost of not infringing, so they were justified in their infringement. Since when did the massive cost of avoiding infringement become a valid reason to carry on with infringement? This seems just plain absurd by common sense. How do lawyers and infringers make this argument? How is it even entertained in court? What am I missing?

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#47

Post by ascagnel_ »

samwillis wrote: post #18

I think one of the interesting things that will be covered in this lawsuit is whether the licence under which the code is released applies at all in the case of screen scraping. The current understanding of screen scraping is that it is allowed, despite what is in the websites terms. Effectively if a human can access the content freely without having to actively agree to a license or terms you can scrape the content.…

> When it comes to open source code I suspect it will be found to be similar, if the code is freely visible on the web by a human without an active agreement to view it, then it will be possible to "scrape" it. I don't think the license the code is under will apply if that is the case.

I don't see the scraping case applying here -- the idea that all human-readable code accessible on the public internet can be ingested into such a system without regard for its license would effectively mean that anything posted to the public internet is entered into the public domain, which seems ridiculous on its face (especially when the author(s) is including an explicit license alongside that code, which the scraper can theoretically also read and account for).

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#48

Post by Eleison23 »

judge2020 wrote: post #26
jacquesm wrote: post #3

Excellent. GitHub is in my opinion crossing a whole pile of lines here that should not have been crossed without the authors explicit permission, regardless of the utility of the tool they built. Copyright is not something that can be signed over by a terms-of-use change of a hosting provider, the expectation is that your host does not automatically claim the rights to anything that you store there. Such projects sho…

> Copyright is not something that can be signed over by a terms-of-use change of a hosting provider, I mean, it's obvious that uploading code requires you license the hosting provider a license to host it (which is not singing over copyright); although feel free to argue that the license doesn't or shouldn't extend to CoPilot usage.

That's not obvious, because you don't necessarily own the code you're uploading. I can upload any sort of MIT-licensed, BSD-licensed, Apache-licensed, Creative-Commons-licensed, or GNU-copylefted works I want, anywhere within reason and compatible with those licenses, but if I didn't write them then I don't have the legal right to relicense, grant exclusive or restricted license to any specified parties.

So in a way this would void parts of many TOS agreements where you do relicense your User-Generated Content. If we're uploading memes to Facebook, they're gonna have to work out license terms with the copyright holders, not the uploaders.

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#49

Post by tjpnz »

brezelgoring wrote: post #10

Steve Ballmer once called Linux and the GPL License a cancer because to copy a portion of code from a copyleft project, minimal as it may be, would make the whole project require a copyleft license. If Github Co-Pilot includes GPL code then produced works should have GPL too, right? It is known that it produces verbatim copies of sections of code, so the 'derivative' explanation doesn't hold water. Alternatives may b…

>It is known that it produces verbatim copies of sections of code, so the 'derivative' explanation doesn't hold water.

For reference it's been shown to cough up code from Quake verbatim. This from John Carmack(?) also includes his profanity laden comments:

https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

#50

Post by codetrotter »

jacquesm wrote: post #7
amelius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just hope it doesn't end in Microsoft paying some (from their perspective) small fine that is just the cost of doing business.

The range of possible outcomes is enormous, I'll just wait by the sidelines but cherish the thought that moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision. They can't be trusted, this has been proven over and over again and yet people keep falling for it. It's the fox guarding the chickens. I wrote about my misgivings at the time: https://jacquesmattheij.com/what-is-wrong-with-microsoft-buy...

> moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision

What do you use instead?

The top alternatives in my opinion are:

- SourceHut https://sr.ht/

- Codeberg https://codeberg.org/

- Self-hosted using Forgejo https://forgejo.org/ (fork of Gitea)

I was self-hosting my code with Gitea for a while but currently I’m using GitHub. Planning on setting up a Forgejo instance in the coming weeks.

At work we use GitLab, but personally it is one of my least favourite platforms, so I am excluding GitLab from the list above.

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