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Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

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Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#41

Post by neximo64 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #40
neximo64 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you actually throttled if you try to git clone or is that what the theory is, or is the assumption that it uses API calls to scrape through github? Has anyone actually tried, because i've cloned lots of repos and have never been throttled. I'd go so far as to say the author of that post has never even tried it.

21Tb of data, they might rate limit you! But might be possible via proxies. But only public repos.

Copilot was only trained on public repos. Id be surprised if you were throttled.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#42

Post by Liquid_Fire »

19h wrote: post #33
tpxl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The MIT and Apache licenses explicitly allow reuse > No evidence Copilot [...] violated any licenses Both of these allow redistribution _if you include the license_. Copilot doesn't include any licenses in the code it distributes. You can argue whether that's fair use or not, but you can't argue that it doesn't respect the license.

You can configure Copilot to not return code that appears verbatim in public repositories. In that case it at least won't produce code you could legitimately argue would be covered by any individuals' specific license.

But it might well give you the exact same code with a variable name changed (for example), which would be unlikely to hold up in court if a human had done it to bypass the license.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#43

Post by htpltr »

williamcotton wrote: post #16

If you’re curious, the case continued in different directions and reached important decisions regarding books, I won’t get into them because they are not relevant to GitHub. (Google being allowed or not allowed to show a one page preview of a book, to a user who was looking for a quote from a book, is not directly applicable to the concerns surrounding GitHub and GitHub Copilot) Spoiler alert: Google was copying book…

Considered fair use? Google settled with the Authors Guild.

Displaying book excerpts also:

- Leaves the attribution and copyright intact.

- Is not intended to use excerpts verbatim or slightly modified, unless quoting them with attribution.

- May increase the sales of the book.

I agree with the OP of the submission that this case is entirely irrelevant for the CoPilot situation.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#44

Post by justinclift »

19h wrote: post #11

What a ridiculous article. Copilot does not violate antitrust law. GitHub is not a monopoly just because open source devs choose to host there. Devs are free to use GitLab or whatever. Comparing this to Google Books is silly. Google stole copyrighted books. Copilot uses freely shared open source code. No copyright issue. The article claims "Open source code on GitHub might be thought of as 'open and freely accessible…

With the AGPL3 license requiring derivatives operating over a network to disclose their source code (my rough summarisation), does that mean GitHub Copilot should be publishing its source code publicly somewhere?

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#46

Post by belorn »

h2odragon wrote: post #2

When I published stuff to GitHub, it had open licenses: i wanted anyone and everyone to make whatever use of it they could. I didn't foresee this use, and I'm not fond of Microsoft (to say the least); but it certainly falls into the area of things I explicitly allowed when publishing. I suspect many others who publish there feel the same way.

Every creator and author has their own idea of what they want and do not want. A license is rarely ever comprehensive enough to cover all of it, and as time goes on those ideas can also change with the author.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#47

Post by ablob »

blowski wrote: post #34
marginalia_nu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git clone is a very expensive operation. Git hosts generally will try to prohibit mass git clone:ing for this reason.

What makes it so expensive? I’d always assumed it downloaded the .git directory statically, and the computational bits were down by the local client.

I'd assume this is in relation to how much other operations cost. With 'git clone' you at least download the whole repository. Compare that to 'git fetch', which is essentially a lookup at the last-modified timestamp.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#48

Post by htpltr »

Antitrust is one thing, but by cleanroom implementation standards (one team reads the source and writes a spec, another team writes the code) CoPilot is illegal to begin with.

CoPilot reads and rearranges the IP that was created by millions of people who were working very hard and did not anticipate a code laundering machine when they wrote the code and the licenses.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#49

Post by shireboy »

> “If GitHub can produce code by training an AI on all code it is hosting, Youtube could produce videos and music by training an AI on all content it is hosting, the Writer Guilds could produce books by training an AI on all books it owns the rights for, Shutterstock could produce more stock images by training an AI on all stock images it is hosting.”

There is a subtle difference here. Microsoft isn’t just producing code based on GitHub data. They are producing a tool that lets others generate code based on GitHub data. I do think consideration of the source data creators intent is important- and there is a case CoPilot hasn’t done that. But if Shutterstock wants to use any images _that they have been given license for and treat creators fairly for_ to build a tool that lets others generate images, they should be allowed.

Also, the op argues only MS has access to train based on all of GitHub. Others might run into rate limiting etc. However we know Amazon and others do have similar models. This would indicate MS may have a competitive edge but not a full market lockout.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#50

Post by pelasaco »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #14

There kinda is, just not an antitrust claim. [1] https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/case-updates.html

last update nov. 2022.. is the system too slow or didn't they get the news that they were expecting?
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