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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

#411

Post by tptacek »

bugfix-66 wrote: post #124
m00x wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that added clause is nonsense. On top of being nonsense, there is significant precedent. Remember the lawsuit of HiQ labs vs LinkedIn? Scraping, or viewing public data on a public webpage is legal. https://gizmodo.com/linkedin-scraping-data-legal-court-case-...

If the GPL can defeat Copilot, we need an more permissive MIT/BSD-style license to do the same.

This does seem like a pretty compelling rebuttal, since the preceding comment suggests that GPL does nothing to Microsoft's ability to incorporate code into Copilot's model.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#412

Post by falcolas »

pmarreck wrote: post #335
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is demonstrably false. It is a system outputting character-for-character repository code.[1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33457517

It can be modified to not do that (example: mutating the code to a "synonym" that is functionally but not visually identical). It can also be modified to be opt-in-only (only peoples' code that they permit to be learned on, can use the product)

Perhaps you are right, and it could be so modified.

Could be, but isn’t. And that matters.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#413

Post by rowanG077 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #371
rowanG077 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't say we can simulate it. There is a massive leap from what I said to being able to simulate it.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#414

Post by Aeolun »

xtracto wrote: post #337
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…

Say you publish a song and copyright it. Then I record it and save it in a .xz format. It's not an MP3, it is not an audio file. Say I split it into N several chunks and I share it with N different people. Or with the same people, but I share it at N different dates. Say I charge them $10 a month for doing that, and I don't pay you anything. Am I violating your copyright? Are you entitled to do that? To make it funni…

What you are actually giving people is a set of chords that happen to show up in your song, the machine can suggest an appropriate next chord.

It’s also smart enough to rebuild your song from the chords _if you ask it to_.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#415

Post by xigoi »

neongreen wrote: post #341
ugh123 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attributions are fundamental to open source? I thought having source openly available was fundamental to open source (and allowed use without liability/warranty) as per apache, mit, and other licenses. If they just stick to using permissive-licensed source code then i'm not sure what the actual 'harm' is with co-pilot. If they auto-generate an acknowledgement file for all source repos used in co-pilot, and then asked…

Apparently they are using GPL-licensed code as well, see https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554 After five minutes of googling I'm still not sure if using MIT code requires an attribution, but many people claim it does, see https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8163 as one example

From GitHub itself (emphasis mine):

> A short and simple permissive license with conditions only requiring preservation of copyright and license notices. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#416

Post by alpaca128 »

shagie wrote: post #242
Etheryte wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your code is open source - irregardless of license, one might read it as a text book and then remember or even copy snippets and re-use this somewhere else unrelated to the original application. Yes, but attribution should still be given. Just because you don't copy-paste someone else's creation doesn't mean you're licensed to use it.

Is it the role of the tool (in this case copilot) to include the license information? Or is it the responsibility of the organization using the code to make sure that it wasn't copied from somewhere? What if, instead of a tool, you had a random consultant do some work, and it was found out that he asked a ton of stuff on Stack Overflow and copied the CC-BY-SA 4.0 answers into his work? What if it was then found out t…

> Or is it the responsibility of the organization using the code to make sure that it wasn't copied from somewhere?

Do you know whether the code you got from Copilot has an incompatible license? No, so if you plan to use Copilot for serious projects you need it to include sources/licenses either way. In fact that would be a very helpful feature as it would let you filter licenses.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#417

Post by heavyset_go »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #392
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.

This is not necessarily true, the function space defined by the hidden layers might not contain an exact duplicate of the original training input for all (or even most) of the training inputs. Things that are very well represented in the training data probably have a point in the function space that is "lossy compression" level close to the original training image though, not so much in terms of fidelity as in change…

When I say encoded or compressed, I do not mean verbatim copies. That can happen, but I wouldn't say it's likely for every piece of training data Copilot was trained on.

Pieces of that data are encoded/compressed/transformed, and given the right incantation, a neutral net can put them together to produce a piece of code that is substantially the same as the code it was trained on. Obviously not for every piece of code it was trained on, but there's enough to see this effect in action.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#418

Post by [deleted] »

klabb3 wrote: post #400
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…

> Your code is not in that thing. That thing has merely read your code and adjusted its own generative code. This is kinda smug, because it overcomplicates things for no reason, and only serves as a faux technocentric strawman. It just muddies the waters for a sane discussion of the topic, which people can participate in without a CS degree. The AI models of today are very simple to explain: its a product built from…

[deleted]

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#420

Post by klabb3 »

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…

> 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...

This sounds unenforceable in the general case. How could github know whether someone pushes their own code or not? Is it a license violation to push someone's FOSS code to github because the author didn't sign up with GH?

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