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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

#431

Post by layer8 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #320
Supermancho wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The brain is also just a "complex math program". This is not a fact.

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…

You are confusing the nondiscrete math of physics with the discrete math of computation. Even with unlimited computational resources, we can’t simulate arbitrary physical systems exactly, or even with limited error bounds (see chaos theory). What a program (mathematical or not) in the turing-machine sense can do is only a tiny, tiny subset of what physics can do.

Personally I believe it’s likely that the brain can essentially be reduced to a computation, but we have no proof of that.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#432

Post by mdaEyebot »

sigzero wrote: post #331
citilife wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't believe it does anything with private repos and that isn't what is being alleged.

It's the license that matters, not whether the code is visible on Microsoft's website.

Code which anybody can view is called "source available". You aren't necessarily allowed to use the code, but some companies will let their customers see what is going on so they can better integrate the code, understand performance implications, debug and fix unexpected issues, etc. The customers would probably face significant legal risks if they took that code and started to sell it.

"Open source" code implies permission to re-use the code, but there is still some nuance. Some open-source licenses come with almost no restrictions, but others include limiting clauses. The GPL, for example, is "viral": anybody who uses GPL code in a project must also provide that project's source code on request.

What do you think the chances are that Microsoft would surrender the Copilot codebase upon receipt of a GPL request?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#434

Post by benlivengood »

Cort3z wrote: post #270

I’m not a lawyer, but here is why I believe a class action lawsuit is correct; “AI” is just fancy speak for “complex math program”. If I make a program that’s simply given an arbitrary input then, thought math operations, outputs Microsoft copyright code, am I in the clear just because it’s “AI”? I think they would sue the heck out of me if I did that, and I believe the opposite should be true as well. I’m sure my ow…

Humans are just compression with extra steps by that logic.

There's a fairly simple technical fix for codex/copilot anyway; stick a search engine on the back end and index the training data and don't output things found in the search engine.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#435

Post by deanjones »

lamontcg wrote: post #395
deanjones wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time."

You're trying to play desperate semantic games. "This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content" is unambiguously clear.

"desperate semantic games" is actually a reasonable description of the legal process :-)

I'm not sure I agree that anything expressed in a legal contract using natural language is "unambiguously clear". MS / Github's expensively-attired lawyers will not doubt forcefully argue that they are not selling the YOUR content, but a service based on a model generated from a large collection of content, which they have been granted a licence to "parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers". There may even be in-court discussion of generalization, which will be exciting.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#436

Post by dmix »

bogwog wrote: post #187
dmix wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TabNine has absolutely improved my life as a programmer. There's something really rewarding about having a robot read your mind for entire blocks of code. It's not just functions either, one of the most common things that it helps me with daily is simple stuff like this: Typing const x = { a: 'one', b: 'two', ... } And later I'll be typing y = [ a['one'], b[' It's really amazing the amount of busy-work typing in prog…

I don't think this is a good example of the value of these things. You can just as easily do that same thing with advanced text editor features. Sublime for example supports multi-cursor editing. Just hold alt+shift+arrow keys to add a cursor, then type in the brackets you want. Ctrl+D can be used to select the next occurrence of the current selection with multiple cursors, built-in commands from the command pallete…

I’ve used Vim for over a decade I know what it can do.

This is automated and happens immediately without you even thinking about it.

You only ever pull out the complicated Vim editing when you have a particular hard task, I’m talking about the small stuff many times a day.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#437

Post by cdrini »

Cort3z wrote: post #270

I’m not a lawyer, but here is why I believe a class action lawsuit is correct; “AI” is just fancy speak for “complex math program”. If I make a program that’s simply given an arbitrary input then, thought math operations, outputs Microsoft copyright code, am I in the clear just because it’s “AI”? I think they would sue the heck out of me if I did that, and I believe the opposite should be true as well. I’m sure my ow…

I haven't heard anyone saying that copilot is legal "just because it's AI." That's a pretty bad faith, reductive, and disingenuous representation. The core argument I've seen is that the output is sufficiently transformative and not straight up copying.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#438

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #411
bugfix-66 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#439

Post by metadat »

heavyset_go wrote: post #426
metadat wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate: Co-Pilot can't reproduce copyrighted work without appropriate user input. Just trying to demonstrate a point- this analogy seems flawed.

If I draw some eyes in Photoshop, it won't automatically draw the Mona Lisa around it for me.

Until you sprinkle a bit of Stable Diffusion V2 or 3 on it, or perhaps some GaN.

The more I think about it, the more this all seems like another dimension of Jack and the Magic Beanstalk crossed with The Matrix.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#440

Post by xigoi »

bpicolo wrote: post #318
bogwog wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I hope comes out of the lawsuit. If a company wants to sell an AI model, they need to own all of the training data. It can't be "fair use" to take other peoples' works at zero cost, and use it to build a commercial product without compensation. And maybe models trained on public data should be in the public domain, so that AI research can happen without requiring massive investments to obtain the trainin…

> It can't be "fair use" to take other peoples' works at zero cost, and use it to build a commercial product without compensation. You just described open source software. That's the whole heart of this lawsuit, and equally Copilot. It was trained on OSS which is explicitly licensed for free use.

> That's the whole heart of this lawsuit, and equally Copilot. It was trained on OSS which is explicitly licensed for free use.

Most open-source software is not licensed for free use. MIT and GPL, the two most common licenses, both require attribution.

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