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

thehftguy.com

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

#51

Post by williamcotton »

htpltr wrote: post #43
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.

As this very article we are discussing notes, Google was not allowed to settle precisely because of this monopoly position. It went to trial:

In late 2013, after the class action status was challenged, the District Court granted summary judgement in favor of Google, dismissing the lawsuit and affirming the Google Books project met all legal requirements for fair use. The Second Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the District Court's summary judgement in October 2015, ruling Google's "project provides a public service without violating intellectual property law." The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently denied a petition to hear the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

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

#53

Post by pelasaco »

Liquid_Fire wrote: post #42
19h wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you are assuming some imaginative scenario. "Hold up" in court. It will never happen. Just check how many ways you have to write a method to check if a number is odd or not. If you are using a application using a framework, pretty sure all codes looks similar. Look a ruby on rails application for example. Quite often, the user model, session controller and in some level, all controllers if they are following the "rails way" they look very similar.

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

#55

Post by az226 »

bilqis wrote: post #45
samwillis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't use privet repositories to train Copilot.

They say they don’t

I’m sure you think this is a clever reply but the reality is that GitHub wouldn’t even begin to think if that were even technically possible. If it got out that it trained on confidential customer data, it would be game over. The risk is so stupidly large nobody in their right mind would take it. So yeah, if they say they don’t, they don’t.

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

#57

Post by unreal37 »

bilqis wrote: post #45
samwillis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't use privet repositories to train Copilot.

They say they don’t

I don't understand why people just automatically doubt things that companies say when they can be sued (or would otherwise destroy their business) if they are lying about it. Seems unnecessarily pessimistic.

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

#58

Post by belorn »

williamcotton wrote: post #23
NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps your license permits CoPilot reuse, but that is not every F/OSS license. There are some which require attribution of the original authors. There are some which require the distributor to make available any source code, and any modifications made to the software. Software authors are not upset about the mere reuse of their code, it's the violations of such license terms that are problematic. If attribution is…

First, if the copying is found to be fair use (which is very likely), then attribution or other requirements of a copyright license will not be required. Second, the only aspects of code that needs to follow the license are the parts of the code that are covered by copyright. That excludes anything that is functional. Since optimizations are functional and not expressive in nature then, for example, an optimized sort…

If copying by AI is generally found to be fair use then we will see this in music, porn, advertisement, in political associated situations, and other situations where authors has a history of disagreeing with how their work get used. Unstable diffusion is an ongoing test of how far fair use may be applied.

I find it very likely that copyright law will be changed if training on copyrighted material becomes universally allowed under fair use. The alternative is that training on software code is allowed, but training on images/videos/music is not, which I do not find likely.

> Second, the only aspects of code that needs to follow the license are the parts of the code that are covered by copyright

The legal system don't generally work that ways. The questions judges tend to look at is if the accused party can be reasonable said to have copied someone else work without permission. We can look at either napster or the pirate bay court cases and see how low priority judges tend to view arguments that rely exclusively on a technical detail (A torrent file is not the same as a movie!).

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

#59

Post by ChatGTP »

esrauch wrote: post #52
bilqis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say they don’t

Why would they possibly lie about that?

Because they do shady shit, like, by default Copilot would "sample" code for training while using it. Maybe this is no longer the default, maybe it still is, but it was the default.

This type of thing erodes trust? Why should my proprietary code be used for training by default?

I was really annoyed by this.

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

#60

Post by supriyo-biswas »

pelasaco wrote: post #50
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?

> MARCH 10, 2023 > Plain­tiffs filed oppo­si­tions to these motions to dis­miss.

Legal processes are generally slow.

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