As much as I love the little guy beating the big evil company, I hope the lawsuit doesn't cause anything to happen to copilot. Maybe some changes, like better protection against emitting 1:1 licensed code or opting out your code from training.
We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
501–510 of 824 posts
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#502Maybe I'm being too cynical, but this feels like it's more a law firm and individual looking to profit and make their mark in legal history rather than an aggrieved individual looking for justice. Programmer/Lawyer Plaintiff + upstart SF Based Law Firm + novel technology = a good shot at a case that'll last a long time, and fertile ground to establish yourself as experts in what looks to be a heavily litigated area o…
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Yes but this time it is about the is-even() function I have written in 2012 so they are right! /s
Snark aside, I do agree with you. For me the most surprising thing is really the amount of people siding with them on HN...
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#503Can Copilot reproduce Numerical Recipes in C?
(asking because I know the authors were kinda famous for being very litigious).
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#504I’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…
Correct legally, morally, or both? Legally a copyright claim seems weak, but they didn't assert one. Some of their claims look stronger than others. The DMCA claim in particular strikes me as strong-ish at first glance, though. Morally I think this class action is dead wrong. This is how innovation dies. Many of the class members likely do not want to kill Copilot and every future service that operates similarly. Bey…
I don’t think this lawsuit would hinder innovation but it would greatly change it and who owns it.
If an AI model is the joint property of all the people who contributed IP to it, it’s a pretty hugely democratic and decentralizing force. It also will incentivise a huge amount of innovation on better, richer data sources for AI.
If an AI model isn’t joint property of the IP it learned then it’s a great way to build extractive business models because the raw resource is mostly free. This will incentivise larger, more centralised entities.
Much of the most interesting data comes from everyday people. A class action precedent is probably good for society and good for innovation (particularly pushing innovation on the edge/data collection side)
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#505I am sorry for not bringing any kind of legal perspective here, but: *Jesus Christ*, I hope I live long enough to see copyright die. Here we are at the cusp of a new paradigm of commanding computers to do stuff for us, right at the beginning of the first AI development which actually impresses me. And we are fucking bickering about how we were cheated out of $0.00034 because our repo from 2015 might have been used fo…
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Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#506I’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…
Correct legally, morally, or both? Legally a copyright claim seems weak, but they didn't assert one. Some of their claims look stronger than others. The DMCA claim in particular strikes me as strong-ish at first glance, though. Morally I think this class action is dead wrong. This is how innovation dies. Many of the class members likely do not want to kill Copilot and every future service that operates similarly. Bey…
I'm fine with Copilot, but I think all rightsholders should be allowed to decide if they want their code training it or not. And that should be opt-in, not opt-out.
(And refusing to opt in shouldn't have to mean switching to a new hosting platform.)
> Beyond that, the class members aren't likely to get much if any money. The only party here who stands to clearly benefit is the attorneys.
That's the case in pretty much any class action. I look at class actions as having two purposes: to require that the defendant stops doing something, and to fine the defendant some amount of money. Sure, individual class members will see very little of that money, but I look at it as a way of hurting a company that has done people wrong. Hopefully they won't do that anymore, and other companies will be on notice that they shouldn't do those bad things either. Of course, sometimes monetary damages end up being a slap on the wrist, just something a company considers a cost of doing business.
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#507LOL we look like taxi drivers fighting Uber. If Kasparov uses chess programs to be better at chess maybe we can use copilot to be better developers? Also, anyone, either a person or a machine, is welcome to learn from the code I wrote, actually that is how I learnt how to code, so why would I stop others from doing the same?.
No human perfectly reproduces the learning material they used. If that was true, one might as well just higher engineers from Twitter and make a new platform from the code they remember!
Well, we humans do it occasionally. You probably remember a few specific code snippets in your lang of choice because they kept annoying you/you love them/you wrote them a lot. So if I would put you in the exactly right situation, you would indeed reproduce code verbatim.
So does Copilot.
I am not trying to insinuate that Copilot works like a human, but it is literally the same situation.
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#508I’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.
> The core argument I've seen is that the output is sufficiently transformative and not straight up copying.
An argument that isn't made about any other type of algorithm.
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct legally, morally, or both? Legally a copyright claim seems weak, but they didn't assert one. Some of their claims look stronger than others. The DMCA claim in particular strikes me as strong-ish at first glance, though. Morally I think this class action is dead wrong. This is how innovation dies. Many of the class members likely do not want to kill Copilot and every future service that operates similarly. Bey…
I don’t think this lawsuit would hinder innovation but it would greatly change it and who owns it. If an AI model is the joint property of all the people who contributed IP to it, it’s a pretty hugely democratic and decentralizing force. It also will incentivise a huge amount of innovation on better, richer data sources for AI. If an AI model isn’t joint property of the IP it learned then it’s a great way to build ex…
If the resource is free and non-rivalrous, what is being extracted?
Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
People would likely not share any code if they could not trust that their work would be respected, and attributed. So yes, I believe it to be fundamental to open source.
Maybe researchers that are used to hunting for publications and attributions. If I’m sharing my code publicly, it’s because I want it to be _used_.
People share proprietary code publicly. And the fact that you're allowed to read a book doesn't (currently) give you the right to copy it and redistribute the copy.