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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

#521

Post by bawolff »

michaelmrose wrote: post #179
bawolff wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A programmer can read available but not oss licensed code and learn from it. Thats fair use. If a machine does it, is it wrong ? You can learn from it, but if you start copying snippets or base your code on it to such an extent that its clear your work is based on it, things start to get risky. For comparison, people have tried to get around copyright of photos by hiring an illustrator to "draw" the photo, which do…

Why wouldn't drawing the photo be fair use can you cite a case?

It might or might not be depending on the situation. Some of it might come down to intent.

Like if the drawing was meant to be an artistic rendering with independent artistic value, much more likely to be fair use. If the drawing was meant to be a loop-hole to avoid paying the licensing fee on the original, its much less likely. Fair use has a bunch of criteria - a lot of it depends on intention and how the usage would affect the original copyright holder.

I would add that fair use lets you use a copyrighted work, it doesn't make the copyright go away, just adds some cases where you can use the work notwithstanding the original copyright, but the original copyright is still there.

Note: IANAL, this all could be wrong. I dont have any cases, i do know that people propose this sort of thing at wikipedia from time to time - i.e. hiring someone to draw copyrighted photos - and it usually gets shot down as not solving the problem, although im not familiar with the legal basis.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#522

Post by D13Fd »

heavyset_go wrote: post #520
D13Fd wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I look at class actions as having two purposes . . . to require that the defendant stops doing something That's my point. Many of the class members don't want the company to stop doing this. I have code on GitHub, and Copilot is a useful tool. I don't care if my code was used to train the model. Sure, I personally could opt out of the suit, but that would be utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The bot…

If you don't feel like you're being represented, you're free to choose not to be a member of class in the lawsuit.

> If you don't feel like you're being represented, you're free to choose not to be a member of class in the lawsuit.

I think you missed this part:

> Sure, I personally could opt out of the suit, but that would be utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#523

Post by robbrown451 »

devmor wrote: post #491
njharman wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you read a bunch of code, say over years of developer career. What you write is influenced by all that. Will include similar patterns, similar code and identical snippets, knowingly or not. How large does snippet have to be before it's copyright? "x"? "x==1"? "if x==1\n print('x is one')"? [obviously, replace with actual common code like if not found return 404]. Do you want to be vulnerable to copyright litigati…

This is a logical fallacy. A human is not an algorithm. We do not have to extend rights regarding novel invention to an algorithm to protect them for people.

Differentiating between a human and a machine simply because one "is not an algorithm" doesn't make a lot of sense. If it were true, people would very easily game it, by using algorithms to automate the most trivial parts of copying someone's work.

Ultimately the algorithm is automating something a human could do. There is a lot of gray area to copyright law, but you can't get around that simply by offloading to an algorithm.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#524

Post by williamcotton »

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 read most of the complaint. The only examples of supposed copyright infringement are isEven and isPrime functions. Here's what Copilot gives me in a Typescript file:

  function isPrime(n: number): boolean {
    for (let i = 2; i  1;
  }
  
  function isEven(n: number): boolean {
    return n % 2 === 0;
  }
These are clearly not covered by copyright in the first place. This case is really quite pathetic.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#525

Post by r3trohack3r »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #344
r3trohack3r wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone takes your open source code and incorporates it into their proprietary software, then they are effectively using your work for their private gain. And then if we can close that loop by taking their proprietary software and feeding it into a NN to re-liberate it isn't that a net win for software freedom? Today crossing the sourcecode->bytecode veil effectively obfuscates the implementation beyond most hum…

> And then if we can close that loop by taking their proprietary software From where? They aren't publishing it. That's literally the meaning of proprietary.

I can’t tell if you disagree with the rest of my comment or didn’t bother to read it…

That’s literally not the definition of proprietary.

You download proprietary software when you navigate to (nearly) every webpage. Just because a website like HN sends you (possibly unobfuscated) HTML, CSS, and JS over the wire in plain-text does not mean those files are not proprietary. Those files are covered by copyright in the U.S.

Access to the source code is not sufficient for that source code to be FOSS.

You also failed to acknowledge leaked source code and bytecode decompilation, which were a substantial portion of my comment.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#526

Post by omegacharlie »

Think some of the negativity about Copilot may be the perception that if an individual or small startup attempted training an ML model from public source-code and commercialised a service from it they would be drowning in legal issues from big companies not happy with their code used in such a product.

In addition just because code is available publicly on GitHub does not necessarily mean it is permissively licensed to use elsewhere, even with attribution. Copyright holders not happy with their copyrighted works publicly accessible can use the DMCA to issue take-downs that GitHub does comply with but how that interacts with Copilot and any of its training data is a different question.

As much as the DMCA is bad law rather funny seeing Microsoft be charged in this lawsuit with the less known provision against 'removal of copyright management information'. Microsoft does have more resources to mount at defence so it will probably end up different compared to a smaller player facing this action.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#527

Post by MarcellusDrum »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #469

I 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…

I'm one of those who are against copyrights, but fully support this movement, for 2 reasons:

1) If Github Copilot is a free software liscensed under GPL, I'm all for it. Microsoft is using other's collective hard labour to benefit itself.

2) Its Microsoft. The king of dark patterns, monopolization, and the enemy of software freedom. They can't have their cake and eat it too.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#528

Post by echelon »

williamcotton wrote: post #524
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 read most of the complaint. The only examples of supposed copyright infringement are isEven and isPrime functions. Here's what Copilot gives me in a Typescript file: function isPrime(n: number): boolean { for (let i = 2; i 1; } function isEven(n: number): boolean { return n % 2 === 0; } These are clearly not covered by copyright in the first place. This case is really quite pathetic.

Moreover, if this case wins, it threatens to disrupt one of the biggest technological progressions of all time.

AI/ML will change every field just as the Internet and smartphones did. It doesn't show any indication of peaking, either.

If the US chooses the wrong path here, we'll only tie our hands behind our backs. Other countries won't be so foolish.

We should be able to train on any media a child could see, hear, or read.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#529

Post by saurik »

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…

So, it isn't clear to me which of these clauses you are citing grants them the forced right to "Copilot" (which I'm using as a verb to avoid defining what stage of production we are talking about) that wasn't granted by the license of the code, but let's assume for a moment that you are correct: that just means that GitHub as a service makes no sense, right? Like, there are a ton of people using GitHub to develop using code I've published in the past... code which is under various of these example licenses, and which I've never myself (as the copyright holder) published to GitHub (and, in fact, would never as I despise GitHub). There are also a number of very popular projects--such as the Linux kernel--which people no only upload to GitHub but which have official mirrors of on GitHub where no party even owns the copyright in order to agree to these terms of service. Meaning, if you are correct, GitHub is often being used illegal and a ton of the source code they are training against wasn't legally provided to them in the first place.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#530

Post by heavyset_go »

WithinReason wrote: post #478
heavyset_go wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you Google Mona Lisa the result is the Mona Lisa. If you query Copilot for a common piece of code you get that code.

Google doesn't sell its search feature as a product that you can just plagiarize the results from and they're yours. Microsoft does that with Copilot.

Copilot is as much of a search engine as Stable Diffusion or DALL-e are, which is to say they aren't at all. If you want to compare it to a search engine, despite it being a tortured metaphor, the most apt comparison is not to Google, but to The Pirate Bay if TPB stored all of their copyrighted content and served it up themselves.

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