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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

#571

Post by simoncion »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #479
flatline wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is laundering away proprietary livenses, because that code is not open source and not in public github repos. And OSS capabilities are now present in copilot, which is neither free nor open. Furthermore these contributions are making their way into proprietary code and the OSS licensing becomes even further watered down. This is the epitome of what copyleft is against!

I follow you explanation but not your end statement. What I think GP is getting at in my understanding is that all this OSS/licensing stuff was a cautious attempt to assert a radical idea into an atmosphere of extrem secrecy: That information wants to be free . Now we have a fat cooperation making a public statement of putting the value of advancing humanity over the value of honoring weird old Victorian ideas of "in…

> [OSS] was a cautious attempt to assert a radical idea into an atmosphere of extrem secrecy: That information wants to be free.

Information may want to be free, but users of free information often want to enrich their private endeavors by shackling the information that was given to them freely.

The (A|L)GPL acknowledges the fact that some people and corporations like to use free-and-gratis work in their products and not reciprocate the courtesy shown to them by the authors of that work. (I choose the (L)GPL whenever I can so that folks who derive from my work are either required to either make it available as I have, or pay me enough so that I don't mind them shackling my work.)

The BSD license acknowledges the fact that some people and many corporations like to use gratis work in their closed-source products and never even do so much as bother to credit the authors of work that they used.

For as long as powerful folks continue to use and improve upon gratis information and software without contributing the products that used that information and/or improvements, the 'weird old Victorian ideas of "intellectual property"' are going to have to continue to be dealt with. Remember... you likely cannot reasonably afford an army of lawyers to ensure that pretty much noone uses your work without paying you, but big companies like Microsoft, RedHat, IBM, Oracle, etc, etc, and wealthy individuals can.

For as long as those wealthy entities can lock up and force you to pay for their work and ideas, but make it ruinously expensive for us little people to -individually- do the same to them, we'll need "weird old Victorian" things like licenses to help correct this imbalance of power.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#572

Post by Filligree »

layer8 wrote: post #447
rowanG077 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creations by AI should obviously be protected by fiat as well. Anything else is a ridiculous double standard that will stifle progress.

As long as AIs are incapable of recognizing when they are plagiarizing, as humans are generally capable of, the double standard seems entirely warranted.

> as humans are generally capable of

Citation needed. I've never plagiarised on purpose, sure, but I've caught myself at least several dozen times well after the act.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#573

Post by joe_the_user »

williamcotton wrote: post #534
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't read the relevant part of the complaint. It starts on document page 14 (PDF page 17). There's a clear footnote: > Due to the nature of Codex, Copilot, and AI in general, Plaintiffs cannot be certain these examples would produce the same results if attempted following additional trainings of Codex and/or Copilot. The offending solution from the AI included extra lines that are reasonably understood to come…

Sure, those comments might be considered infringement, but that's from an earlier version of Codex. Copilot does not return that code. The complaint even says so.

If a software systematically engages in copyright violation but only haphazardly corrects those violations, those haphazard correct aren't evidence the problem has vanished.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#574

Post by Filligree »

an1sotropy wrote: post #565
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…

You haven’t actually thought through what kind of world it would be if there was no copyright law, have you? I don’t know what your political leanings are, but I’ve met some libertarians who are blissfully naive about the extent to which their world and worldview is buttressed by laws and the governments that enforce them, and your comment reminds me of that.

I'm game.

What terrible outcome will we see from a lack of copyright law?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#575

Post by zhfliz »

bloppe wrote: post #538
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…

The problem with the class action lawsuit against GitHub is this: if you host your code on GitHub, it doesn't matter what license you use. Microsoft can do whatever they want with it. You agreed to this by agreeing to their terms and conditions.

anyone can upload someone else's code to GitHub, not just people who can grant such permission.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#576

Post by kevincox »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #489

Even if this succeeds, you've already lost. 1. The ability to be able to run and train these models is going to eventually be perfectly plausible on a home machine. 2. It's only a matter of time before models, e.g. a popular model scraped from all of the code on GitHub, is a publicly available torrent. 3. People will be able to just run it locally as an integrated plug-in in jet brains or VS code. 4. You'll never kno…

Just because some people get away with copyright infringement doesn't mean that copyright infringement is now legal.

I don't think 1-3 matter at all. The point is that GitHub is selling a tool that can commit copyright infringement. This lawsuit is trying to get them to pay the consequences for the infringement that they have enabled.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#577

Post by x-complexity »

trention wrote: post #557
albertzeyer wrote: post #407

I really don't understand how there can be a problem with how Copilot works. Any human just works in the same way. A human is trained on lots and lots of of copyrighted material. Still, what a human produces in the end is not automatically derived work from all the human has seen in his life before. So, why should an AI be treated different here? I don't understand the argument for this. I actually see quite some dan…

>So, why should an AI be treated different here? I don't understand the argument for this. Because the AI is not a human and only humans have rights, including the right to learn.

> >So, why should an AI be treated different here? I don't understand the argument for this. > Because the AI is not a human and only humans have rights, including the right to learn.

Okay then: Who counts as 'human'? What's the qualifier for being a 'human'?

------

(The following questions all point to the same underlying question.)

Are you human if you have only one leg or 8 fingers due to a genetic deformity? What about albinism or sickle cell disease?

If someone had robotic implants, are they human? Is it inhuman to have an artificial leg? What about both legs?

Same scenario as above, but both arms & legs are replaced. Are they human?

Same as above, but now everything below the torso has been replaced. Same question.

Same question, but now everything below the neck.

If someone were to successfully transplant their brains into a robot body, are they still human?

Someone embeds a neural implant into their brain: Still human?

Same question, now multiple neural implants.

Same question, but now the brain-to-implant ratio is 2:1. Brain mass & neural count hasn't changed since then.

Same question, but with the brain-to-implant ratio now 3:1.

4:1. 5:1. 6:1. 8:1. 10:1. 15:1. 20:1. 30:1. 50:1. 100:1. 200:1. 500:1. 1000:1.

The neural count now starts to decrease because of regular cell degradation. What's the percentage point before they're considered non-human?

90%? 80%? 70%? 60%? 50%? 40%? 30%? 20%? 10%? 5%? 2%? 1%? 0.5%? 0.2%? 0.1%? 0.01%? 0.001%?

------

Where is the dividing line between 'human' and 'non-human'?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#578

Post by odessacubbage »

adlpz wrote: post #36

It feels weird saying this but, for once, I hope the big evil corporation gets to keep selling their big bad product. I find the pattern matching and repetitive code generation really helpful. And the library autocomplete on steroids, too. Meh. Tricky subject.

why not just train it on your own code or an opt-in data base of voluntarily contributed code? why does everyone else have to make your life easier [and generate enormous wealth for a third party with zero compensation for their work] involuntarily?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#579

Post by trention »

x-complexity wrote: post #577
trention wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So, why should an AI be treated different here? I don't understand the argument for this. Because the AI is not a human and only humans have rights, including the right to learn.

> >So, why should an AI be treated different here? I don't understand the argument for this. > Because the AI is not a human and only humans have rights, including the right to learn. Okay then: Who counts as 'human'? What's the qualifier for being a 'human'? ------ (The following questions all point to the same underlying question.) Are you human if you have only one leg or 8 fingers due to a genetic deformity? What…

Idiotic sealioning having nothing to do with AI and neural nets.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#580

Post by gus_massa »

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.

That isPrime function does not even cut at sqrt(n). Asking for the state of the art isPrime function is too much, but the sqrt trick is the very first step and it's free. (IIRC, the faster version uses i*i<n)
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