Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

githubcopilotlitigation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 824 posts

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#591

Post by an1sotropy »

Filligree wrote: post #574
an1sotropy wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, Linux might not exist, at least not in its current nature form, enabled by a “share and share alike” license that has meant that companies contribute to it instead of copying and closing it off from others.

More generally, what is left to protect any creative work besides guarding physical access? Why would any company make any movie or tv show if it could be copied and redistributed by others endlessly the moment it gets shown once?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#593

Post by [deleted] »

gus_massa wrote: post #580
williamcotton wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

[deleted]

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#594

Post by erezsh »

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…

The only thing worse than not having AI, is having all AI owned by a small group of people.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#595

Post by ALittleLight »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #531
williamcotton wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

This seems like an incredibly trivial example. If I remembered that example subconsciously, and used it myself somewhere, would that be an infringement of intellectual property? In any large code base how many such infringements are there? Many? Should we sue every software company on this premise?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#596

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#598

Post by matthewwolfe »

I will never understand why people push code to public repos and then complain when someone or something uses that code. Code that you want to keep private or make money off of should be private. Only publish stuff to the public that you want other people to see and learn from. All the complaints about attribution… who cares.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#599

Post by elefantastisch »

xchip wrote: post #113

LOL 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?.

Judging by the majority opinion in this thread, it seems pretty clear GitHub could have asked and gotten enough people to opt-in to have no problem training their model. They probably would have been thrilled to do it and proud of being included in the training data.

But the preference of the majority does not override the conditions placed by people who prefer not to participate.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#600

Post by layer8 »

Filligree wrote: post #572
layer8 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, that you caught yourself is already something that makes a difference. It would already change the equation if Copilot would send an email saying “Hey, that snippet xyz I suggested yesterday is actually plagiarized from repo abc. I’m truly sorry about that, I’ll do my best to be more careful in the future.”

As far as “citation needed”, humans are being convicted for plagiarism, so it is generally assumed that they are able to tell and hence can be held responsible for it.

Responsibility or liability is really the crux here. As long as AIs can’t be made liable for their actions (output) like humans or legal entities can, instead the AI operators must be held accountable, and it’s arguably their responsibility to take all practical measures to prevent their AIs from plagiarizing, or from otherwise violating license terms.

Post reply on HN