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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

#61

Post by schappim »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #38
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #10

As a non-lawyer, I am very suspicious of the claim that "Plaintiffs and the Class have suffered monetary damages as a result of Defendants’ conduct." Flagrant disregard for copyright? Sure, maybe. The output of the model is subject to copyright? Who knows! But the copyright holders being damaged in some what? Seems doubtful. The best argument I could think of would be "GitHub would have had to pay us for this, and th…

The parallels to music sampling are somewhat humorous. Where is fair use vs misappropriation? To be discovered!

Soon we'll have to use Mechanical Turk[0] to identify existing opensource code similar to what Girl Talk did with "Feed the Animals"[1].

Unrelated, how is it that Mechanical Turk was never truely integrated w/ AWS?

[0] https://www.mturk.com/

[1] https://waxy.org/2008/09/girl_turk/

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#62

Post by kube-system »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #10

As a non-lawyer, I am very suspicious of the claim that "Plaintiffs and the Class have suffered monetary damages as a result of Defendants’ conduct." Flagrant disregard for copyright? Sure, maybe. The output of the model is subject to copyright? Who knows! But the copyright holders being damaged in some what? Seems doubtful. The best argument I could think of would be "GitHub would have had to pay us for this, and th…

Those damages are enumerated on pages 50-52. Remember, "damages" is being used in a legal sense here -- for a non-lawyer, you can interpret it more like "a dollar value on something someone did that was wrong". This is more broad than the colloquial use of the word.

Sometimes damages are statutory, i.e. they have a fixed dollar amount written right into the law. This lawsuit references one such law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1203

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#63

Post by dmix »

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.

TabNine has absolutely improved my life as a programmer. There's something really rewarding about having a robot read your mind for entire blocks of code.

It's not just functions either, one of the most common things that it helps me with daily is simple stuff like this:

Typing

    const x = {
        a: 'one',
        b: 'two',
        ...
    }
And later I'll be typing

    y = [
      a['one'], 
      b['
It's really amazing the amount of busy-work typing in programming that a smart pattern matching algo could help with.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#64

Post by m00x »

bugfix-66 wrote: post #28

Ask HN: I want to modify the BSD 2-Clause Open Source License to explicitly prohibit the use of the licensed software in training systems like Microsoft's Copilot (and use during inference). How should the third clause be worded? The No-AI 3-Clause Open Source Software License Copyright (C) All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided tha…

Get a lawyer since this is nonsense.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#65

Post by bdcravens »

IceWreck wrote: post #34

I am not against this lawsuit but I'm against the implications of this because it can lead to disastrous laws. 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 ? What is the line between copying and machine learning ? Where does overfitting come in ? Today they're filing a lawsuit against copilot. Tomorrow it will be against stable diffusio…

In most copyright cases, exposure to the material in question is always discussed.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#67

Post by elil17 »

sedatk wrote: post #56
IceWreck wrote: post #34

I am not against this lawsuit but I'm against the implications of this because it can lead to disastrous laws. 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 ? What is the line between copying and machine learning ? Where does overfitting come in ? Today they're filing a lawsuit against copilot. Tomorrow it will be against stable diffusio…

> A programmer can read available but not oss licensed code and learn from it Actually, we were forbidden to look at open source code at Microsoft (circa 2009) because it might influence our coding and violate licenses.

That demonstrates that copyright laws are already stifling innovation.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#69

Post by protomyth »

I really feel that Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith[0] is going to have a big effect on this type of thing. They are basically relying on their AI magic to make it transformative. I'm starting to think the era of learning from material other people own without a license / permission is going to end quickly.

0) https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/andy-warhol-foun...

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#70

Post by golemotron »

heavyset_go wrote: post #9
naillo wrote: post #3

I'm kinda sceptical that this goes anywhere given that basically they say that whatever copilot outputs is your responsibility to vet that it doesn't break any copyright (obviously that goes against the promise of it and the PR but that's the small print that gets them out of trouble).

Saying "it's your responsibility to not breach licenses or violate copyright" doesn't absolve your service from breaching licenses and violating copyright itself.

Yet we all use web browsers that copy copyrighted text from buffer to buffer all the time. This doesn't even include all of the copying that ISPs perform.

It might be fair to say that the read performed in training has the same character since no human is involved.

The real copyright violation would be using a derived work.

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