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Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

thehftguy.com

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Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#61

Post by unreal37 »

htpltr wrote: post #48

Antitrust is one thing, but by cleanroom implementation standards (one team reads the source and writes a spec, another team writes the code) CoPilot is illegal to begin with. CoPilot reads and rearranges the IP that was created by millions of people who were working very hard and did not anticipate a code laundering machine when they wrote the code and the licenses.

That's quite an extreme set of statements, and I very much doubt what you consider "illegal" is actually illegal.

When you publish something for others to view (text, images, code, whatever), others are allowed to view it. You can't anticipate how others view it, with their eyes or with screenreaders to assist. You can't stop them from reading it, thinking about it, discussing it with their friends, taking notes, summarizing it. You can't stop people from learning from your published content or recognizing patterns between it and other similar things.

Sorry, but you can't create a license that says "I will allow you to view this but you cannot learn from it. If you learn from it, you need to pay me."

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#62

Post by reissbaker »

mschild wrote: post #15
samwillis wrote: post #4

> Microsoft GitHub is the largest collection of open source code in the world. Microsoft GitHub is in a unique and dominant positions to host and access and distribute most of the open-source code in the world No, it's not in a "unique and dominant position". Open source code is freely available online, it's almost trivial to build a bot to scrape OS code from anywhere on the web (GitHub included). The comparison to…

There certainly are other spaces where open source code is hosted and available, but the default for most is GitHub. I think it's in a similar position to Google 10 years ago. Sure there are other search engines, but Google is by and large the standard one. That does put Microsoft in the unique position to have direct unfettered access to any and all open source code on GitHub without restrictions. Unless you or I ge…

Not sure if you posted before the edits, but I'm pretty convinced by them, seeing as how there are multiple alternatives with the same data.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#63

Post by scarface74 »

mschild wrote: post #15
samwillis wrote: post #4

> Microsoft GitHub is the largest collection of open source code in the world. Microsoft GitHub is in a unique and dominant positions to host and access and distribute most of the open-source code in the world No, it's not in a "unique and dominant position". Open source code is freely available online, it's almost trivial to build a bot to scrape OS code from anywhere on the web (GitHub included). The comparison to…

There certainly are other spaces where open source code is hosted and available, but the default for most is GitHub. I think it's in a similar position to Google 10 years ago. Sure there are other search engines, but Google is by and large the standard one. That does put Microsoft in the unique position to have direct unfettered access to any and all open source code on GitHub without restrictions. Unless you or I ge…

it’s really not that hard to

git clone

git set origin…

It’s much harder to copy Google’s index.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#64

Post by vinaypai »

Contrary to what the author of this article seems to believe, antitrust law isn't a general purpose law for going after companies you don't like.

The author seems very confused and is mostly talking about copyright claim and then bizarrely starts talking about antitrust litigation.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#65

Post by scarface74 »

h2odragon wrote: post #2

When I published stuff to GitHub, it had open licenses: i wanted anyone and everyone to make whatever use of it they could. I didn't foresee this use, and I'm not fond of Microsoft (to say the least); but it certainly falls into the area of things I explicitly allowed when publishing. I suspect many others who publish there feel the same way.

> i wanted anyone and everyone to make whatever use of it they could.

> didn't foresee this use

So you really didn’t want any use. You just wanted the use you found acceptable? So you didn’t really want it to be “open”

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#66

Post by marginalia_nu »

ablob wrote: post #47
blowski wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it so expensive? I’d always assumed it downloaded the .git directory statically, and the computational bits were down by the local client.

I'd assume this is in relation to how much other operations cost. With 'git clone' you at least download the whole repository. Compare that to 'git fetch', which is essentially a lookup at the last-modified timestamp.

Yeah. Git repositories can grow very large very quickly. A single clone here and there isn't too bad, but if you're scraping tens of thousands of projects, you can easily rack up terabytes in disk and network access.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#67

Post by mrtranscendence »

williamcotton wrote: post #30
shanebellone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wow, that's horrible. I didn't know that sampling and mashups required an explicit license." The conclusion essentially boils down to "remixing is not fair use". Today's hip-hop is a direct result of that decision because sampling became prohibitively expensive.

It’s not legally fair use but no musicians consider it stealing. Remember, the session players who wrote those hooks and grooves were not given a copyright. They got paid a flat fee. They could not care less if their drum beat, bass line or horn part was reused in a creative new way. The lawyers of the copyright holders sure do care, though!

Session players having been paid a flat fee were not the only ones whose music would get sampled and remixed, though.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#68

Post by amoss »

htpltr wrote: post #48

Antitrust is one thing, but by cleanroom implementation standards (one team reads the source and writes a spec, another team writes the code) CoPilot is illegal to begin with. CoPilot reads and rearranges the IP that was created by millions of people who were working very hard and did not anticipate a code laundering machine when they wrote the code and the licenses.

Clean implementation is an approach to guarantee a lack of pollution. It is not the minimum level necessary to avoid it.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#69

Post by scrollaway »

ChatGTP wrote: post #59
esrauch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they possibly lie about that?

Because they do shady shit, like, by default Copilot would "sample" code for training while using it. Maybe this is no longer the default, maybe it still is, but it was the default. This type of thing erodes trust? Why should my proprietary code be used for training by default? I was really annoyed by this.

OpenAI is not the same company as GitHub, and it has always been pretty clear that chats on ChatGPT are recorded and used for training (unless you now opt out).

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#70

Post by bilqis »

unreal37 wrote: post #57
bilqis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say they don’t

I don't understand why people just automatically doubt things that companies say when they can be sued (or would otherwise destroy their business) if they are lying about it. Seems unnecessarily pessimistic.

But will that actually be against ToS or copyright? Many people tend to say that copilot learning from OSS doesn’t infringe any copyright and is no different from a person just learning from someone else’s work. So how is it different if copilot is learning from private repositories? Or eg from leaked source code?
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