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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

#631

Post by awestroke »

an1sotropy wrote: post #197
awestroke wrote: post #57

If this leads anywhere I'll be pissed. I love CoPilot.

copilot is great, and ignorance is bliss, isn't it The situation that this lawsuit is trying to save you from is this: (1) copilot blurps out some code X that you use, and then redistribute in some form (monetized or not); (2) it turns out company C owns copyright on something Y that copilot was trained on, and then (3) C makes a strong case that X is part of Y, and that your use of X does not fall under "fair use",…

It's pretty obvious when it does emit copyrightable code, and you mostly have to really try to make that happen. Have you even used copilot yourself?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#632

Post by theamk »

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…

AI is not treated differently here. If a human produced this kind of code: https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554 they would be sued as well

I am not sure how can anyone root for AI after seeing those kinds of outputs. It's like high-school level plagiatrism.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#633

Post by theamk »

glerk wrote: post #145
celestialcheese wrote: post #133

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but this feels like it's more a law firm and individual looking to profit and make their mark in legal history rather than an aggrieved individual looking for justice. Programmer/Lawyer Plaintiff + upstart SF Based Law Firm + novel technology = a good shot at a case that'll last a long time, and fertile ground to establish yourself as experts in what looks to be a heavily litigated area o…

Quoted post unavailable.

In both cases, large company (the troll/Microsoft) is profiting and smaller subjects or individuals (real inventors/code authors) are losing.

But with patent trolls, large company is suing, while in this case, large company is being sued.

So it's the opposite, and I wish Microsoft loses.

(Note this is between Microsoft and code authors. The people who use copilot don't have a say there, as it's not their code being ingested)

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#634

Post by theamk »

elcomet wrote: post #260

This is why we can't have nice things. Copilot is the best thing that happened in developper tools since a long time, it increased a lot my productivity. Please don't ruin it.

Write a whole bunch of code and permit copilot learning on it! Then it would be great even without violating others' copyrights.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#635

Post by zarzavat »

joe_the_user wrote: post #573
williamcotton wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If Copilot is committing widespread infringements of their copyright, then surely they will be able to find examples of such infringement to submit in their lawsuit.

I assume they want some kind of broad relief, such as an injunction to take down copilot. They are not going to get it, they are not going to get anything at all, if they can’t even provide examples of violating code.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#636

Post by chlorion »

D13Fd wrote: post #624
chlorion wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's selfish to want people to abide by the license I released my project under? That's pure nonsense.

Your code is protected by copyright. The license allows for what would otherwise be copyright infringement. But training an AI model on media (code or otherwise) is not copyright infringement, so the license is irrelevant. It's selfish to pretend otherwise and to try to assert a copyright right that doesn't exist, for the purpose of impeding progress in a field that benefits us all.

Here is a snippet of things that copyright is intended to cover:

>the right to exclude others from making certain uses of the work: copying it, making a derivative work based on that work, distributing copies of the work to the public, and publicly performing or displaying the work.

So why would "training" "AI" on code with the intention of emitting derived works not be copyright infringement exactly?

This product is transforming copyrighted code into something that's intended to be used or sold in other works. The snippets it emits are directly derived from copyrighted code.

The most common argument against this is that humans also learn from copyrighted material. My argument against this is that CoPilot is not a human and should not be assumed to inherit rules intended for humans.

>in a field that benefits us all

As it stands currently CoPilot is proprietary and does not benefit anyone except for MicroSoft. If CoPilot was released under a FOSS license it would actually benefit us all. Most of the people against CoPilot are not against AI, but rather a proprietary AI product transforming FOSS work into other potentially proprietary works with the intention of profiting off of the completion service and hoarding the code that powers it.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#637

Post by matjet »

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…

Patent trolls that are hated look like: You develop package to do X from first principles, then get sued because someone patented using a known algorithm for the purpose of X.

Copyright working in a supported/non hated way: You develop a package to do X by cribbing off someone else's package X. They sue you for stealing their work, not to make money off you. Situation at hand is case 2, hence the lack of interest in financial gain.

Why is this case 2, when it does not always reproduce the copyrighted works exactly? Situation: You realise that rather than cribbing off of one persons package X, you can crib off two other package X's and mix/average their contents. Scale this to 100's of packages.

Eventually, ML should avoid this by developing to work from first principles, writing in it's own style, with public code used only for validation of it's ability to understand and write code.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#638

Post by zarzavat »

theamk wrote: post #625
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 lawsuit goes through, it's not likely that Copilot would disappear.. but there would be a checkbox to opt-in your code. You could check it and your code will be used to train model. I have some code on Github as well and would not want it to be used in training, nor by Microsoft nor by other company. It is under GPL license to ensure that any derived use is public and not stripped of copyrights and locked into pro…

If this lawsuit is successful it doubt it will change anything at all. Microsoft will just pay the damages as a cost of doing business and continue what they are doing. Maybe they will add an opt-out.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#639

Post by [deleted] »

zarzavat wrote: post #635
joe_the_user wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If Copilot is committing widespread infringements of their copyright, then surely they will be able to find examples of such infringement to submit in their lawsuit. I assume they want some kind of broad relief, such as an injunction to take down copilot. They are not going to get it, they are not going to get anything at all, if they can’t even provide examples of violating code.

[deleted]

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#640

Post by zarzavat »

commoner wrote: post #616
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…

On piracy, HN users defend Sci-Hub to protest against the academic publishing industry, which involves large corporations such as Elsevier charging publishing and subscription fees that are much more than the value that these corporations bring to the actual research, review, and publication. Academics need to publish in order to survive, and they individually do not have enough power to subvert the existing academic…

The argument for libgen is that whatever damage there is to the authors missing out on revenues is outweighed by people being able to get books that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford (especially in developing countries).

In the case of copilot, the damage suffered by the authors is close to zero. And those who benefit the most are the authors themselves. A double digit percent productivity enhancement is worth more to me than a few million $ to a trillion dollar company, especially because MS has to pay for compute.

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