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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

#641

Post by jrochkind1 »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #234
jrochkind1 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh... I don't know. It sounds to me like you are saying because the code example outputs exact lines, it's a copyright violation; but the image AI's necessarily don't output exact copies of even portions of pre-existing images, that's not how they work. But I don't think copyright on visual images actually works like that, that it needs to be an exact copy to infringe. If I draw my own pictures of Mickey Mouse and Go…

I believe fair use is the way to go then. SD would definitely be so, in my opinion.

For those curious about the standards for fair sue in US copyright law, and how they have been considered in previous caess, here's one legal overview:

https://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use

This AI re-mixing stuff is so new, I think few legal observers would say they could definitely predict what the courts will do with it. Nobody really knew how the Google Books case, for instance, was going to go until it went.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#642

Post by blackoil »

skydhash wrote: post #609
Filligree wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm game. What terrible outcome will we see from a lack of copyright law?

I'm from a country which basically ignore all copyright laws in practice. The musical scene relies on live sessions to generate any money, and the movie scene (which was never anything special) is mostly dead. That's because any media that hits the market is copied and sold everywhere. Even books, if they got popular, will get copied and sold with little enforcement, at every corner. This is mostly because the means…

>The musical scene relies on live sessions to generate any money

That's true even in USA (with strong copyrights), apart from for top .1%

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#644

Post by eslaught »

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.

Correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think this document needs to be a comprehensive record of every piece of copyrighted material that Copilot or Codex produce. That's something that will be produced during/for the trial process itself. Right now, this is just establishing the basic premise, and the claims for the type of behavior that is going on.

I think they intentionally picked (literal) textbook examples because they're short and easy for non-experts to grasp and have some understanding of. But I don't think we've seen any of the code from the respective J. Doe's yet, and I would assume we would in the trial (possibly in addition to more cases).

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#645

Post by galaxyLogic »

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…

Who should be sued? Microsoft who produces an application known as "Copilot" which itself contains nobody else's code but Microsoft's? OR the person who USES Copilot, to produce code which contains somebody else's copyrighted code?

Using Copilot is a bit like using a shotgun, can be very illegal depending on what you shoot at. Creating and distributing the app Copilot is like creating and selling a shotgun.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#646

Post by kmeisthax »

williamtrask wrote: post #504
D13Fd wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct legally, morally, or both? Legally a copyright claim seems weak, but they didn't assert one. Some of their claims look stronger than others. The DMCA claim in particular strikes me as strong-ish at first glance, though. Morally I think this class action is dead wrong. This is how innovation dies. Many of the class members likely do not want to kill Copilot and every future service that operates similarly. Bey…

I don’t think this lawsuit would hinder innovation but it would greatly change it and who owns it. If an AI model is the joint property of all the people who contributed IP to it, it’s a pretty hugely democratic and decentralizing force. It also will incentivise a huge amount of innovation on better, richer data sources for AI. If an AI model isn’t joint property of the IP it learned then it’s a great way to build ex…

The problem of jointly-owned AI is that the actual value of a particular contribution to the training set is not particularly easy to calculate. We can't tie a particular model weight back to individual training set examples, nor can we take an output that's a statistical mix of two different peoples' work and trace it back to them.

With current technology, the only licensing model we can offer is "give us your training set example, we'll chuck a few pennies at you out of credit sales and nothing more". We can't even comply with CC-BY because the model can't determine who to attribute to.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#647

Post by [deleted] »

eslaught wrote: post #644
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.

Correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think this document needs to be a comprehensive record of every piece of copyrighted material that Copilot or Codex produce. That's something that will be produced during/for the trial process itself. Right now, this is just establishing the basic premise, and the claims for the type of behavior that is going on. I think they intentionally picked (literal) textbook examples because th…

[deleted]

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#648

Post by kmeisthax »

smoldesu wrote: post #313
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…

> “AI” is just fancy speak for “complex math program” Not really? It's less about arithmetic and more about inferencing data in higher dimensions than we can understand. Comparing it to traditional computation is a trap, same as treating it like a human mind. They've very different, under the surface. IMO, if this is a data problem then we should treat it like one. Simple fix - find a legal basis for which licenses a…

The only license that is permissive enough for AI training is CC0.

Art generators can't comply with attribution requirements and code generators don't know if and when they trip the GPL copyleft. I believe most permissive code licenses also have some kind of attribution requirement.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#649

Post by commoner »

zarzavat wrote: post #640
commoner wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

You're assuming that Microsoft needs to shut down Copilot to comply with the licenses of the software they misused. That is not the case. To make Copilot legitimate, all Microsoft has to do is restrict Copilot's inputs to non-proprietary code, release the Copilot dataset under a compatible license, and clarify that the code generated by Copilot is also covered under that license. Attribution can be done by inserting a comment with link to a paginated list of all of the contributors whose code was used in Copilot.

Microsoft can even continue to sell Copilot as a service while keeping it license-compliant, since most developers are not going to self-host the entire dataset. Microsoft can also choose to exclude copyleft-licensed code from Copilot or create multiple flavors of Copilot, each licensed differently. You can get your "productivity enhancement" without needing Microsoft to violate software licenses.

The damage is not in the monetary payment denied to free and open source software contributors, payment these contributors never demanded. The damage is in Microsoft violating other people's software licenses to create a proprietary product derived from copyleft-licensed and attribution-required code, and in Microsoft encouraging other developers to violate these licenses. Microsoft needs to rectify these violations with specific performance.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#650

Post by [deleted] »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #645
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…

Who should be sued? Microsoft who produces an application known as "Copilot" which itself contains nobody else's code but Microsoft's? OR the person who USES Copilot, to produce code which contains somebody else's copyrighted code? Using Copilot is a bit like using a shotgun, can be very illegal depending on what you shoot at. Creating and distributing the app Copilot is like creating and selling a shotgun.

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