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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

#661

Post by adlpz »

odessacubbage wrote: post #581
adlpz wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm just afraid that it might not be as good as it is that way. It's a bit like how GPT-3, Stable Diffusion and all those generative models use extensive amounts of copyrighted material in training to get as good as they do. In those cases however the output space is so vast that plagiarism is very unlikely. With code, not so much.

there are literally thousands of years of artwork that fall under public domain, the idea that the dataset isn't big enough to make good images without copyright infringement and attribution laundering is frankly laughable.

My guess is that is not as much about the amount of available data but how accessible it is. Scraping the internet seems to be one of the preferred ways of gathering vast amounts of, in particular, text and images.

Telling apart what's public domain or not is not a trivially automatable task.

If one just relies on curated libraries of vetted public domain content you don't get, by far, the expected amout of variability and diversity.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#662

Post by deanjones »

saurik wrote: post #529
deanjones wrote: post #322

This will fail very quickly. The licence that project owners publish with their code on Github applies to third parties who wish to use the code, but does not apply to Github. Authors who publish their code on Github grant Github a licence under the Github Terms: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... Specifically, sections D.4 to D.7 grant Github the right to "to store, archive, parse, and d…

So, it isn't clear to me which of these clauses you are citing grants them the forced right to "Copilot" (which I'm using as a verb to avoid defining what stage of production we are talking about) that wasn't granted by the license of the code, but let's assume for a moment that you are correct: that just means that GitHub as a service makes no sense, right? Like, there are a ton of people using GitHub to develop usi…

Section D.3: "If you're posting anything you did not create yourself or do not own the rights to, you agree that you are responsible for any Content you post". A lawsuit against Github has no standing for the scenario you suggest, because Github is not at fault.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#663

Post by renewiltord »

lbotos wrote: post #629
lbotos wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law will consider "intent". By your logic, web browsers are infringing. Can you use curl to infringe on copyright? Yes. Is every time you use curl copyright infringement? No. Can you in theory tell when you are infringing with curl? Yes. Can you use copilot to infringe? Yes. Is every time you use copilot copyright infringement? No. Can you in theory tell when you are infringing with copilot? *No*

my response above about intent is wrong, but the rest still holds imo.

So the difference is entirely in being able to find out whether you're infringing or not?

Surely that's solvable with a EULA that passes the responsibility onto the user to search?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#664

Post by deanjones »

xigoi wrote: post #483
puffoflogic wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it explicitly states that it does give them the right to share your code. Copilot isn't selling code; if it were, then GitHub wouldn't let you share the output of Copilot; that would destroy their market. That they allow you to share the output of Copilot with others proves that what they are selling is the service, not the output. The output is, at worst, "shared" code from Github's licensors.

They're selling the service, which is a derivative work of the code.

Which is what the licence is granting them the right to do.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#665

Post by ahtihn »

heavyset_go wrote: post #515
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…

Innovation dies when creators can't create without someone ripping off their work against the terms they release it under. I am more hesitant to release code on GitHub under any licenses now. Even outside of GPL-esque terms, I've considered open sourcing some of my product's components under a source available but otherwise proprietary license, but if Microsoft won't adhere to popular licenses like the GPL, why would…

> Innovation dies when creators can't create without someone ripping off their work against the terms they release it under.

I strongly disagree. There would be more innovation if code couldn't be copyrighted or kept secret. See: all of open source.

> I've considered open sourcing some of my product's components under a source available but otherwise proprietary license

What's the point of that? This isn't useful to anyone. The fact you even consider it shows you don't understand open source. I'm sure you happily use open source code yourself though.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#666

Post by WithinReason »

heavyset_go wrote: post #530
WithinReason wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you Google Mona Lisa the result is the Mona Lisa. If you query Copilot for a common piece of code you get that code.

Google doesn't sell its search feature as a product that you can just plagiarize the results from and they're yours. Microsoft does that with Copilot. Copilot is as much of a search engine as Stable Diffusion or DALL-e are, which is to say they aren't at all. If you want to compare it to a search engine, despite it being a tortured metaphor, the most apt comparison is not to Google, but to The Pirate Bay if TPB store…

With Copilot it's your responsibility not to use it as a search engine to copy-paste code. It's completely obvious when it's being used as a search engine so it's not a problem at all.

Stable Diffusion works on completely different principles and they can't exactly replicate a pixels from their training data.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#667

Post by fsflover »

ahtihn wrote: post #665
heavyset_go wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Innovation dies when creators can't create without someone ripping off their work against the terms they release it under. I am more hesitant to release code on GitHub under any licenses now. Even outside of GPL-esque terms, I've considered open sourcing some of my product's components under a source available but otherwise proprietary license, but if Microsoft won't adhere to popular licenses like the GPL, why would…

> Innovation dies when creators can't create without someone ripping off their work against the terms they release it under. I strongly disagree. There would be more innovation if code couldn't be copyrighted or kept secret. See: all of open source. > I've considered open sourcing some of my product's components under a source available but otherwise proprietary license What's the point of that? This isn't useful to…

> There would be more innovation if code couldn't be copyrighted or kept secret. See: all of open source.

I actually agree. However this is not what's happening. Copilot effectvely removes copyright from FLOSS code, but doesn't touch proprietary software. FLOSS loses it's teeth against the corporations.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#668

Post by maxloh »

deanjones wrote: post #322

This will fail very quickly. The licence that project owners publish with their code on Github applies to third parties who wish to use the code, but does not apply to Github. Authors who publish their code on Github grant Github a licence under the Github Terms: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... Specifically, sections D.4 to D.7 grant Github the right to "to store, archive, parse, and d…

How about codebase that were uploaded to GitHub, by someone other than the original copyright owner?

e.g. I can clone the GNU codebase and publish it to GitHub. Clearly I don't own the code and do not have any rights to grant GitHub a license.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#669

Post by sireat »

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.

I feel like Charlie Gordon from Algernon with and without Copilot.

Literally 10x faster development.

Case in point: had an unexpected project and no time to complete it. Within an hour Copilot helped me:

* Write a couple of tricky matplotlib plots

* Do some extensive analysis with Pandas

* Write a couple of SQL queries

* Write a Flask back-end and deploy it

* Write a bit of a front-end

* This all with extra comments , links to documentation and pretty reasonable style

I have experience with all of the above mentioned but the speed increase was considerable.

This would a a good day's work without Copilot and there would be less commenting and hackier code.

Before Copilot I would be cursing a lot more reading various docs...

The key thing that Copilot does it reduces latency for your thoughts-action-results loop.

Does the open source really suffer if less people read documentation directly? Would you really be less likely to create an open source library if you knew someone can now use your library at 10x speed?

The inference ability has crossed uncanny valley so many times.

I find myself wondering whether there is a speech recognition component at times.

When teaching a lecture I will start saying something and write a prompt at the same time and the sentence produced by Copilot will be spot on what I've just said.

Ideally there would an open source version of Copilot that respects everyone's wishes. I fear that is impossible.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#670

Post by elikoga »

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.

When searching for "console.log(isEven(50));" "// → true", which is one of the parts that the complaints is about, since this is also reproduced inside a Programming learning book: We get with cs.github.com

" Showing 1 - 20 of 66 files found (in 76 milliseconds)"

So, if this lawsuit succeeds in some way shape or form, does the author have a case against the 66 people that reproduced these lines in their own repository?

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