Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

githubcopilotlitigation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 824 posts

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#671

Post by fsflover »

nickelpro wrote: post #543
yenwodyah wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Copilot has been shown to distribute (parts of) the copyrighted works used to create it. That’s the difference.

A) No it doesn't, there's nothing in the Copilot model or the plugin that represents or constitutes a reproduction of copyright code being distributed by GH/MS. The allegation is it generates code that constitutes a copyright violation. This distinction is not academic, it's significant, and represents an unexplored area of copyright law. B) "parts of" copyright works are not themselves sufficient to constitute a cop…

> The allegation is it generates code that constitutes a copyright violation.

The weights of the Copilot very likely contain verbatim parts of the copyrighted code, just like in a zip archive. It chooses semi-randomly which parts to show and sometimes breaks copyright by displaying large enough pieces.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33458603

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#672

Post by RamblingCTO »

opine-at-random wrote: post #223
RamblingCTO wrote: post #8

lol @ "open-source soft­ware piracy" If I'm being honest I'm a bit annoyed at this. What's the problem and what's the point of this?

If you'd ever read even a single one of the licenses to the software I'm sure you use everyday, you'd understand. This is such an obvious and pathetic strawman. I notice often on hackernews that people don't seem to understand anything about free or open-source software outside of the pragmatics of whether they can abuse the work for free.

You read a lot into my not so serious comment. Maybe internet comment sections aren't the right place for you.

But I'll bite: I know licensing, thank you. But what's copyrightable is not so easy. Licenses are not so easy. Copilot does not copy entire works and it's very questionable if a few lines of code are "piracy". It's a repeating discussion again and again, there's nothing novel about it except for the fact that a machine learns (and overfits for small portions of code). So please get off your high horse. I don't care for your fundamentalism.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#673

Post by schleck8 »

0x_rs wrote: post #513
schleck8 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely everyone reading this has written that code verbatim at some point in their lives Ironically their Twitter account uses a screenshot from a TV series as profile picture. I wonder how legal that is, even if meant as a joke. https://twitter.com/saverlawfirm Edit: It's been changed 2 minutes after I wrote this comment

>their "Joined November 2022", following one account and no followers. It's generous to consider it a genuine account, no?

It's linked in their official campaign twitter bio, which in turn is linked on the website

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#674

Post by ranguna »

elikoga wrote: post #670
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.

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 repositor…

They can already sue those people if they don't follow the original license, they just need to file a complaint individually to each author, I think. Standard OSS license stuff, or else, why would people even use licenses?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#675

Post by ranguna »

echelon wrote: post #528
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.

Moreover, if this case wins, it threatens to disrupt one of the biggest technological progressions of all time. AI/ML will change every field just as the Internet and smartphones did. It doesn't show any indication of peaking, either. If the US chooses the wrong path here, we'll only tie our hands behind our backs. Other countries won't be so foolish. We should be able to train on any media a child could see, hear, o…

> it threatens to disrupt one of the biggest technological progressions of all time.

Chill dude, all they have to do is include the licenses on their generated code.

If anything, this is going to generate even more progress. The copilot team would have to create some kind of feature that would connect the generated output the the relevant training data. That'd be pretty incredible to see in the field of AI/ML in general.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#676

Post by IshKebab »

alpaca128 wrote: post #360
IshKebab wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you ok with it being illegal for humans to learn from copyrighted books unless they have a license that explicitly allows learning? That does not sound like a pleasant consequence.

Would you use an AI text generator to write a thesis? No, there's a risk a whole chunk of it will be considered plagiarism because you have no idea what the source of the AI output is, but you know it was trained with unknown copyrighted material. This has nothing to do with the way humans learn, it's about correct attribution. There is no technical reason why Microsoft can't respect licenses with Copilot. But that w…

> Would you use an AI text generator to write a thesis? No, there's a risk a whole chunk of it will be considered plagiarism because you have no idea what the source of the AI output is, but you know it was trained with unknown copyrighted material.

Of course, but that's a separate issue. We're not talking about whether the output of the AI is copyrighted. We're talking about whether it's ok for it to learn from copyrighted material.

Again you can say exactly the same about humans. I am perfectly capable of plagiarising or outputting copyrighted material. That doesn't mean it's illegal to learn from that material, just to output it verbatim.

So the fundamental issue is that it's harder to tell when an AI is plagiarising than it is when you produce something yourself. But that is a technical (and probably solvable) issue, not a legal one. And it's not the subject of this lawsuit.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#677

Post by ranguna »

robbrown451 wrote: post #523
devmor wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a logical fallacy. A human is not an algorithm. We do not have to extend rights regarding novel invention to an algorithm to protect them for people.

Differentiating between a human and a machine simply because one "is not an algorithm" doesn't make a lot of sense. If it were true, people would very easily game it, by using algorithms to automate the most trivial parts of copying someone's work. Ultimately the algorithm is automating something a human could do. There is a lot of gray area to copyright law, but you can't get around that simply by offloading to an a…

> you can't get around that simply by offloading to an algorithm.

You can ...?

By simply saying existing fair usage rights are limited to be used by humans and not for-profit companies building for-profit products.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#678

Post by ranguna »

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.

Everyone, copilot because they used (for training) and generate copyrighted code for they product and people that use the product.

Although users can probably get away with it because they didn't know copilot was actively generating copyrighted code.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#679

Post by albertzeyer »

theamk wrote: post #632
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.

I'm not talking about cases where code is copied, as in your example. I fully agree, this should be fixed. But I don't see such a big problem here. We can do sth about this and reduce those cases to a reasonable human-level minimum or below.

I explicitly say human-level because humans would also not be totally immune to this. It can happen that you unintentionally write the same code you have seen somewhere.

It can also even happen that you write the same code just by pure chance.

I'm talking about the statement in general, that all Copilot output is derived work. This is just wrong, as it is for a human as well.

I'm talking about the statement "[Copi­lot] relies on unprece­dented open-source soft­ware piracy". This is just wrong. A human also relies on open-source software (and even private software) to learn, and this is not piracy.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#680

Post by albertzeyer »

layer8 wrote: post #472
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…

Humans are able to recognize when they are plagiarizing someone else’s work. AIs currently aren’t.

I would argue, also humans are far from perfect here. But this is anyway not so much my argument. I agree with you, this should be improved. But I don't see such a big problem in improving this. I'm sure we will find some ways to get this also to a human-level or better.

I'm mostly talking about the statement "[Copilot] relies on unprece­dented open-source soft­ware piracy". This is just wrong. It learns from open-source code, just like a human does.

Post reply on HN