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

An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

katedowninglaw.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 182 posts

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#71

Post by NoboruWataya »

LesZedCB wrote: post #3

out of curiosity, would anybody else cease to have an issue copilot if it was an open source model? i'm not paying for copilot right now because i'm waiting for this to shake out. but i'd be happy to pay (even their current asking price) if i knew the model was also open source and could be self hosted. maybe this is the wrong way to ask the question, but hopefully it makes sense

I agree - it's problematic enough that licensing information gets lost in the Copilot process, but as is we basically have developers contributing their time and expertise, for free, to the development of Microsoft's new paid proprietary product. Worse still, if Copilot is as revolutionary as some people make it out to be, those same developers are inadvertently helping Microsoft build a monopoly in a new market, with all the disastrous consequences that entails.

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#72

Post by dragonwriter »

6stringmerc wrote: post #65
dragonwriter wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright was originally intended to protect the creators of a work. No, it wasn’t. Copyright was originally intended to protect the publishers of a work. It was later transformed to nominally focus on the creators, but even this was lobbied for by publishers in their own self-interest after the old law directly protecting them was allowed to lapse, and because it still had the same net effect since realizing value…

Wrong! At the point of creation something is granted copyright. Publishers in literature and music are right assholes who’ve created this system. Little middle men rent seeking. It does need reform but it is for the creators that’s why it’s tied to the creator and not date of publication. Fix your perspective buckaroo

> It does need reform but it is for the creators

No, under the US Constitution it is for a specified public benefit as its purpose, the private benefit is a mechanism to achieve that.

Under the Statute of Anne, it was nominally for creators (but this was lobbied for by printers after the expiration of earlier laws, and they were the prime beneficiaries in practice.)

The earlier laws were explicitly for printers.

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#73

Post by falcor84 »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #59
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is eating meat fine? - maybe. Is eating all animals OK? - Hmm... This argument is hardly less flawed than the one you are criticizing. And you statement that 'there is no equal sign ...' is also unconvincing, as we're not equating these two, but the process of learning, which is quite similar.

> but the process of learning, which is quite similar. Thats the thing, there is no reason to think that they are similar.

What do you mean? What is this definition of "learning" that would exclude machine learning?

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#74

Post by comice »

runnerup wrote: post #6
LesZedCB wrote: post #3

out of curiosity, would anybody else cease to have an issue copilot if it was an open source model? i'm not paying for copilot right now because i'm waiting for this to shake out. but i'd be happy to pay (even their current asking price) if i knew the model was also open source and could be self hosted. maybe this is the wrong way to ask the question, but hopefully it makes sense

If it was GPL it could use GPL code and legally there would be no debate.

One of the requirements of the GPL is that credit is given (and indeed this is needed for enforcement to work because the GPL leverages copyright).

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#75

Post by rwmj »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #43

Has anyone produced a legally watertight license or clause for other licenses that prevents code being used for training of copilot-like services?

It would be a Field of Endeavor restriction so the resulting license wouldn't be open source, and I don't think (?) Copilot is trained on proprietary code.

(Section 6 here: https://opensource.org/osd)

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#76

Post by ufo »

bayindirh wrote: post #70
nomilk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Said content belonging to someone else. Is CoPilot just trained on OSS, or on private repos too?

Just on public repositories, as far as I know, however regardless of license. There are GPL repositories which force you to open your code, which is one aspect, and there are "source available" repositories, which allows you to see the code, but forbids everything else. There are a lot of blurry areas about this, and in my opinion, an AI learns like a human is not a solid basis for fair use. On the other hand, if pri…

There is also plenty on code on the training set that violates OSS licenses (e.g. copying code without attribution)

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#77

Post by jimktrains2 »

nomilk wrote: post #36
fhd2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't shake the feeling that a lot of the logic around ML models having more or less the same "rights" as humans comes from misleading marketing that they, in any shape or form, resemble human intelligence. AI is a buzzword applied to any kind of algorithm for an activity that people previously thought couldn't be automated. Back when I was young, graph pathfinding algorithms where called AI. A few decades later th…

An argument in favour of legality of web scraping is if a human can look at websites and collect data, then why shouldn't they be allowed to do the same programatically? This is the same but for use of open source code: if humans are allowed to use one specific (organic) neural network to read, process, and use open source code, then why shouldn't they be allowed to use some other neural network, artificial or otherw…

No, scraping stems from a service not placing any limits on its access cannot complain that it was accessed.

With code, that is denoted via the license, which when supplied with the code and especially as metadata before downloading (as is the case with GitHub) is the common means with which those limits are placed.

Humans and neural networks process information very differently and it's disingenuous to imply otherwise.

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#78

Post by jackdaniel »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #56
jackdaniel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this argument over and over again, and it is so flawed that it is hard to bear. There is no equal sign between a person and a program. There is also that thing called "scale" that is critical to the interpretation of the action. Is eating meat fine? - maybe. Is eating all animals OK? - Hmm...

> Is eating meat fine? - maybe. Is eating all animals OK? - Hmm... This argument is hardly less flawed than the one you are criticizing. And you statement that 'there is no equal sign ...' is also unconvincing, as we're not equating these two, but the process of learning, which is quite similar.

I've touched two things - that's why they were put in separate paragraphs. Let me spell it out in different words:

1. People have certain rights, duties and prohibitions. Equating the right of George Lucas to use ideas he saw with rights of a machine to do that misses the point by the same measure as asserting that MS enslaves the copilot, but in the opposite direction.

2. Scale does matter. If I'm an ordinary person then the act of eating won't ruin the ecosystem. Now imagine a construct that operates under the same principle of eating, but its jaw, stomach and speed of eating is many magnitudes larger - do we apply same limitations to both, because the principle of eating is the same?

Also, since I'm spelling things out, the fact that I'm seeing the same argument many times over, and that it is so obviously flawed, makes me think that this is a symptom of astroturfing.

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#79

Post by rwmj »

falcor84 wrote: post #73
jimktrains2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the process of learning, which is quite similar. Thats the thing, there is no reason to think that they are similar.

What do you mean? What is this definition of "learning" that would exclude machine learning?

Can a human read and learn every single line of code on github?

Re: An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit

#80

Post by visarga »

david_allison wrote: post #68
visarga wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replicating copyrighted code from the training set only happens 1% of the time, it's the exception not the rule. And when it happens it's usually because the same text appears multiple times in the training set. So it will memorize boilerplate and popular code snippets, not unique stuff. Even a replicated piece of code 100 lines long is no big deal in my opinion, unless it contains some kind of unique thing never see…

I have ~400KLOC changed on GitHub. 1% of the time happens multiple times a day given scale. Pragmatically, people are already knowingly committing commercially viable copyright violations of my work. I'd rather it wasn't encouraged further by a US-based 'big tech', especially if the people using my code aren't aware that they're doing anything questionable. Some months, I earn over 100x less from OSS than I would in…

It's the wild west phase, after it settles down there will probably be ways to signal you don't want to allow training on your code. But I think it's just like taking your grain of sand from the beach so nobody else can have it. The beach is going to be just the same.
Post reply on HN