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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

#721

Post by lbotos »

renewiltord wrote: post #663
lbotos wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not a lawyer, but if you provide a platform that enables infringement that's different than if you provide a tool that could enable infringement.

Popcorn time vs. bittorrent.

And you are right the EULA could say "it's up to the end user to confirm you can use this code". But then how do you verify? That slows down "productivity" where copilot promises "speeding up" productivity.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#722

Post by bmitc »

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…

I played around with creating an MIT license on my GitHub that explicitly forbids Copilot and other such systems that I thought I may update my projects to, because I strongly dislike the data collection. I'm not a lawyer though.

Is there a GutHub terms of agreement that covers Copilot?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#723

Post by bmitc »

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

There is a ton of innovative stuff that is not open source. I don't see what open source has to do with innovation.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#724

Post by visarga »

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…

Not just AI is threatened, but also the use of sites like StackOverflow because some of those snippets might infringe a license. So we have to write everything from our heads, de novo. No more googling for solutions.

I think we should just relax copyright, it's dying anyway. Language models allow people to borrow skills learned from other people, and solve tasks. That's huge. Like Matrix, loading up a new skill at the press of a button. Can we give up such a huge advantage in order to protect copyright?

I think the notion of copyright has been under attack already for 2 decades by the internet, search engine and social networks. They all work against it, and AI does it even more. It just encapsulates the whole culture in a box, mixing everything up, all copyrights melting away, everything one prompt away. This could be a new medium of propagation for ideas. No longer limited to human brains and books, they can now propagate through language models more efficiently.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#725

Post by rrobukef »

williamcotton wrote: post #615
nequo wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have only skimmed. But lines 23 and 24 on page 23 also reference Copilot's autocompletion of Quake III's `Q_rsqrt`[1] and mention that it is under GPL2. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287

I doubt that anything other than Carmack's comments are covered. See the "Filtration" section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... "In computer programs, concerns for efficiency may limit the possible ways to achieve a particular function, making a particular expression necessary to achieving the idea. In this case, the expression is not protected by copyright." "Finally, material that exi…

The magic-constant is not optimal there exist better alternatives. It is not necessary to implement this function and should be copyrightable. It is also not a trivial part.

On the other hand, Microsoft may only need to show "Hey, we got this code from FooBar under this license and this license and ..."

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#726

Post by nudpiedo »

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.

the metaphor is sort of broken... here the "shotgun" has the ammunition and the dead child in.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#727

Post by fsflover »

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…

> I hope I live long enough to see copyright die.

I actually agree. However this is not what's happening here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463441

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463800

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#728

Post by CobrastanJorji »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #302
lovich wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That implies it’s a service I want, which I have not decided on in this situation. Either way I was more arguing with the other posters claim that it “didn’t make sense” to critique this move, which I think is factually incorrect since I can come up with a few plausible situations where it does make sense

it doesn't imply it's a service you want, but rather, if you do want it, you can opt-in to the service by joining the lawsuit when the time comes if you feel the class doesn't represent you, you can just not opt-in

Sadly, you've got it backwards. Class actions are opt-out. You're part of it unless you know about the settlement and contact them to let them know you're opting out of it.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#729

Post by benlivengood »

devmor wrote: post #492
benlivengood wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are just compression with extra steps by that logic. There's a fairly simple technical fix for codex/copilot anyway; stick a search engine on the back end and index the training data and don't output things found in the search engine.

I dont think that would work very well because there are not infinite ways to succinctly solve most programming problems. In fact the majority of solutions will look exactly the same. The real solution is very, very simple. Only use opt-in training data. Don't acquire codebases from people who didn't agree to it.

> I dont think that would work very well because there are not infinite ways to succinctly solve most programming problems. In fact the majority of solutions will look exactly the same.

Algorithms can't be patented or copyrighted, as they are pure mathematics. If an implementation of an algorithm has no creative content because it is succinct then it likely doesn't deserve copyright.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#730

Post by ksaj »

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.

I tested co-pilot initially with Hello World in different languages. In Lisp, it gave me verbatim code from a particular tutorial, which was made obvious because their code had "Hello " where was the name of a YouTube tutorial, instead of the word "World." It was surely slurped into the model via someone who had done the tutorial and uploaded their efforts to Github. Mind you, it's pretty much the way everyone would code it, but the inclusion of is definitely an issue.

So it isn't too hard to prove the case.

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