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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

#761

Post by joe_the_user »

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #486
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…

Yes, the passion to defend copyright trolling for isEven functions (an example included in the filing) from people here is bizarre. I can't decide if people just hate Microsoft enough that a future where you must pay to include an iseven function in your code is a price worth paying to give them a bloody nose, or there are just a large contingent of users making millions off their GPL code who are put out. More serio…

The idea that using copilot "damages" copyright seems ill-considered.

Suppose a commercial software company just took GPL-licensed software and openly incorporated into their own code and then sold. Would that "damage" copyright also? Remember, there's no legal principle that says "if we catch violating copyright, your stuff is now free". The copyright holder can sue for damages or to stop distribution and that's it.

People like Larry Ellison of Oracle have claimed they just steal GPL'd stuff 'cause it there. But Oracle defends it's copyrighted code very aggressively. Oppositely, the GPL is intended to allow more open access than public domain in a time where commercial companies want to take anything they can get.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#762

Post by tremon »

plgonzalezrx8 wrote: post #720
teddyh wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But training an AI model on media (code or otherwise) is not copyright infringement, so the license is irrelevant. Well, maybe . But even if we assume that this is true, when anyone later uses the AI to reproduce a copy of the code, a copy has been made and copyright has been infringed.

This whole code thing is so nonsense to me. If I need a code to loop over 10 lines, I'll code a for loop the same way regardless of what I'm developing. Define for me, at what point of complexity, does code gets Copyrighted? The things copilot is outputting is literally small chunks of code that needs a lot of cleanup afterwards. Is not like I type "Build twitter for me" and BAM, I got a working clone of twitter.

Every line that you produce is copyrighted by you, automatically. There is no "obviousness" test for copyright: if you decide to code a for loop, then that for loop is copyrighted the moment you type it in.

copilot is outputting literally small chunks of code that needs a lot of cleanup afterwards

If you start from copyrighted chunks, then clean them, you're still violating people's copyright. Multi-million dollar lawsuits have been fought over people using small samples from other people's music, cleaning them, and releasing them as parts of their own song.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#763

Post by az226 »

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…

Not just copyright, what Copilot does it fair use. If Google taking tens of thousands of lines directly and gets away with it, it's going to be impossible to see any logic that gets AI being trained on millions of lines of code, not being fair use for any individual open source copyright holder.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#764

Post by az226 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #612
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…

1) This "copilot is great 'cause copyright is evil" argument breaks when you look at the fact that copilot is copyrighted, closed software tool for producing closed, copyrighted software. If you trained copilot on GPL'd software and specified that copilot's output was also GPL'd maybe you'd have some reasonable claim (but even then, the attribution claim would come in). 2) So far, these tools are "better search" sche…

#1 is a pretty dumb argument. Should all of Silicon Valley VC backed startups send Linus Torvalds billion-dollar checks?

I don't see a world where Copilot isn't fair use (at least in America).

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#765

Post by az226 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #172
cheriot wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that then reproduces near replica's of my code Copying a few lines is not the same as copying the whole thing. Sharing quotes from a book is not copyright infringement.

If your intent is to create a competing product for profit, chances are that won't be found as fair use, given that determining fair use depends on intent and how the content is used. Using clips from a movie in a movie review is probably fair use. Using clips from a movie in knock-off of that movie for profit? Probably not fair use if it's not a parody. Copilot is not like a movie reviewer using clips to review a mo…

You're mistaking the end-user's copyright infringement with Copilot's alleged infringement.

Copilot is fair use and transformative -- that is unless there is an open source Copilot that Copilot is training on, only then would it be competing and it's easy for GitHub or OpenAI to exclude those repos of copilot alternatives from the training set.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#766

Post by az226 »

an1sotropy wrote: post #422
r3trohack3r wrote: post #158

I'm not confident in this stance - sharing it to have a conversation. Hopefully some folks can help me think through this! The value of copyleft licenses, for me, was that we were fighting back against the notion of copyright. That you couldn't sell me a product that I wasn't allowed to modify and share my modifications back with others. The right to modify and redistribute transitively though the software license ga…

I think (1) you're mainly missing that copyleft vs non-copyleft is actually irrelevant for the copilot case. You also (2) may be missing the legal footing of copyleft licenses. (1) The problem with copilot is that when it blurps out code X that is arguably not under fair use (given how large and non-transformed the code segment is), copilot users have no idea who owns copyright on X, and thus they are in a legal mine…

Copying even a single code segment literally will have you lose a fair use trial. Look at Google taking 10k+ lines verbatim and winning the case.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#767

Post by az226 »

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.

That's not right. Copilot has a copyright supression feature, humans don't. It's actually opposite.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#768

Post by az226 »

Imnimo wrote: post #47

On page 18, they show Copilot produces the following code: >function isEven(n) { > return n % 2 === 0; >} They then say, "Copilot’s Output, like Codex’s, is derived from existing code. Namely, sample code that appears in the online book Mastering JS, written by Valeri Karpov." Surely everyone reading this has written that code verbatim at some point in their lives. How can they assert that this code is derived specif…

Shows how hilariously dumb this lawsuit is. The plaintiff is a lawyer but somehow missed the merger doctrine class.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#769

Post by az226 »

Phrodo_00 wrote: post #173
williamcotton wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way in hell that isEven is covered by copyright. "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." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... Think about how absurd this is. So if Microsoft was the first…

> There is no way in hell that isEven is covered by copyright. Hey, I said the same thing about APIs, but here we are. Edit: Actually, the Supreme Court declined ruling whether APIs are copyrightable, but they did say that if they are, reusing them like google reused the java apis in android would fall under fair use. Given that lower courts did think that APIs should be copyrightable, we don't know if they are anymo…

What's interesting in that case is I would argue the interface code is MORE important than the implementing code. You can hire any SWE to re-implement the entire API and it being pretty straightforward. The interface code was what actually mattered with developers and took creative expression, design, sequence, organization to put together and feedback and iteration over the years. Google knew this too, taking the interface code was WAY more important for them than if they had done the reverse.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#770

Post by az226 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #254

If Microsoft is so confident in the legality and ethics of Copilot, and that it doesn't leak or steal proprietary IP... they should go train it on the MS Word and Windows and Excel source trees. What's that? They don't want to do that? Why not?

I have no doubt they will -- but the specific models will be used for Microsoft engineers. There will be a Copilot for Enterprise that trains on customers' private code.
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