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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

#781

Post by lbotos »

renewiltord wrote: post #743
lbotos wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, makes sense! I guess we'll see what arguments the court finds convincing. I, for one, hope Copilot stays, but if we can delay its destruction long enough I think we'll get open-source models that will give us this for free. And then the cat will be out of the bag.

https://github.com/moyix/fauxpilot is working on an open source variant. Based on https://github.com/salesforce/CodeGen

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#782

Post by still_grokking »

bobbruno wrote: post #755
AnnasVirtual wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are clearly doesn't understand how machine learning works, if machine learning ok copyrighted data becomes illegal then most of our infrastructures will be down because most of it uses machine learning, the first that will affect many people is probably google search

I believe this is the core point of the lawsuit - is Copilot really creating code from what it learned (which happens to, by some weird glitch, mimic the source code) or is it just a big overfitting model that learned to encode and memorize a large number of answers and spit them out verbatim when prompted? I think that losing this lawsuit has much more serious consequences for Copilot than just having to connect to…

I don't think that anybody will try to answer the philosophical question in what regard what this machine does has anything to do with human reasoning.

In the end it's just a machine. It's not a person. So trying to anthropomorphize this case makes no sense from the get go.

Looking at it this way (and I guess this is the right way to look at it from the law standpoint) Copilot is just a fancy database.

It's a database full of copyrighted work…

How this database (and it's query system) works from the technical viewpoint isn't relevant. It just makes no difference as by law machines aren't people. End of story.

But should the curt (to my extreme surprise) rule that what MS did was "fair use" than the flood gates of "fairuseify through ML"[1] would be open. Given the history of copyright and/or other IP laws in the US this just won't happen! The US won't ever accept that someone would be allowed to grab all Mikey Mouse movies put them into some AI and start to create new Mikey Mouse movies. That's the unthinkable. Just imagine what this would mean. You could "launder" any copyrighted work just by uploading and re-querying it form some "ML-based database system". That would be the end of copyright. This just won't happen. MS is going lose this trail. There is no other option.

The only real question is how severe their loose will be. They used for sure also AGPLv4 code for training. Thinking this through to the end with all consequences would mean that large chunks of MS's infrastructure, and all supporting code, which means more or less all of Azure, which means more or less all of MS's software, would need to be offered in (usable!) source to all users of Copilot. I think this won't happen. I expect the court to find a way to weasel out of this consequence.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220121020414/fairuseify.ml/

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#783

Post by iudqnolq »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #225
iudqnolq wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the core principles of the American system of government is that we outsource enforcement to private parties. Instead of the public needing to fund enforcement with tax dollars private parties undertake risky litigation in exchange for the chance of a big payoff. There is a reasonable argument that's a horrible system. But it doesn't make sense to criticize the plaintiff looking for a profit - the entire syste…

> If you're angry about it lobby for either no rules or properly funded government enforcement of rules. No, there are plenty of other changes you might want to see. For example, in the American system, judges are generally not allowed to be aware of anything not mentioned by a party to the case. There is no good reason for this.

Nope!

Take a look at "judicial notice" and "amicus curiae".

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#784

Post by saurik »

deanjones wrote: post #662
saurik wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, so: "that just means that GitHub as a service makes no sense, right?" Like, I feel you simply ignored the core complaint of my comment so you could instead note something about GitHub's potential liability (a thought process I didn't even bring up, though I can see how many you decided to bend my final comment into somehow being relevant for that thought). Like, are you simply ceding then that a ridiculous amount of the content on GitHub -- including major projects such as Linux -- are not allowed to be posted to GitHub?

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#785

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

AnnasVirtual wrote: post #746
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it all runs on hardware we created and we know exactly what operations were implemented in that hardware. How is it not just math?

it is a math that simulate neurons firing

That’s clearly not the case because if it were so simple we’d have an AGI now.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#786

Post by bombolo »

bobbruno wrote: post #756
bombolo wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Differentiating between a human and a machine simply because one "is not an algorithm" doesn't make a lot of sense. Uh? So if I design a self driving car which kills someone, it's the car that goes to jail? Legal precedent seems to indicate this is not the case at all. Because humans and machines are different, simply because humans aren't machines and viceversa.

Last I checked this was very much a gray area. I’d expect at least a long investigation into the amount of work and testing put into validating that the self-driving algorithm operates inside reasonable standards of safe driving. In fact, I expect that, as the industry progresses, the tests for minimal acceptable self-driving safety get more and more standardised. That doesn’t answer the question of who’s responsible…

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/03/08/uber-got-off-the-hook...

Well the "long" investigation let uber off the hook despite disabling emergency breaking and put the driver in jail.

Which seems to put all the blame on the user and nothing on the makers of the AI.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#787

Post by ranguna »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #700
ranguna wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And who enforces that?

The owners of the original work

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#788

Post by ranguna »

bobbruno wrote: post #753
ranguna wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gene…

If they can actually link output to specific input, the lawsuit has merit and more, GPT-3 is a lie. A neural network is supposed to learn how things work, not memorize a large number of examples and spit them out verbatim - or keep connections to specific inputs. Copilot losing the lawsuit is evidence it’s a case of overfitting, not true ML.

Mind you, not all outputs are the result of over fitting.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#789

Post by ranguna »

WithinReason wrote: post #694
ranguna wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gene…

They already have that feature and you can turn it on

Ah great, then it should be on and with no way to disable it.

Of course, end user could just strip the license/attribution off their generated output, but that's a different story.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#790

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

D13Fd wrote: post #522
heavyset_go wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't feel like you're being represented, you're free to choose not to be a member of class in the lawsuit.

> If you don't feel like you're being represented, you're free to choose not to be a member of class in the lawsuit. I think you missed this part: > Sure, I personally could opt out of the suit, but that would be utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

why would it be meaningless?

seems like a great opportunity for Microsoft to alter copilot so it's opt-in to get your code scanned, and to mandatorily add licensing and attribution to outputs

I know you said you're OK with it as is, but many aren't, so if I'm a coder, this suit represents a big net positive for me, being a way to reduce the probability of someone laundering my code away without proper attribution or license attention

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