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

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

#81

Post by jules »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #47

A hypothetical question: imagine a filmmaker, who had studied a lot of obviously copyrighted movies by famous renowned directors. This means he has trained his neural network using their copyrighted licensed content. Does he breach copyright when he composes and films a scene? Are visual quotes copyright theft? Homages? Did George Lucas infringe copyright when he was borrowing compositions from "Triumph of the will"?

I bet he would if his movie scene is pixel for pixel identical to the scene he watched.

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

#82

Post by geysersam »

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…

This is the slippery slope argument. It's not inconsistent to allow human "webscraping" while disallowing massive machine web scraping. Most important, it's about what the owner of the website considers to be appropriate.

A neural network is closer to a database than a human brain. So this is akin to saying: I can store your personal data in my human brain (without your consent), why am I not allowed to do it in PostgreSQL?

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

#83

Post by bayindirh »

ufo wrote: post #76
bayindirh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Yes, however humans making mistakes knowingly or unknowingly doesn't make what Copilot does right.

We just talked this with a couple of friends. I always cite what I got from where (it's just two occasions, but it's not zero), and always respect their licenses.

I'm worried about both ways of the permeation: GPL to closed and closed to open. Open source is a widely misunderstood concept and people (and companies) are using that misunderstanding to validate their blanket options. That's wrong on so many (legal to ethical, and everything in between) levels.

Emulator writers are afraid to read leaked console code, because any resemblance of their code to it means destruction of years (or decades) of reverse engineering and clean room development done in that domain. If code licensing is that important and crucial, why a court tested license (e.g. GPL) is so worthless? Is this fair, again in the same cross-section (legal to ethical)?

There's a lot to be discussed, and a lot of ideas to be re-learnt here. Open Source (or precisely Free / Copylefted software) doesn't mean free for all. We need to understand that.

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

#84

Post by rwmj »

david_allison wrote: post #21
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

It's not the license of the model, it's the license of the output. As it stands, Copilot is a black-box which strips copyright from a piece of code. I'd be fine if it were a level playing field and GitHub also trained it on private repositories - that's a signal that they don't care about copyright at all. I'd be fine as a developer who releases GPL'ed code if the output was licensed as GPL - obviously no license vio…

You could also imagine different Copilot models, eg Copilot-GPL, Copilot-MIT etc. Each would be trained only on GPL or MIT code from github. Then which model gets used depends on the license of the file being written at the time.

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

#85

Post by jimktrains2 »

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?

I'm not going to have an epistemological debate on what is knowledge or skill. Humans are more lossy and able to bring in much more varied knowledge and experience in ways a computer cannot.

Ai/ml is not artificial general intelligence. It's a mathematical model.

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

rwmj wrote: post #84
david_allison wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the license of the model, it's the license of the output. As it stands, Copilot is a black-box which strips copyright from a piece of code. I'd be fine if it were a level playing field and GitHub also trained it on private repositories - that's a signal that they don't care about copyright at all. I'd be fine as a developer who releases GPL'ed code if the output was licensed as GPL - obviously no license vio…

You could also imagine different Copilot models, eg Copilot-GPL, Copilot-MIT etc. Each would be trained only on GPL or MIT code from github. Then which model gets used depends on the license of the file being written at the time.

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by bayindirh »

carpenecopinum wrote: post #66
uklgrant wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are not neural networks, that's just a thesis. Even novelists do not sit all day long in a closed room reading other people's work and then do a collage of what they've read. Otherwise no books would have been written in the first place. Cut the AI off humans' work, let it interact with the real world and see what it produces. It will be nothing. Once (if ever?) an AI is capable of producing an actual original…

> Cut the AI off humans' work, let it interact with the real world and see what it produces. It will be nothing. That "experiment" could just as well be done on humans, though, cut them off of any work that any human has done before and you may get simple cave paintings, if you're lucky.

Do not underestimate the instincts of any living being. The implicit knowledge and the foundation carried with every one of us is immense.

Monkeys have evolved enough to start making their own tools [0].

[0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/monkeys-make-ston...

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

#89

Post by polaris64 »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #47

A hypothetical question: imagine a filmmaker, who had studied a lot of obviously copyrighted movies by famous renowned directors. This means he has trained his neural network using their copyrighted licensed content. Does he breach copyright when he composes and films a scene? Are visual quotes copyright theft? Homages? Did George Lucas infringe copyright when he was borrowing compositions from "Triumph of the will"?

A difference is that I can't just spin up a copy of George Lucas on my GPU in seconds and request it to produce something from a prompt like "a disappointing prequel".

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

#90

Post by jimktrains2 »

carpenecopinum wrote: post #66
uklgrant wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are not neural networks, that's just a thesis. Even novelists do not sit all day long in a closed room reading other people's work and then do a collage of what they've read. Otherwise no books would have been written in the first place. Cut the AI off humans' work, let it interact with the real world and see what it produces. It will be nothing. Once (if ever?) an AI is capable of producing an actual original…

> Cut the AI off humans' work, let it interact with the real world and see what it produces. It will be nothing. That "experiment" could just as well be done on humans, though, cut them off of any work that any human has done before and you may get simple cave paintings, if you're lucky.

Simple cave paintings are much more than nothing.
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