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Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

thehftguy.com

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Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#81

Post by rjmunro »

samwillis wrote: post #4

> Microsoft GitHub is the largest collection of open source code in the world. Microsoft GitHub is in a unique and dominant positions to host and access and distribute most of the open-source code in the world No, it's not in a "unique and dominant position". Open source code is freely available online, it's almost trivial to build a bot to scrape OS code from anywhere on the web (GitHub included). The comparison to…

> Google had a dominant position because it had the resources to scan all books.

I thought Google had a dominant position because they signed an exclusive deal with the authors guild that explicitly gave them a dominant position.

Anyone else could set up a project to go round libraries and scan books. Google has put more money into it than other organisations, but The Internet Archive has about 20 million scans (https://archive.org/details/texts).

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#82

Post by ChatGTP »

scarface74 wrote: post #63
mschild wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There certainly are other spaces where open source code is hosted and available, but the default for most is GitHub. I think it's in a similar position to Google 10 years ago. Sure there are other search engines, but Google is by and large the standard one. That does put Microsoft in the unique position to have direct unfettered access to any and all open source code on GitHub without restrictions. Unless you or I ge…

it’s really not that hard to git clone git set origin… It’s much harder to copy Google’s index.

You think it's practical to do this with almost all the public repos on Github?

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#83

Post by alkonaut »

That someone reads my code I expect. That someone reads my code and uses it to train a machine they money off I didn't expect, but I also can't say I object.

However, that part of the argument feels like the less interesting CoPilot legal argument. The interesting one is: what's the license for use of the code it spits out? Any time CoPilot spits out a nontrivial piece of code that a) exists verbatim on Github and b) is nontrivial enough to be copyrightable, then what happens? Just because it was chewed through the machine doesn't magically wipe the original GPL/MIT/BSD license it had on GitHub. CoPilot doesn't represent a "clean room".

Large companies tend to be extremely skittish about devs using IP they don't have rights to. I lived under a rule of "No open source licensed thing , at all, anywhere" for years in the early 2000. Later, the rules are relaxed and obviously everyone uses MIT/BSD type stuff in commercial products these days, but management is still nervous about things like Stackoverflow answer code being copied verbatim (Still verboten). So how can - if I understand things correctly - CoPilot be allowed or encouraged at such places now? Wouldn't exactly the same worry about nontrivial StackOverflow snippets apply to CoPilot produced code?

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#85

Post by yulaow »

unreal37 wrote: post #57
bilqis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say they don’t

I don't understand why people just automatically doubt things that companies say when they can be sued (or would otherwise destroy their business) if they are lying about it. Seems unnecessarily pessimistic.

I mean, we discovered that the whole car industry was lying flagrantly on their emission tests which had the potential of destroying the whole business and there were A LOT of people who knew about it and could talk anytime

Why wouldn't sw companies do the same?

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#86

Post by kmeisthax »

htpltr wrote: post #48

Antitrust is one thing, but by cleanroom implementation standards (one team reads the source and writes a spec, another team writes the code) CoPilot is illegal to begin with. CoPilot reads and rearranges the IP that was created by millions of people who were working very hard and did not anticipate a code laundering machine when they wrote the code and the licenses.

Clean room is not the actual requirement for avoiding copyright infringement in reverse engineering. There have been several notable cases in which clean room practices were either not followed or outright disregarded, but the resulting product was considered to be non-infringing anyway[0].

Furthermore, while lots of hard work was put into the code that CoPilot used, that hard work was specifically donated with the intent that the code be reused. The only hard requirement being that the code remain free. The thing people are angry about with CoPilot is that it's a hosted OpenAI product with no freely-available model weights, and that generated code might be regurgitated from training data in some cases[1]. If CoPilot was actually open AI, nobody would be suing over it.

[0] In Sony v. Connectix, it was found that Connectix actually tried clean-room, black-box analysis of the PlayStation ROM, but abandoned it in favor of disassembling the whole thing. Connectix was still ruled non-infringing.

[1] Most egregiously, the comment "evil floating point bit level hacking" will make it spit out Quake III source. Microsoft worked around this by explicitly banning that particular phrase, which is just stupid.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#87

Post by EwanToo »

ChatGTP wrote: post #77
scrollaway wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI is not the same company as GitHub, and it has always been pretty clear that chats on ChatGPT are recorded and used for training (unless you now opt out).

Not sure why you're bringing OpenAI into it. My comment and the article is about "Copilot" I'm talking about when using "Github Copilot" and you ask for a code suggestion, it would send the "context" back to GitHub / Microsoft and use that code as training. Your comment is interesting to me though because there does seem to be a surprisingly large amount of defending OpenAI going on. Almost seems automatic now.

Because Github Copilot is an interface into OpenAI Codex:

"GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, a new AI system created by OpenAI."

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilo...

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#88

Post by scarface74 »

h2odragon wrote: post #78
scarface74 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i wanted anyone and everyone to make whatever use of it they could. > didn't foresee this use So you really didn’t want any use. You just wanted the use you found acceptable? So you didn’t really want it to be “open”

I didn't foresee it, i do not object to it, and probably would not have had i known beforehand. Code i dont want others to use I dont publish.

I only work on open source code that I either am getting paid for or that I have gotten paid for in the past, I genericized and gone through my employer’s very straightforward open source process.

By default the license we use is MIT. If I ever did for some reason choose to open source my own work, it would be a similar license.

I don’t like the idea of claiming something is “open” and then placing restrictions on it.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#89

Post by zelphirkalt »

samwillis wrote: post #31
bilqis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github also has access to private repositories.

They don't use privet repositories to train Copilot.

Maybe not yet. All just a change of their terms away. Oh you don't like it? We will give you 2 weeks to migrate. Perhaps you want this other more expensive subscription?

Just like with other code they should not be using as they do, they would probably run another "ask questions later" approach.

Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

#90

Post by jackdaniel »

neximo64 wrote: post #38
jackdaniel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is addressed in the same paragraph - you can't scan/download "whole" github because you'll be throttled.

Are you actually throttled if you try to git clone or is that what the theory is, or is the assumption that it uses API calls to scrape through github? Has anyone actually tried, because i've cloned lots of repos and have never been throttled. I'd go so far as to say the author of that post has never even tried it.

I'm not arguing for or against whether they are in the dominant position; what I'm doing is pointing out that the grandparent quoted part of the text (and argues against it) without quoting the justification the author provided that is directly relevant to what they say.

> There’s an important notion to address here. Open source code on GitHub might be thought of as “open and freely accessible” but it is not. It’s possible for any person to access and download one single repo from GitHub. It’s not possible for a person to download all repos from Github or a percentage of all repos, they will hit limitations and restrictions when trying to download too many repos. (Unless there’s some special archives or mechanisms I am not aware of).

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