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Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
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Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#82> The anonymous programmers have repeatedly insisted Copilot could, and would, generate code identical to what they had written themselves, which is a key pillar of their lawsuit since there is an identicality requirement for their DMCA claim. However, Judge Tigar earlier ruled the plaintiffs hadn't actually demonstrated instances of this happening, which prompted a dismissal of the claim with a chance to amend it. I…
Where it gets ethnically dubious is that: 1. The copilot team rushed to slap a copyright filter on top to keep these verbatim examples from showing up, and now claims they never happen. 2. LLMs are prone to paraphrasing. Just because you filter out verbatim copies doesn't mean there isn't still copyright infringement/plagiarism/whatever you want to call it. The copyright filter is only a legal protection, not a pract…
> 1.
Isn't that akin to destruction of evidence?
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#83I thought "the Copilot coding assistant was trained on open source software hosted on GitHub and as such would suggest snippets from those public projects to other programmers without care for licenses" was explicitly allowed by the GitHub Terms of Service: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... "If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a non…
That just means github can display the code, and you can see the code, but that does not mean you can then profit from or redistribute (profit or no) the code without attribution. Amazon has the rights to publish a book, and you have the right to receive a copy of the book, but neither of those gives you the right to re-publish the book under your own name.
"use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service" might allow a wide range of uses on GitHub Pages websites, even if https://example.github.io is monetized (monetization is permitted by https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... in a few cases)
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#84Can you insist or put instructions that AIs do not train on your code? If they train on your code but don't produce the exact same output, is there any protection you can have from that?
When are people going to get that this isn't a right folks have?
If your code is readable, the public can learn from it.
Copyright doesn't extend to function.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#85> Indeed, last year GitHub was said to have tuned its programming assistant to generate slight variations of ingested training code to prevent its output from being accused of being an exact copy of licensed software. If I, a human, were to: 1. Carefully read and memorize some copyrighted code. 2. Produce new code that is textually identical to that. But in the process of typing it up, I randomly mechanically tweak a…
Just to set the stage and not entirely specific to this complaint... It really depends on what is and isn't subject to copyright for software.
Broadly, there is the distinction between expressive and functional code. [1]
And then there are the specific tests that have been developed by the courts to separate the expressive and functional aspects of software. [2] [3]
In practice it is very expensive for a plaintiff to do such analysis. For the most part the damages related to copyright are not worth the time and money. Plaintiffs tend to go for trade secret related damages as they are not restricted by the above tests.
There are also arguments to be made of de minimis infringements that are not worth the time of the court.
Most importantly the plaintiff fundamentally has the burden of proof and cannot just say that copying must have taken place. They need concrete evidence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea–expression_distinction
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari...
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#86> Indeed, last year GitHub was said to have tuned its programming assistant to generate slight variations of ingested training code to prevent its output from being accused of being an exact copy of licensed software. If I, a human, were to: 1. Carefully read and memorize some copyrighted code. 2. Produce new code that is textually identical to that. But in the process of typing it up, I randomly mechanically tweak a…
You probably do this all the time. Forget memorizing but undoubtedly you've read code, learned from it, and then likely reproduced similar code. Probably nothing terribly important, just a function here or there. Maybe even reproduced something you did for a previous employer.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#87This kind of argument makes me feel like it also supports the abolition of patents: eventually multiple other people will come up with the same obvious solution, which becomes obvious once a person spends enough time looking at a problem.
Unfortunately USPTO takes "non-obvious" to mean that it wasn't already suggested by combining patents or other written work, so if you are the first to work a problem you can claim easy solutions that anyone with a clue would have quickly reached. Land rushes to fence off new fields seem inevitable.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#88> Indeed, last year GitHub was said to have tuned its programming assistant to generate slight variations of ingested training code to prevent its output from being accused of being an exact copy of licensed software. If I, a human, were to: 1. Carefully read and memorize some copyrighted code. 2. Produce new code that is textually identical to that. But in the process of typing it up, I randomly mechanically tweak a…
> How is it any different when a machine does the same thing? Because intent matters in the law. If you intended to reproduce copyrighted code verbatim but tried to hide your activity with a few tweaks, that's a very different thing from using a tool which occasionally reproduces copyrighted code by accident but clearly was not designed for that purpose, and much more often than not outputs transformative works.
Um, the entire intent of these "AI" systems is explicitly to reproduce copyrighted work with mechanical changes to make it not appear to be a verbatim copy.
That is the whole purpose and mechanism by which they operate.
Also the intent does not matter under law - not intending to break the law is not a defense if you break the law. Not intending to take someone's property doesn't mean it becomes your property. You might get less penalties and/or charges, due to intent (the obvious examples being murder vs manslaughter, etc).
But here we have an entire ecosystem where the model is "scan copyrighted material" followed by "regurgitate that material with mechanical changes to fit the surrounding context and to appear to be 'new' content".
Moreover given that this 'new' code is just a regurgitation of existing code with mutations to make it appear to fit the context and not directly identical to the existing code, then that 'new' code cannot be subject to copyright (you can't claim copyright to something you did not create, copyright does not protect output of mechanical or automatic transformations of other copyrighted content, and copyright does not protect the result of "natural processes", e.g 'I asked a statistical model to give me a statically plausible sequence of tokens and it did'). So in the best case scenario - the one where the copyright laundering as a service tool is not treated as just that, any code it produces is not protectable by copyright, and anyone can just copy "your work" without the license and (because you've said if you weren't intending to violate copyright it's ok) they can say they could not distinguish the non-copyright-protected work from the protected work and assumed that therefore none of it was subject to copyright. To be super sure though they weren't violating any of your copyrights, they then ran an "AI tool" to make the names better and better suit your style.
I am so sick of these arguments where people spout nonsense about "AI" systems magically "understanding" or "knowing" anything - they are very expensive statistical models, the produce statistically plausible strings of text, by a combination of copying the text of others wholesale, and filling the remaining space with bullshit that for basic tasks is often correct enough, and for anything else is wrong - because again they're just producing plausible sequences of tokens and have no understanding of anything beyond that.
To be very very very clear: if an AI system "understood" anything it was doing, it would not need to ingest essentially all the text that anyone has ever written, just to produce content that is at best only locally coherent, and that is frequently incorrect in more or less every domain to which it is applied. Take code completion (as in this case): Developers can write code without essentially reading all the code that has ever existed just so that they can write basic code, because developers understand code. Developers don't intermingle random unrelated and non-present variables or functions in their code as they write, because they understand what variables are and therefore they can't use non existent ones. "AI" on the other hand required more power than many countries to "learn" by reading as much as possible all code ever written, and then produce nonsense output for anything complex because they're still just generating a string of tokens that is plausible according to their statistical model - the result of these AIs is essentially binary: it has been in effect asked to produce code that does something that was in its training corpus and can be copied essentially verbatim, with a transformation path to make it fit, or it's not in the training corpus and you get random and generally incorrect code - hopefully wrong enough it fails to build, because they're also good at generating code that looks plausible but only fails at runtime because plausible sequence of tokens often overlaps with 'things a compiler will accept'.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where it gets ethnically dubious is that: 1. The copilot team rushed to slap a copyright filter on top to keep these verbatim examples from showing up, and now claims they never happen. 2. LLMs are prone to paraphrasing. Just because you filter out verbatim copies doesn't mean there isn't still copyright infringement/plagiarism/whatever you want to call it. The copyright filter is only a legal protection, not a pract…
> 1. Isn't that akin to destruction of evidence?
Legally? No.
In spirit? ... Probably?
Unlike most LLMs, Github copilot can trivially solve their copyright problem by just using only code they have the right to reproduce.
They have a giant corpus of code tagged with license, SELECT BY license MIT/Equivalent and you're done, problem solved because those licenses explicitly grant permission for this kind of reuse.
(It's still not very cash money to take open source work for commercial gain without paying the original authors, and there's a humorous question if MIT-copilot would need to come with a multi-gigabyte attribution file, but everyone widely agrees it's legal and permitted.)
The only reason you'd hack a filter on top rather than doing the above is if you'd want to hide the copyright problem. It's an objectively worse solution.
Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean you can legally do this by hand right now. That's how they cloned the IBM bios back in the day. IBM sued and lost.
No, that's not. They cloned the bios by observing how it behaved and writing code that behaved the same way. Nobody even looked at the bios code.
That's not how they did it. They had one team read the BIOS source listings in the IBM PC Technical Reference Manual and create a technical specification and a second team take that specification and write a new BIOS [1]. The second team never saw the original code so therefore they could not have copied it.
To do something similar with AI, you really need to train one AI on the source code and then have it explain that code to a second AI that never saw the original code.