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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

#801

Post by still_grokking »

kmeisthax wrote: post #651
njharman wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you read a bunch of code, say over years of developer career. What you write is influenced by all that. Will include similar patterns, similar code and identical snippets, knowingly or not. How large does snippet have to be before it's copyright? "x"? "x==1"? "if x==1\n print('x is one')"? [obviously, replace with actual common code like if not found return 404]. Do you want to be vulnerable to copyright litigati…

Copyright already worries about this sort of thing a great deal, and it's actually a lot more well thought-out than your average hacker is aware of. There are no hard and fast rules; but generally... the thing being sued over has to be creative enough to be copyrightable in the first place. Small snippets do not qualify for copyright protection alone.

I'm not sure this is true. At least for copyright in the common law meaning.

Oracle got copyright on API signatures…

In civil law there is a bar to protection if the work lacks "substantial" creativity. But even this bar is extremely low. More or less everything besides maybe simple math formulas is protected.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#802

Post by still_grokking »

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…

This makes no sense.

If you build a machine and sell it, and this machine kills someone even operated correctly you'll have a problem. A big problem…

AI is a machine.

So the case is actually quite simple.

Regarding the sibling's Uber example: There the argumentation was that the machine was not operated correctly. So this is not a comparable case.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#803

Post by devmor »

AnnasVirtual wrote: post #749
devmor wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is essentially the same as the argument that the pirate bay didn't infringe copyright, it only facilitated infringement. And we all saw how well that went legally.

that is not how similar at all that is not how machine learning works OMG

Machine learning is not important to this line of argument. We are talking about the legal responsibility of a tool.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#804

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #716
anikom15 wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone with more money and more resources than you profiting off your work.

Fair theoretical point. Please do name one industry, niche or platform where copyright does actually prevent this from happening in any meaningful way today.

use of GPL code in a subset (obviously not all) of proprietary software

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#805

Post by robbrown451 »

bombolo wrote: post #695
robbrown451 wrote: post #523

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. If it were true, people would very easily game it, by using algorithms to automate the most trivial parts of copying someone's work. Ultimately the algorithm is automating something a human could do. There is a lot of gray area to copyright law, but you can't get around that simply by offloading to an a…

> 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.

"So if I design a self driving car which kills someone, it's the car that goes to jail?"

No but the manufacturer will typically be held responsible. If the manufacturer intentionally designed it to kill people, someone could certainly be charged with murder. More likely it was a software defect and then it is a matter of financial liability. (in between is a software defect that someone knew about and chose not to fix)

This isn't a new issue. If you design a car and the brakes fail due to a design issue and that issue can be determined to be something that could have been preventable by more competent design.... someone might indeed go to jail but more likely it would be the corporation paying out a large amount of money.

It could even be a mixture of the manufacturer's fault and the driver. Maybe the brakes failed but the driver was speeding and being reckless and slammed on the brakes with no time to spare. Had it not been a faulty design, no one would have gotten hurt, but also if the driver had been competent and responsible, no one would have gotten hurt.

But with self driving cars, when they no longer need a "safety driver", it certainly won't typically be the human occupant of the car's fault to any degree, since they are simply a passenger.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#806

Post by jpollock »

williamcotton wrote: post #524
Cort3z wrote: post #270

I’m not a lawyer, but here is why I believe a class action lawsuit is correct; “AI” is just fancy speak for “complex math program”. If I make a program that’s simply given an arbitrary input then, thought math operations, outputs Microsoft copyright code, am I in the clear just because it’s “AI”? I think they would sue the heck out of me if I did that, and I believe the opposite should be true as well. I’m sure my ow…

I read most of the complaint. The only examples of supposed copyright infringement are isEven and isPrime functions. Here's what Copilot gives me in a Typescript file: function isPrime(n: number): boolean { for (let i = 2; i 1; } function isEven(n: number): boolean { return n % 2 === 0; } These are clearly not covered by copyright in the first place. This case is really quite pathetic.

Those are quite copyrightable, in the same way that rangeCheck() is copyrighted.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#807

Post by kmeisthax »

still_grokking wrote: post #801
kmeisthax wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright already worries about this sort of thing a great deal, and it's actually a lot more well thought-out than your average hacker is aware of. There are no hard and fast rules; but generally... the thing being sued over has to be creative enough to be copyrightable in the first place. Small snippets do not qualify for copyright protection alone.

I'm not sure this is true. At least for copyright in the common law meaning. Oracle got copyright on API signatures… In civil law there is a bar to protection if the work lacks "substantial" creativity. But even this bar is extremely low. More or less everything besides maybe simple math formulas is protected.

Oracle got a very thin copyright on API signatures. The "programmer convenience" ruling in Google v. Oracle basically precludes almost all copyright action on APIs alone.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#808

Post by still_grokking »

kmeisthax wrote: post #807
still_grokking wrote: post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is true. At least for copyright in the common law meaning. Oracle got copyright on API signatures… In civil law there is a bar to protection if the work lacks "substantial" creativity. But even this bar is extremely low. More or less everything besides maybe simple math formulas is protected.

Oracle got a very thin copyright on API signatures. The "programmer convenience" ruling in Google v. Oracle basically precludes almost all copyright action on APIs alone.

No, they got absolute copyright on the API signatures.

The court did not even question any copyright, it just assumed the APIs are copyrighted by Oracle. Than it looked for reasons why copying the APIs could possibly be fair use…

By the skin of their teeth they found some very involved and case specific reasons why Google's use of the copyrighted APIs was, after all, fair use.

https://www.bhfs.com/insights/alerts-articles/2021/supreme-c...

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#809

Post by rat9988 »

rrobukef wrote: post #725
williamcotton wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that anything other than Carmack's comments are covered. See the "Filtration" section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... "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." "Finally, material that exi…

The magic-constant is not optimal there exist better alternatives. It is not necessary to implement this function and should be copyrightable. It is also not a trivial part. On the other hand, Microsoft may only need to show "Hey, we got this code from FooBar under this license and this license and ..."

Why should it be copyrightable. It's just a way to calculte inverse square root. This falls under the public, in my non lawyer opinion. Such small snippets do not qualify, usually, for copyright.

Re: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

#810

Post by robbrown451 »

nchi3 wrote: post #710
robbrown451 wrote: post #523

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. If it were true, people would very easily game it, by using algorithms to automate the most trivial parts of copying someone's work. Ultimately the algorithm is automating something a human could do. There is a lot of gray area to copyright law, but you can't get around that simply by offloading to an a…

>by using algorithms to automate the most trivial parts of copying someone's work That's basically what copilot is...?

Ethical or not, Copilot is sophisticated software, which doesn't qualify as "trivial" by my definition.
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