GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#91

Post by mzl » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 12:23 PM UTC

bluesign wrote: post #44

bayindirh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the emitted code which is actually derived from GPL code? What about BSL, SSPL, or other source available (for your eyes only) licenses? Copilot harvests all public repos, regardless of its license.

IANAL but searched a lot on this, this is very tricky subject legally. To simplify: - imagine all code Copilot trained on is GPL licensed. - we have a universal function `isInfringing(code)` that has access to all GPL code, and returns `true` if it is infringing some GPL code. for a given prompt; if `isInfringing(copilot(prompt))==false` we cannot claim copilot infringing on GPL code, even it is trained on GPLed code…

If one was sufficiently inspired by code A when writing code B, then it is a derivate work. This is a core tenet of copyright law.

At what measure is one sufficiently inspired for it to be a derivate work? That is up to courts to decide.

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#92

Post by batch12 » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 12:25 PM UTC

carom wrote: post #20

This is missing the largest argument in my opinion. The weights are the derivative work of the GPL licensed code and should therefore be released under the GPL. I would say these companies release their weights or simply not train on copyleft code. It is truly amazing how many people will shill for these massive corporations that claim they love open source or that their AI is open while they profit off of the violat…

I think it's amazing that licenses are ignored to train a model, but companies then try to impose a license on the use of the same model. It would be nice if there there was a training BOM that came with a model. And if not included, all rights to control the use of a model were forfeit.

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#93

Post by Hamuko » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 12:26 PM UTC

skywhopper wrote: post #81

Hamuko wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The core is always the user and what they need. Would reducing copyright duration actually help with that?

Copyright duration is not really a factor in the FSF’s actual goal, which is for software to be distributed with user-modifiable source code. Copyleft licenses are a means of achieving this through the existing copyright system with its ludicrous durations. But making copyright terms much shorter would help, yes, because any released source code or even binary files could be used, reverse-engineered, and modified wit…

Even if you reduce copyright to a year, it still requires waiting through that time before you can actually use the code. And even if you were free to use Windows’ source code a year after release, it still wouldn’t give you access to the source code itself. Meanwhile Microsoft would be free to use any GPL code a year after its release without worrying about any licensing requirements, since they have the source code freely available.

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#94

Post by reginald78 » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 12:28 PM UTC

If it isn't copyright infringement I assume Microsoft has trained it on all of its proprietary source code to make it the best it can be.

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#95

Post by Guvante » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 12:31 PM UTC

If Copilot spits out the entirety of a GPL library and you include that code in your project you are certainly violating the GPL license.

AI is trying to avoid paying for training data since the amount of data required is so vast anything reasonable to content creators as payment would result in billions of expenses.

Additionally there have been copyright exemptions around scrapping and reproducing the scrapped contents but typically those exemptions have been explicitly granted as part of a copyright case and have been narrowly defined.

For instance Google Images only provides thumbnails and your browser gets the full size image from the original source.

The biggest problem for AI is that most previous copyright cases that were similar have all been partially avoided by not being the same thing. Google scrapping isn't trying to do the same thing your content is doing.

However training data output is trying to do the same thing as the original so falls under stricter scrutiny.

Although as this post eludes to the problem is going after the AI is untested territory and going after violators tends to be complex at best. After all in my first hypothetical how would anyone know? I will say that historically the courts haven't been very positive about shell games like this.

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#96

Post by thwarted » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 12:33 PM UTC

lukan wrote: post #80

xigoi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You certainly don’t need to study IT to use Linux.

Well, let's put it like this. I did study IT and even I struggle at times. Or quite often, if I want to do something new. And I absolutey would have no idea, how to do anything serious, without the terminal. But a terminal is programming. So yeah, even a newb can learn to paste some commands quite quickly - but troubleshooting even trivial things, gets you into highly technical stuff very quickly. Do you consider man…

So your issue is that someone who solved their problem didn't solve it in a way that you want or expect? Why does your opinion about their problem matter at all? Why does it matter to the person who makes their solution available that the common people won't?

Using the terminal is not "programming". Non-programmers can use the terminal for many non-programming tasks. Imagemagick and netpbm-progs require no knowledge of programming to use, although it may require knowledge manipulating files and some graphical theory. The only difference from GIMP or Photoshop is that the UI/UX has a different efficiency metric (mainly because interactive image manipulation is more efficient when you are interacting visually). But the operations are just as discoverable: reading and navigating help text/man pages in the former (the man pages for Imagemagick and netpbm-progs are relatively decent), and reading and navigating menus and dialog boxes in the latter.

Re: GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

#97

Post by prosim » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 12:34 PM UTC

bananapub wrote: post #90

https://okfn.de/en/vorstand/ : > Director of Developer Policy at GitHub since March 2024 so this should be understood the same way you understand an editorial in the New York Times entitled Why Babies Can Learn To Like Bombs, by Joe Blow (Raytheon).

Except the article is dated in URL and sidebar to July 5, 2021.

#98

Post by prosim » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 12:36 PM UTC

qjakdx wrote: post #74

carom wrote: post #20

This is missing the largest argument in my opinion. The weights are the derivative work of the GPL licensed code and should therefore be released under the GPL. I would say these companies release their weights or simply not train on copyleft code. It is truly amazing how many people will shill for these massive corporations that claim they love open source or that their AI is open while they profit off of the violat…

He works for GitHub and has probably never written anything in his life: https://okfn.de/en/vorstand/

He started at GitHub 3 years after the article was written. Don't think GitHub's interview process takes that long. ;)

#99

Post by rkangel » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 12:53 PM UTC

lukan wrote: post #43

minot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Free Software community has made it clear from day 1 that the GPL can only achieve its goals through enforcement of copyright We should mention when we say this, although I think it is self-evident, that the preferable alternative is reducing the scope of copyright across the board -- be it with shorter time frames (I'd argue even twenty years total is too long!) or some other means. To programmers and develope…

"The core is always the user and what they need." Which is why gnu/linux without a terminal is totally usable and therefore accesible to the non programmer. /s I agree that user centric developement should be the goal, but I hardly see it implemented. Free software programmers almost allways solved their own needs first, which is alright, because usually no one paid them to serve other peoples needs, but I seldom see…

> Which is why gnu/linux without a terminal is totally usable and therefore accesible to the non programmer. /s

Have you used modern Fedora? I have an old Thinkpad at home that I put Fedora on last year as our "sofa" laptop for web shopping etc. I took careful note of what I needed to do to set it up and that involved nothing on the command line to get to something good that my wife could happily use (not a techie, never used Linux).

#100

Post by koolala » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 12:54 PM UTC

haksz wrote: post #68

pornel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL doesn't apply/doesn't have to be agreed to when the usage is allowed by the copyright law in another way. GPL can't override copyright exceptions like fair use (details vary by jurisdiction, but the principle is the same everywhere). Even the license itself states it's optional, and you don't have to agree it (if you don't, you get the copyright law's default). Author of the article is a former member of the Pira…

I would say that the Pirate Party has expertise in nothing apart from perhaps protecting Internet freedoms. So the same persons that supported Napster and the Pirate Bay now want to circumvent copyright for open source software. An unholy alliance, but the recent comments from some Microsoft brass about everything on the Web being freeware seems to indicate that these are the talking points that Microsoft and its new…

If the Web is freeware... I wonder what options remain for licenced online information.