Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
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Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#2When I published stuff to GitHub, it had open licenses: i wanted anyone and everyone to make whatever use of it they could. I didn't foresee this use, and I'm not fond of Microsoft (to say the least); but it certainly falls into the area of things I explicitly allowed when publishing.
I suspect many others who publish there feel the same way.
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#3I believe the closest precedent is:
Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records, Inc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Upright_Music,_Ltd._v._W....
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#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 the Google Books antitrust falls down completely, Google had a dominant position because it had the resources to scan all books. Anyone can build a collection of almost all open source code.
Further to that, all these models (GPT and Image generation) are trained on scraped data, trying to suggest that only GitHub/Microsoft could do it defeats the purpose of trying to establish what the legal rights are over training models with scraped data.
We need test cases and precedent, but trying to use this as one is not going to work.
Edit:
It took me 15 seconds to find that there is a Google Big Query dataset of open source code for GitHub: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-datasets/github-...
and thats been further curated on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/datasets/codeparrot/github-code
GitHub / Microsoft do not have a monopoly on this data.
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#5> 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…
> It's almost trivial to built a bot to scrape OS code from anywhere on the web.
Seems like a logistical nightmare to me. Git repos interact spectacularly poorly with web scraping in general.
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#6> 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…
> We need test cases and president
I imagine you meant "precedent".
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#7I believe the closest precedent is: Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records, Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Upright_Music,_Ltd._v._W... .
Wow, that's horrible. I didn't know that sampling and mashups required an explicit license.
Looks like it's in the EU as well.
edit: Hm, Pelham v Hütter C-476/17 might offer some grace for mashups under the quotation exemption at least. Though I wouldn't rely on that.
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#8> 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…
This is addressed in the same paragraph - you can't scan/download "whole" github because you'll be throttled.
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#9When I published stuff to GitHub, it had open licenses: i wanted anyone and everyone to make whatever use of it they could. I didn't foresee this use, and I'm not fond of Microsoft (to say the least); but it certainly falls into the area of things I explicitly allowed when publishing. I suspect many others who publish there feel the same way.
Perhaps your license permits CoPilot reuse, but that is not every F/OSS license. There are some which require attribution of the original authors. There are some which require the distributor to make available any source code, and any modifications made to the software.
Software authors are not upset about the mere reuse of their code, it's the violations of such license terms that are problematic. If attribution is required, but neglected or impossible, that's typically known as "plagiarism", you know.
Re: Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?
#10When I published stuff to GitHub, it had open licenses: i wanted anyone and everyone to make whatever use of it they could. I didn't foresee this use, and I'm not fond of Microsoft (to say the least); but it certainly falls into the area of things I explicitly allowed when publishing. I suspect many others who publish there feel the same way.
Problem is when someone uploads something to github they have a license to share (eg via GPL), but are not the copyright owner of.