Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/github_copilot_dmca/

by samspenc • 2 years ago

381 421 2 years ago

rolph2• 2 years ago

copilot was apparently snipping license bearing comments, and applying "semantic" variations of the remaining code.

i would package the entire code as a series of comments, [ideally this would be snipped by the pliagarists] leaving a snippet of example code that no one of sound mind would allow to execute, being proffered by copilot.

ChrisMarshallNY4• 2 years ago

of sound mind

That's a reach, these days...

I'm seeing some really ... interesting ... behavior, being exhibited by folks that, at first blush, I think are kids, just out of bootcamp, but, on further inspection, turn out to be middle-aged professionals.

I really think Teh Internets Tubes have been rather corrosive to collective mental health.

klyrs4• 2 years ago

The ability to think for oneself will diminish rapidly in an environment that rewards one for not doing so.

Smart people still exist. They just aren't online.

rolph2• 2 years ago

..that suggests there is actually a chance that someone would go for such a boobytrap.

bityard• 2 years ago

This is pretty interesting, and I have conflicted feelings about the (seemingly obvious) outcome of this trial.

I wonder, if MS and OpenAI win, does that mean it will be legal for anyone to take the leaked source code for a proprietary product, train an LLM on it, and then ask the LLM to emit a version of it that is different enough to avoid copyright infringement?

That would be quite the double-edged sword for proprietary software companies.

ChrisMarshallNY4• 2 years ago

I suspect that this is exactly what will happen; not just with code, but also prose and artwork.

Someone is likely to design an LLM that is specifically trained to do exactly that.

Lots of money to be made...

devmor10• 2 years ago

On the matter of artwork there's no need for suspicion - it is and has been happening for a while now. There are entire online databases dedicated to providing non-consenting artist's "styles" as downloadable model parameters by name.

ADeerAppeared7• 2 years ago

Someone is likely to design an LLM that is specifically trained to do exactly that.

Perplexity AI.

epolanski3• 2 years ago

I feel like what really matters is who has more money to throw in tribunals.

Somehow I feel if it was "Adobe vs dev that claims his code was spit by copilot" it would not end the same.

crote• 2 years ago

I was mainly inspired by this section:

Specifically, the judge cited the study's observation that Copilot reportedly "rarely emits memorized code in benign situations, and most memorization occurs only when the model has been prompted with long code excerpts that are very similar to the training data."

That almost sounds like it'd be fine to train an "art transformation model" which takes an image and transforms it, which for all the frames of a specific Disney movie just so happen to output the very next frame...

devmor10• 2 years ago

Following existing law and applying reasonable expectations, I would point to the old adage "intent is 9/10ths of the law".

It would probably be legal to do this, as long as no one could reasonably show that you intentionally trained the LLM on said leaked source code with the intent to reproduce the product.

Of course, civil suits could be another matter entirely. If you pick a product to rip off that's owned by a multi-billion dollar company, all that can save you is the ethical limits of their legal team's consciences.

spencerflem• 2 years ago

Not unless a big company is the one doing it lol

pennomi• 2 years ago

Or even those AI-powered decompilers people are working on… you could clone virtually any software with that. Surely there will be limitations.

beeboobaa34• 2 years ago

The limitation is the amount of money & political power the owner of the software you're cloning has.

wongarsu2• 2 years ago

The source code of Windows XP is widely available. Same with a ~2 year old version of Bing, Bing Maps, Cortana etc. Yet that doesn't seem to have had major negative effects on those products. If anything having the Windows source code available seems to be a net boon for Windows development. Sometimes looking at the source is just better if the documentation is unclear.

mr_toad2• 2 years ago

If you compiled it and the resulting binary was substantially similar to the original you’d likely get sued.

Legend2440• 2 years ago

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.

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

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.

axus• 2 years ago

I thought there was a "clean room", where the people reading it and the people writing it were different; and they made a written specification instead of a Vulcan mind meld.

jeroenhd• 2 years ago

A Wine fork built using an LLM trained on leaked Windows code might be pretty useful.

witx• 2 years ago

You'd get a Wine full of ads, the need for an account to use and the not so occasional BSoD /s

Spivak4• 2 years ago

No, because judges aren't robots applying the law like code. Intent matters. If you do this it will be painfully obvious that your intent is to duplicate a large body copywritten code.

yellowapple2• 2 years ago

It's painfully obvious that the intent of GitHub Copilot is to duplicate a large body of copyrighted code.

yellowapple2• 2 years ago

That's exactly what I expect to happen with the source code to Microsoft's own software products, namely Windows.

Hilarity will ensue :)

mr_toad2• 2 years ago

The misappropriation of the code (a trade secret) would likely be grounds for legal action against the people who stole it and the people who received it. A lot depends on jurisdiction.

But if it was made public and then if an unrelated third party were to re-write the code in such a way that it was non-infringing, then it would be non-infringing. That’s just a tautology.

throwaway562if1• 2 years ago

Let's be honest: It will be legal if you're a $3 trillion company, and not if you're not.

stale20025• 2 years ago

By definition you are allowed to take leaked source coded and change it enough such that it avoids infringement, and this will avoid infringement.

The LLM has nothing to do with it, and isn't required here.

elzbardico2• 2 years ago

Yeah. In a ideal world where an open source developer gets equal treatment from the law facing a giant corporation with hordes of very expensive lawyers and "technical experts".

daedrdev2• 2 years ago

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.

It sounds fair from how the article describes it

whimsicalism4• 2 years ago

Huh. There have definitely been well publicized examples of this happening, like the quake inverse square root

polishTar2• 2 years ago

Fast inverse square root is now part of the public domain.

Also, even if this weren’t the case you can’t sue for damages to other people (they’d need to bring their own suit)

voxic11• 2 years ago

You can't copyright a mathematical operation. Only a particular implementation of it, and even then it may not be copyrightable if its a straightforward and obvious implementation.

That said the implementation doesn't appear to be totally trivial and copilot apparently even copies the comments which are almost certainly copyrightable in themselves.

https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/dbe4ddb1...

However a twitter post on its own isn't evidence a court will accept. You would need the original poster to testify that what is seen in the post is actually what he got from copilot and not just a meme or joke that he made.

Also the plaintiffs in this case don't include id-Software and there is some evidence that id-Software actually stole the fast inverse sqrt code from 3dfx so they might not want to bring a claim here anyways.

wongarsu2• 2 years ago

It reads like the judge required them to show it happened to their code, not to any code in general. That's a much higher bar. There are thousands of instances of fast inverse square root in the training data but only one copy of your random github repositories. Getting to model to reproduce your code verbatim might be possible for all we know, but it isn't trivial.

daedrdev2• 2 years ago

The article mentions that GitHub copilot has been trained to avoid directly copying specific cases it knows, and that although you can get it to spit out copyright code by prefixing the copyrighted code as a starting point, in normal us cases its quite rare.

dathinab• 2 years ago

yes, but you need to show that it happened _in your case_, not that it can happen in general.

ADeerAppeared7• 2 years ago

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 practical protection against the issue of copyright infringement.

Everyone who knows how these systems work understand this. The copilot FAQ to this day claims that you should run copyright scanning tools on your codebase because your developers might "copy code from an online source or library".

Github has it's own research from 2021 showing that these tools do indeed copy their training data occasionally: https://github.blog/2021-06-30-github-copilot-research-recit...

They clearly know the problem is real. Their own research agreed, their FAQs and legal documents are carefully phrased to avoid admitting it. But rather than owning up to the problem, it's "Ner ner ner ner ner, you can't prove it to a boomer judge".

squarefoot3• 2 years ago

1.

Isn't that akin to destruction of evidence?

bawolff7• 2 years ago

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.

Well if the copyright filter is working they indeed aren't happening. Putting in safe gaurds to prevent something from happening doesn't mean you're guilty of it. Putting a railing on a balcony doesn't imply the balcony with railing is unsafe.

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

Copyright infringement and plagerism are different things. Stuff can be copyright infringement without being plagerized, and can be plagerized without being copyright infringement. The two concepts are similar but should not be conflated, especially in a legal context.

Courts decide based on laws, not on gut feeling about what is "fair".

They clearly know the problem is real

They know the risk is real. That is not the same thing as saying that they actually comitted copyright infringement.

A risk of something happening is not the same as actually doing the thing.

"Ner ner ner ner ner, you can't prove it to a boomer judge".

Its always a cop-out to assume that they lost the argument because the judge didn't understand. I suspect the judge understood just fine but the law and the evidence simply wasn't on their side.

nl• 2 years ago

Just because you filter out verbatim copies doesn't mean there isn't still copyright infringement/plagiarism/whatever you want to call it.

Actually, it does. The production of the output is what matters here.

dspillett2• 2 years ago

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.

More than that: the fact that they claimed it wasn't possible before adding the filter, to filter out the thing that said wasn't possible. This doesn't help me trust anything else they might say or have already said.

My take on that was always: if it isn't possible, then why are MS not training the AIs on their internal code (like that for Office, in the case of MS with their copilot product) as well as public code? There must be good examples for it to learn from in there, unless of course they thing public code is massively better than their internal works.

klabb3• 2 years ago

This is so stupid. Going after likeness is doomed to fail against constantly mutating enemies like booming tech companies with infinite resources. And likeness itself isn’t even that big of a deal, and even if you win it’s such a minor case-by-case event that puts an enormous burden of proof on the victims to even get started. If the narrative centers around likeness, they’ve already won.

The main issue, as I see it, is that they took copyrighted material and made new commercial products without compensating (let alone acquiring permission from) the rights holders, ie their suppliers. Specifically, they sneaked a fair use sticker on mass AI training, with neither precedent nor a ruling anywhere. Fair use originates in times before there were even computers. (Imo it’s as outrageous as applying a free-mushroom-picking-on-non-cultivated-land law to justify industrial scale farming on private land.) That’s what should be challenged.

mvdtnz• 2 years ago

What were the plaintiffs even thinking when they submitted a claim based on identicality without being able to produce a single instance of copilot generating a verbatim copy. Even the research they submitted was unable to make a claim any stronger than "it's possibly in theory but we've never seen it".

AmericanChopper• 2 years ago

A lot of people post AI outrage comments on HN that are clearly based on a rather poor understanding of the law and legal processes. This entire case and all of the plaintiffs statements about it reads like one of those comments.

loceng5• 2 years ago

This 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.

CodeWriter234• 2 years ago

The Patent System is not intended to be a test of exclusive original thought.

The function of the Patent System is to incentivize search for solutions by temporarily securing exclusive right to market novel devices and processes for the discoverer.

loceng5• 2 years ago

Of non-obvious inventions. My argument being all inventions are obvious once attention is applied to that area and scope.

erik_seaberg• 2 years ago

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.

pledess• 2 years ago

I 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 nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service." In other words, in addition to what's allowed by the LICENSE file in your repo, you are also separately licensing your code "to use ... through the GitHub Service" and this would (in my interpretation) include use by Copilot for training, and use by Copilot to deliver snippets to any other GitHub user.

dmitrygr• 2 years ago

Lots of my code is on github (eg https://github.com/syuu1228/uARM), uploaded by others. I gave no license for its use in training. What now?

zdragnar• 2 years ago

If the person didn't have your permission or permission from the license to agree to github's terms, then you sue the person who uploaded it to GitHub.

You don't get to go after GitHub because you have no contractual relationship with them. At best, you can get an injunction forcing them to take it down, though getting them to un-train copilot may not be feasible. At best you'd get a small cash offer, since you're unlikely to be able to justify any damages in a suit.

simion314• 2 years ago

That will work if I upload only my code, but there are many open source projects where there are more then one author and GithHub did not acquired the rights from all the authors, the uploader to GitHub might not even be the author too.

Brian_K_White• 2 years ago

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.

rurcliped• 2 years ago

"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)

purpleblue• 2 years ago

Can 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?

archontes9• 2 years ago

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.

ADeerAppeared7• 2 years ago

People aren't going to get it, because you don't get them.

People have the right to learn non-copyrightable elements from your code.

The claim is that AI learns copyrightable elements.

carom• 2 years ago

The public is not learning from it. A person or corporation is creating a derivative work of it. Training a model is deriving a function from the training data. It is not "a human learning something by reading it".

verandaguy• 2 years ago

More thinking out loud than answering your question, but nightshade for code and other plain text formats would be cool.

munificent3• 2 years ago

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 few identifiers or something to produce code that has the exact same semantics but isn't character-wise identical.

3. Claim that as new original code without the original copyright.

I assume that I would get my ass kicked legally speaking. That reads to me exactly like deliberate copyright infringement with willful obfuscation of my infringement.

How is it any different when a machine does the same thing?

singleshot_5• 2 years ago

The guy who owns the machine is really rich, while you are more or less (all due respect of course) not worth suing.

That’s why I think the opposite of what you claim is true: if you were to do this, absolutely nothing would happen. When they do it, they will get sued over and over until the law changes and they can’t be sued, or they enter some mutually-beneficial relationship with the parties who keep suing.

beeboobaa34• 2 years ago

if you were to do this, absolutely nothing would happen

Read up on the DMCA and the impact it has on e.g. nintendo emulators and the developers thereof

beeboobaa34• 2 years ago

Rules for thee but not for me (rich companies). Think of the shareholders!

Analemma_• 2 years ago

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.

archontes9• 2 years ago

Not in copyright. The work speaks for itself, and the function of code is not a copyrightable aspect.

olliej• 2 years ago

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'.

anigbrowl• 2 years ago

It's equally plausible to say you don't intend to reproduce copyrighted code verbatim but occasionally do so given either a sufficiently specific prompt or because the reproduced code is so generic that it probably gets rewritten a hundred times a day because that's how people learned to do basic things from books or documentation or their education.

munificent3• 2 years ago

clearly was not designed for that purpose,

I'm not aware of evidence that support that claim. If I ask ChatGPT "Give me a recipe for squirrel lemon stew" and it so happens that one person did write a recipe for that exact thing on the Internet, then I would expect that the most accurate, truthful response would be that exact recipe. Anything else would essentially be hallucination.

dmix3• 2 years ago

That's a significant over simplification of how it works though to the point of almost not being a useful analogy.

If your analogy was you were a human who memorized every variation of a problem (and every other known problem) and there was a tiny perctange of a chance where you reproduced that exact varation of one you memorized, but then added an after the fact filter so you don't directly reproduce it...

It's more like musicians who basically copy a bunch of music patterns or chord progressions before then notice their final output sounds too similar to another song (which happens often IRL) then changes it to be more original before releasing it to the public.

ADeerAppeared7• 2 years ago

If you analogy was you were a human who memorized every variation of a problem (and every other known problem)

This is mere assumption. AI is supposed to work like that, but that's a goal, and not the result of current implementations. Research shows that they do memorize solutions as well, and quite regularly so. (This is an unavoidable flaw in current LLMs; They must be capable of memorizing input verbatim in order to learn specific facts.)

and there was a tiny perctange of a chance where you reproduced that exact varation of one you memorized

This is copyright infringement. Actionable copyright infringement. The big music publishers go after this kind of accidental partial reproduction.

but then added an after the fact filter so you don't directly reproduce it...

"Legally distinct" is a gimmick that only works where the copyright is on specific identifiable parts of a work.

Changing a variable name does not make a code snippet "legally distinct", it's still copyright infringement.

belorn2• 2 years ago

We are currently seeing the music industry reacting to AI learning a bunch of music patterns and chord progressions and outputting works that sounds very similar to existing music and artists. They are not liking it.

To just see how much they disliked it, youtube copyright strikes is basically a trained AI to detect music patterns to identify sound with slight variations or copyrighted songs and take videos down. Generating slight variations was one of the early method that videos used to bypass the take down system.

archontes9• 2 years ago

You might not get your ass kicked. Copyright doesn't protect function, to the point where the court will assess the degree to which the style of the code can be separated from the function. In the even that they aren't separable, the code is not copyrightable.

https://www.wardandsmith.com/articles/supreme-court-announce...

https://easlerlaw.com/software-computer-code-copyrighted#:~:...

ADeerAppeared7• 2 years ago

The simple version is that code is copyrightable as an expression. And the underlaying algorithm is patentable.

The legal term you're looking for here is the "Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison" test; What remains if you subtract all the non-copyrightable elements from a given piece of code.

tomxor• 2 years ago

US copyright does protect for "substantial similarity" [0]. And at the other end of the spectrum, this has been abused in absurd ways to argue that substantially different code has infringed.

In Zenimax vs Oculus they basically argued that a bunch of really abstract yet entirely generic parts of the code were shared, we are talking some nested for loops, certain combinations of if statements, and due to a lack of a qualitative understanding of code, syntax, common patterns, and what might actually qualify for substantively novel code in the courtroom, this was accepted as infringing. [1]

Point is, the legal system is highly selective when it comes to corporate interests.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/02/doom-co-creator-defen...

torginus• 2 years ago

If I were to license a cover of a song for a music video, I'd have to license both the original song and the cover itself.

I'd say this is extremely relevant in this case.

giamma2• 2 years ago

Software like Blackduck or Scanoss is designed to identify exactly that type of behaviour. It is used very often to scan closed source software and to check whether it contains snippets that are copied from open source with incompatible licenses (e.g. GPL).

To be able to do so, these softwares build a syntax tree of what your code snippet is, and compare the tree structure with similar trees in open source software without being fooled by variable names. To speed up the search, they also compute a signature for these trees so that the signature can be more easily searched in their database of open source code.

scott_w4• 2 years ago

While correct, the example given is that they COPY the code, then make adjustments to hide the fact. I suspect this is still a copyright violation. It’s interesting that a judge sees it differently when it’s just run through a programme. I’m not a legal expert so I’m guessing it’s a bit more complex than the headline?

ars• 2 years ago

I assume that I would get my ass kicked legally speaking.

Maybe, maybe not. It's not as simple as you made it out to be. If you write a book with lots of stuff and you got inspiration from other books, and even put in phrases wholesale, but modified to use your own character names instead, I'm not convinced you would lose.

The court would look at the work as a whole, not single pieces of it.

They would also check if you are just copying things verbatim, or if you memorize a pattern and emit the same pattern - for example look at lawsuits about copying music, where they'll claim this part of the music is the same as that part.

It's really not as cut and dry as you make it out to be.

williamcotton2• 2 years ago

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...

wvenable2• 2 years ago

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.

Aerroon• 2 years ago

arr.sort((a, b) => a - b);

comes to mind. I bet most js devs have written this verbatim.

JoshTriplett2• 2 years ago

You have a much smaller lobbying budget than the AI industry, and you didn't flagrantly rush to copy billions of copyrighted works as quickly as possible and then push a narrative acting like that's the immutable status quo that must continue to be permitted lest the now-massive industry built atop copyright violation be destroyed.

Violate one or two copyrights, get sued or DMCAed out of existence. Violate billions, on the other hand, and you magically become immune to the rules everyone else has to follow.

nadermx• 2 years ago

What about the copyrights purpose of furthering the arts and sciences?

fragmede4• 2 years ago

works the same for banks and owing them money

justinclift2• 2 years ago

Violate one or two copyrights, get sued or DMCAed out of existence. Violate billions, on the other hand, and you magically become immune to the rules everyone else has to follow.

Sounds like the same concept as commonly said of "murderer vs conqueror".

Could probably be applied to many other fields for disruption too. Not the murderer bit (!), more the "break one or two laws -> scaled up massively to a potential new paradigm".

RF_Savage• 2 years ago

Violate billions or millions is what they used to nail warez folks with. So there is that.

marsten• 2 years ago

There's a strong geopolitical angle as well. If you force American companies to license all training data for LLMs, that is such a gargantuan undertaking it would effectively set US companies back by years relative to Chinese competitors, who are under no such restrictions.

Bottom line, if you're doing something considered relevant to the national interest then that buys you a lot of leeway.

Kim_Bruning6• 2 years ago

You will need to first demonstrate that actual copying took place. And that what copying that did take place was actually illegal or infringing.

As we're seeing in court, that's a very interesting question. It turns out that the answers are very counter-intuitive to many.

stale20025• 2 years ago

acting like that's the immutable status quo

It is immutable.

What are you going to do about it? Confiscate everyone's home gamer PCs?

Even in the most extreme hypothetical where lawsuits shutdown OpenAI, that doesn't delete the stable diffusion models that I have on my external hard drives.

The tech is out there. It's too late.

hyperpape• 2 years ago

From the article:

The most recently dismissed claims were fairly important, with one pertaining to infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), section 1202(b), which basically says you shouldn't remove without permission crucial "copyright management" information, such as in this context who wrote the code and the terms of use, as licenses tend to dictate.
It was argued in the class-action suit that Copilot was stripping that info out when offering code snippets from people's projects, which in their view would break 1202(b).
The judge disagreed, however, on the grounds that the code suggested by Copilot was not identical enough to the developers' own copyright-protected work, and thus section 1202(b) did not apply. 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.

So (not a lawyer!) this reads like the point about GitHub tuning their model is not a generic defense against any and all claims of copyright infringement, but a response to a specific claim that this violates a provision of the DMCA.

I don't know whether this is a reasonable defense or not, but your intuitions or mine about whether there is a general copyright violation or what's fair are not necessarily relevant to how the judge construes that very specific bit of legal code.

xinayder2• 2 years ago

What I got from this is, you can copy someone's copyrighted work provided you tweak a few things here and there. I wonder how this holds up in court if you don't have billions at your disposal.

skybrian2• 2 years ago

The machine alone doesn't do anything. The user and machine together constitute a larger system, and with autocomplete, the user is charge. What's the user's intent?

I suspect that a lot of copyright violations are enabled by cut-and-paste and screenshot-taking functionality, and maybe we need to be careful with autocomplete, too? It's the user's responsibility to avoid this. We should be careful using our tools. Do users take enough care in this case? Is it possible to take enough care while still using CoPilot?

I've switched from CoPilot to Cody, but I use them the same way, to write my code. There's no particular reason to use CoPilot's output verbatim and lots of good reasons not to. By the time I've adapted it to my code base and code style and refactored it to hell and back, it's an expression of how I want to solve a problem, and I'm pretty confident claiming ownership.

Is that confidence misplaced? Are other people more careless?

BeefWellington2• 2 years ago

The machine alone doesn't do anything.

By the same token, the machine alone can't download pirated movies. Yet the sites hosting those movies are targeted as the infringers.

There's a point at which foisting this responsibility on the users is simply socializing losses. Ultimately Copilot is the one serving the code up - regardless of the user's request. If the user then goes on to republish that work as their own it becomes two mistakes. It'll be interesting to see if any lawyers are capable of articulating that well enough in any of these lawsuits.

Is that confidence misplaced? Are other people more careless?

I would say yes, for two reasons. One is that using code of unknown provenance means you're opening yourself to unknown legal risks. The second is if you're rewriting it fully (so as not to run afoul of easily spotted copyright) that's not actually "clean room" and you're still open to problems. I'd also wonder what the point of using a code writing LLM is anyways if you're doing all the authorship yourself. It seems like doing double the work.

xorcist• 2 years ago

Why stop there? Extrapolate that thought, keep generating more variants of the code, claim copyright, and seek rent from other people doing the same thing. To extrapolate full circle, there would be a business opportunity to generate as many variants as possible for the original author, to prevent all this from happening.

As long as we're not required to register copyright there's no reason to think the above will play out. International copyright agreements are not limited to verbatim copies only.

BeefWellington2• 2 years ago

Why stop there? Extrapolate that thought, keep generating more variants of the code, claim copyright, and seek rent from other people doing the same thing. To extrapolate full circle, there would be a business opportunity to generate as many variants as possible for the original author, to prevent all this from happening.

This has already been done[1] in music, though in their case they released them to the public domain. Admittedly I think that was more of a protest than anything.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic...

eftychis• 2 years ago

Adding to the sibling comments:

First: every human is per se doing that already. We have – to handwave – a "reasonable person" bar to separate violations versus results of learning and new innovation.

Second: You can be a holder of copyright and your creations result in copyrightable artifacts. Anything generated by the program has been held as uncopyrightable.

_heimdall• 2 years ago

The actual answer here, regardless of a court ruling, is that you'd go broke if anyone big enough tried to go after you for it.

Legal protections for source code are still pretty fuzzy, understandably so given how comparatively new the industry is. That doesn't stop lawyers from racking up huge fees though, it actually helps because they need so much more prep time to debate a case that is so unclear and/or lacking precedent.

ProAm• 2 years ago

How is it any different when a machine does the same thing?

Literally the bank account behind the action...

jollofricepeas• 2 years ago

No clue.

But what if the generative AI were used to create music instead of code would the court have ruled differently?

CONSIDER:

In 2015, a federal judge order Thicke & Pharrell to pay 50% of proceeds to the Marvin Gaye estate for being “too similar” to the song, “Gots to Give It Up”.

Comparison and commentary: https://youtu.be/7_UiQueteN4?si=SkClbyBMOcucigRm

Comparison of both songs: https://youtu.be/ziz9HW2ZmmY?si=3_VZzfoLT-NrozoK

roenxi• 2 years ago

If you tell a programmer to implement a function foo(a, b) then there are actually only a tiny number of ways to do that, semantically speaking, for any given foo. The number of options narrows quickly as the programmer implementing it gets more competent.

Choosing function signatures is an art form but after that "copying" is hard to judge.

sva_• 2 years ago

a function foo(a, b) then there are actually only a tiny number of ways to do that

I'd argue there are infinite ways to implement any function, just almost all of them are extremely bad.

woah• 2 years ago

You would not get your ass kicked legally speaking. Copyright is not that broad. It's not a patent.

skissane3• 2 years ago

I assume that I would get my ass kicked legally speaking. That reads to me exactly like deliberate copyright infringement with willful obfuscation of my infringement.

It looks like wilful obfuscation because the obfuscation is so simplistic. But as the obfuscation gets increasingly sophisticated, it becomes ever harder to distinguish wilful obfuscation from genuine originality.

chii2• 2 years ago

But sufficiently complex obfuscation of infringement is very hard to distinguish from genuine originality.

for the purposes of copyright, originality is not required, just different expressions. It's ideas (aka, patent) that require originality.

The 'sufficiently complex obfuscation' is exactly what people's brains go through when they learn, and re-produced what they learnt in a different context.

I argue that AI-training can be considered to be doing the same.

bawolff7• 2 years ago

How is it any different when a machine does the same thing?

I think the argument is that the machine is not doing that, or at least there isn't evidence that it is doing that.

Specificly no evidence that github is doing both 1 and 2 at the same time. There might be cases where it makes trivial changes to code (point 2) but for code that does not meet the threshold of originality. Similarly there might be cases with copyrighted code where the idea of it is taken, but it is expressed in such a different way that it is not a straightforward derrivitave of the expression (keeping in mind you cannot copyright an idea, only its expression. Using a similar approach or algorithm is not copyright infringement)

And finally, someone has to demonstrate it is actually happening and not just in theory could happen. Generally courts dont punish people for future crimes they haven't comitted yet (sometimes you can get in trouble for being reckless even if nothing bad happens, but i dont think that applies to copyrighg infringement)

constantcrying• 2 years ago

I assume that I would get my ass kicked legally speaking.

Why? This is no different than copy pasting and modifying a bit of code from some documentation/other project/tutorial/SO. Surely if that were a basis for copyright infringement most semi-large software projects would be infringing on copyright.

I don't think anyone here should be willing to open the can if worms that is copy pasting small snippets of code and modifying them.

The judge seems to argue that the non-identical copies are at issue here and that they only happen under contrived circumstances. My moral opinion is that this is irrelevant and that even the defendant is the wrong person. Even verbatim copies of code snippets shouldn't be copyright infringement and suing the company providing the AI is wrong to begin with, as the AI or its providercan not possibly be the one to infringe.

ExoticPearTree2• 2 years ago

I don't think it works that way. During the course of your professional career as a developer you change jobs. And let's say that at every job you create APIs. Besides the particular functions those API provide, the API code itself (how you interact with clients, databases etc.) will be pretty much the same as whatever you did at previous jobs. Does this constitute copyright experience or is just experience?

My analogy is that if Copilot doesn't provide 100% code from another repository it is OK to be used by other people trained with code available on GitHub.

sim7c00• 2 years ago

it depends on how much tax you are paying really. if you pay billions in taxes annually, they might see past it. if the company you copied from pays billions in taxes anually. you will go to jail. if this isn't painfuly obvious by now...

account4211• 2 years ago

Doesn't seem that taxes are the deciding factor seing as how little the government cares about tax dodging done by corporations and the rich.

Kuinox• 2 years ago

You are taking the plaintiff statement as is, which is wrong. You can blame the media that didn't made it clear that it was a statement from the plaintiff.

isodev• 2 years ago

It would. And this is where some legislation "in the spirit of" would have helped. So Microsoft's huge legal arm can't just wiggle their way out on technicalities. Clearly, the law is not prepared to face the challenge of copyright violations on the scale created by the LLMs.

I also think it's not just copyright. It's simply not right to create a product on top of the collective work of all open source developers monetize them on the absurt scale Microsoft operates and never ever credit the original creators.

bmitc• 2 years ago

Regardless of the details here, it's become quite clear that the judicial system is for corporations. It doesn't matter whether they win, lose, or settle, as they win regardless, since the monetary benefits of what got them in court in the first place far outweigh any punishment or settlement cost.

zephyr9• 2 years ago

It seems the total disregard that the tech community showed toward copyright when it was artists losing out has come back to bite. Face-eating leopards, etc.

bena• 2 years ago

I agree. I don’t see the difference.

That’s the entire reason “clean room reverse engineering” is done.

Using nothing but the binary itself, work out how things are done. Making sure that the reverse engineers don’t even have access to any material that could look like it came from the other organization in question. And that it is provable.

alickz• 2 years ago

who gets to copyright claim the various array sorting algorithms then?

kjellsbells• 2 years ago

Days like this, I wonder what Borges would have made of such questions.

"Pierre Menard, author of redis"

I know from experience that parents are aggressively pushing their children into STEM to maximize their chances of being economically secure, but, I really feel that we need a generation of philosophers and humanists to sift through the issues that our technology is raising. What does it mean to know something? What does authorship mean? Is a translated work the same as the original? Borges, Steiner, and the rest have as much to contribute as Ellison, Zuckerberg, and Altman.

p0w3n3d• 2 years ago

How is it anything different? You have no money. And Microsoft has. The problem on this is that it will give a huge leverage to rich companies over poor, because those rich can steal (memorize with AI) anything including music

hn_throwaway_993• 2 years ago

A slight aside, but this is the subtitle:

A few devs versus the powerful forces of Redmond – who did you think was going to win?

I hate that kind of obnoxious "journalism". Sometimes the little guy is actually wrong. To clarify, I'm not commenting on the specifics of this case, I just hate how fake our online discourse has been by appealing to "big guy evil" before even bringing up the specifics of the case.

epolanski3• 2 years ago

I think you're misinterpreting the sentence.

I think it merely implies MS has more resources to throw at the legal case.

gpm3• 2 years ago

I don't think that's something you can take away from the little-guy big-guy narrative. Class actions are funded by courts awarding lawyers huge payouts if they win, not directly by the plaintiffs. There should be plenty of resources on both sides of this fight.

megaman8212• 2 years ago

Maybe but lack of resources doesn't seem to be the main problem. A handful of devs claim copyright infringement, the Judge says show me and they can't. Maybe if they had millions of lawyers trying to get Copilot to produce their copyrighted code, their case would be stronger.

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

they also have more resources to ensure they covered their liability surface before any legal case materialized

aka the plaintiffs were wrong and had no idea what they were talking about

hn_throwaway_993• 2 years ago

I strongly disagree. I don't see how you can interpret that sentence, especially given the "who did you think was going to win?" part, and ignore the implication that Microsoft won solely because of their size and money.

There is actually zero evidence that the judge issued his ruling based on Microsoft's superior legal team, so why even put that sentence in there anyway?

deciplex• 2 years ago

Sometimes the little guy is actually wrong.

He is, sometimes. Also sometimes, the moon passes exactly between the sun and Earth, a new star appears in the sky, the magnetic field of our planet reverses, a proton decays (jury is still out on that one, actually). Etc.

Tools like Copilot are plagiarism machines. We know the data they're being trained on, and a conclusion of "that's plagiarism" is not - or anyway should not be - controversial. I'm not terribly against the notion of a plagiarism machine but I am against the owners of such machines reaping profits from them to the exclusion of the people who provide the source material. This is theft.

More importantly, getting back to big guys and little guys: big guys gang up on little guys all the time. It's usually how they get to be big. They tend to be the ones who realize that working together against the rest of us is to their benefit. So, in the interest of pushing back on that a little, and recognizing that I am after all a fellow "little guy" (figuratively speaking anyway), I tend to support the "little guy" unless I have overwhelming evidence confirming that they are, in fact, both wrong and that supporting them anyway would be against my best interest. Neither is the case, here.

At any rate, the subtitle here references a pretty ubiquitous and, I'm happy to report, increasingly well-known and understood facet of our economic and social institutions, which is that they absolutely positively do not work for us or further our interests in any sense.

tpmoney6• 2 years ago

One would think if these were "plagiarism machines", that one of the plaintiffs would have been able to produce even a single instance of the copying they alleged.

JumpCrisscross• 2 years ago

big guys gang up on little guys all the time

And obnoxious individuals gum up enterprises. It's lazy to the point of dismissal to conclude based on bigness.

Bognar2• 2 years ago

It's The Register, they are always like this. Especially when Microsoft is involved.

epolanski3• 2 years ago

I am not strongly opinionated on this, but the very fact Microsoft used all the code it could find, bar their own has always looked suspicious to me.

jfoster• 2 years ago

Is that a fact? If true, not sure whether it would have bearing on the legal questions, but certainly would make it seem like their actions are not in very good faith. Would love to hear their explanation if it did get raised in court.

cdrini5• 2 years ago

I mean, I imagine it used a lot of their public code, like VS code, typescript, the new windows terminal, or anything on https://github.com/microsoft . They didn't use their private code, but they didn't use anyone else's private code either.

sensanaty5• 2 years ago

They claim to not use anyone's private code, but I wouldn't trust the psychopathic C-suite at M$ not to murder kittens and human babies if it made the line go up a quarter of a percentage point, yet alone something like this.

WesternWind• 2 years ago

Wait... So Microsoft doesn't use Microsoft Teams, it uses Slack?

danpalmer• 2 years ago

GitHub uses Slack, and has done since long before the Microsoft acquisition. GitHub also does a ton of chat-ops, or at least used to, so their migration from Campfire to Slack was a big move for the company, I doubt they want to move again.

chrismsimpson• 2 years ago

If this is how the law is applied for code, are we to expect this is also how it will be applied for other data (e.g. audio a la Udio and Suno)?

nashashmi• 2 years ago

Big question: this thing called “training” AI off of data, how much of this is “training” and how much of this is “synthesizing”? It seems like if code is being copied and rephrased, it is synthetic. Not much “learning” and “training” going on here.

bsza3• 2 years ago

Should we move to modified versions of FOSS licenses that forbid AI training?

Found this: https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses

Legally sound or not, these should at least prevent your code from being included in Copilot's training data, hopefully without affecting any other use case. I'm going to use one of these next time I start a new project.

hardwaresofton• 2 years ago

Note that wouldn’t be F/OSS — maybe OSS but the F wouldn’t be there.

bsza3• 2 years ago

Yes, that is clear. But personally I wouldn't want to write FOSS code anyway until Copilot learns to properly attribute FOSS code. Switching to a more permissive license later on shouldn't be an issue.

cmeacham98• 2 years ago

If copilot is ruled fair use it doesn't matter what your license is, fair use superceeds it.

gpm3• 2 years ago

Legally sound or not, these should at least prevent your code from being included in Copilot's training data

Has microsoft said this or something?

bsza3• 2 years ago

I assumed (heard somewhere) that they only include open source repos in the training data.

Turns out I was wrong. They don't care.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210708165143/https://twitter.c...

stale20025• 2 years ago

You can write whatever words you want on a piece of paper or uploaded to the info section of a GitHub repo.

That doesn't mean anyone has to follow it.

If it's legal to train on other people's stuff, without their permission, this would still apply to your code even if your code includes a license that said "I double extra declare that you can't train AI on this!!".

cellis• 2 years ago

I would like to ask an obvious question to the legally inclined here. How is this any different than remixing a song (lyrics/audio)? It's not "identical", and doesn't output "verbatim" lyrics or audio. What is the distinction between <LLM> and <Singer/Remixer who outputs remixed lyrics/audio>. By a quick Google search it seems remixes violate copyright.

default-kramer• 2 years ago

I'm not legally inclined, but... code and music are different? There must be different standards for when code is too similar, for when music is too similar, for when pictures are too similar, for when books are too similar.

Also, remixes almost always do contain verbatim lyrics and/or samples from the original song. LLM output isn't supposed to contain verbatim copies, but I've been told that sometimes it does. (I don't know much about LLMs and I don't think Copilot is useful. I want my 2010-era Intellisense back, when it was extremely fast and predictable.)

everforward2• 2 years ago

Not a lawyer, but that would be a fair use question, which I hear are notoriously complicated.

Colloquially, I generally expect a remix to be comprised of the original instrumentals/beat (potentially edited, but virtually nothing actually new added), potentially new lyrics, and to still be recognizable as the original.

The "still be recognizable as the original" part is a huge problem for fair use, and why I don't think remixes generally qualify. If it doesn't sound like the original then it's not a remix, but if it does sound like the original it can't be fair use.

I think the underlying issue is the resulting work, not the process that went into creating it. I think (but am in no way sure) that copying parts of songs would be fine if you did something to them so they aren't recognizable as the original.

As an example, if I take a song by the Beatles and repeatedly compress it until it's entirely compression artifacts, I would bet that I could publish that. I don't think it would matter that I started with a copyrighted work, what matters is that my finished product bears no resemblance to any other copyrighted work.

That would mean it's just a normal "is this work too similar to existing works?" standard applied to humans as well.

There is still an ancillary question of whether it's okay to train on copyrighted music, but that's really a different question than whether the works it creates infringe.

yazzku• 2 years ago

The judge disagreed, however, on the grounds that the code suggested by Copilot was not identical enough to the developers' own copyright-protected work, and thus section 1202(b) did not apply.

How did they reach this conclusion? How can you prove that it never copies a code snippet verbatim, versus just showing that it does for one specific code snippet? The latter is a lot easier to show, but I don't know what is it exactly that the prosecution claimed. I guess the size of the copy also matters in copyright violations?

cdrini5• 2 years ago

I think there's a difference between a mathematical proof and legal proof. The mathematical proof would be "show that it never copies a code snippet verbatim", and you of course cannot prove that by example.

Legal proof is I think different (not a lawyer). They're more pragmatic. If, observing a lot of cases where it does not verbatim copy, and, if an expert provides a reasonable argument as to why it is unlikely to verbatim copy, that is enough legal proof for a judge to conclude that the output is not identical enough to the developers copyrighted code.

sagarpatil• 2 years ago

Off topic: How does the judiciary decide which judge to choose for such highly technical case?

benced• 2 years ago

District courts can set their own policies. The Northern California District - where this was filed - allocates a case according to the last 2 digits of the case number. Source: https://www.cand.uscourts.gov/judges/civil-docketing-assignm...

Tomte• 2 years ago

That‘s Matthew Butterick‘s case.

slicktux• 2 years ago

Yet people keep feeding it their code by using GitHub as their repo… Just how we use the internet to share information; there’s just no escaping it.

snvzz2• 2 years ago

All GitHub needs to do to make most happy is offer an opt-out toggle.

It still doesn't.

account4211• 2 years ago

That wouldn't and shouldn't make most people happy. Repository owner != author for all the code - that's kind of the point of open source.

snvzz2• 2 years ago

Good point. But on top of fork hierarchy, git commit authors can be used.

This would mean excluding non-github members, and excluding members that opt out.

MagicMoonlight• 2 years ago

The issue I have is that these models are inherently trained to duplicate stuff. You train them by comparing the output to the original.

If I made an “advanced music engine” which rips Taylor swift files and duplicates them, I would be sued to oblivion. Why does calling it an AI suddenly fix that?

They should have to train them on information they legally own.

cdrini5• 2 years ago

They're not "inherently trained to duplicate"; I think that's a bit of a disingenuous oversimplification. They're trained to learn abstract patterns in large datasets, and remix those patterns in response to a prompt.

"You train them by comparing the output to the original." To the best of my knowledge this isn't correct; can you expand or cite a reference?

rrobukef• 2 years ago

They are trained to duplicate, we just hope they do so by abstracting patterns. Various techniques stack the deck to make it difficult to memorize everything but it still happens easily, especially for replicated knowledge.

"You train them by comparing the output to the original." ->

You train neural networks by producing output for known input, comparing the output with a cost-function to the expected output, and updating your system towards minimizing the cost, repeatedly, until it stops improving or you tire of waiting. Cost functions must have a minimal value when the output matches exactly the expected to work mathematically. Engineering-wise you can possibly fudge things and they probably do so ... now.

I don't agree with your critiques. It isn't an oversimplification, published code literally works as stated.

perlgeek• 2 years ago

From the article:

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.

So, the problem is really one of the lack of evidence, which seems... like a pretty basic mistake from the plaintiffs?

They could've taken a screencap video back when Copilot still produced code more verbatim, and used that as evidence, I assume.

albertTJames• 2 years ago

Looking good ! Go Copilot !

lumb632• 2 years ago

It seems to me that regardless of the outcome of this case, some developers do not want to have their code used to train LLMs. There may need to be a new license created to restrict this usage of software. Or, maybe developers will simply stop contributing open source. In today’s day and age, where open source code serves as a tool to pad Microsoft’s pockets, I certainly will not publish any of my software open source, despite how much I would like to (under GPL) in order to help fellow developers.

If I were Microsoft, I’d really be concerned that I’m going to kill my golden goose by causing a large-scale exodus from GitHub or open source development more generally. Another idea I’ve considered is publishing boatloads of useless or incorrect code to poison their training data.

As I see it, people should be able to restrict how people use something that they gave them. If some people prefer that their code is not used to train LLMs, there should be a way to enforce that.

xinayder2• 2 years ago

I certainly will not publish any of my software open source, despite how much I would like to (under GPL) in order to help fellow developers.

I think this is a rather radical approach. You're undermining the OSS movement because you dislike Microsoft (I do too). I think adding a clause or dual licensing your work is more effective at stopping big-tech funded AI crawlers than just not adhering to open source.

You can host your code on sourcehut or Codeberg (Forgejo), you don't NEED to host it on a Microsoft owned platform.

elzbardico2• 2 years ago

I love the OSS movement. But the OSS movement is dependent on developers making a living somewhere else. If Microsoft effectively replace our class or at least a big part of it with AI, OSS becomes mostly irrelevant.

Not everyone is multi-generationally rich or absurdly frugal. Most people like having good jobs.

lumb632• 2 years ago

There is, as far as I am aware, nothing to stop Microsoft from crawling any other site’s code. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Things like “copyright” didn’t seem to stop OpenAI.

infecto• 2 years ago

I am personally happy to share all my public code to support the development of better models. While I believe the benefits of contributing to open source outweigh the drawbacks, and I don't foresee a "large-scale exodus from GitHub", it's ultimately up to individual developers to decide how their code is used.

zamadatix• 2 years ago

"I don't license as open source because $something which I don't like could use my code" is a pretty common note over time but, despite almost always coming with a warning of the end of some large open source segment, is rarely impactful in any way. Some people probably will use a special license and most won't care except for when they run across projects using said one offs and it becomes a pain to integrate licensing models.

account4211• 2 years ago

I get the sentiment but remember that OSS has always come with the caveat that someone you do not approve of benefits from your code. That part isn't really new with LLMs (which I'm definitely not a fan of). Really this goes for productive pursuit where you do not have total control of your clients. I think it's better to focus on how your work benefits those you want to benefit than to worry about how leeches also profit.

passwordoops• 2 years ago

"The lack of documents from the Windows maker is apparently down to "technical difficulties" in collecting Slack messages"

Wait, I'm forced to use Teams at work but Microsoft employees are on Slack?!

nancyp• 2 years ago

Linux/OSS is cancer. Said who? Anything in public domain is for grab by them.

Until the open tech community is chicken enough to not boycott their no open source stuff such as github and linked in a proof nothing will happen.

warkdarrior3• 2 years ago

Sir, are you OK??

chidli1234• 2 years ago

Microsoft has deep pockets. Judges aren't objective. More at 11.

Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

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