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This discussion is heavily biased and prioritizes people's emotional need to be credited and/or paid for their work over a discussion of the legal and ethical c

This discussion is heavily biased and prioritizes people's emotional need to be credited and/or paid for their work over a discussion of the legal and ethical concerns at play here. It disregards the comments of an expert in the field and focuses instead on demands that may well be unsupported by copyright law. For example, GitHub license section D.4 specifically grants GitHub the right to display your content, analyze your content, and reproduce it in full to other users of the service. Yet no one seems particularly interested in discussing that here today, because it isn't compatible with the outrage that people are prioritizing on HN when discussion Copilot. I would have expected HN to be better than Reddit in this regard, but I'm not seeing it yet. I don't know if the expert is right or wrong here, but nothing in today's comments suggests anything new or curious that hasn't already been ranted about in every prior thread about this topic. I specifically care about copyright law and it's disappointing to see HN having a group tantrum instead of a discussion. https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#d-user-generated-content https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...

ghaff 5y ago
The legal commentary I'm seeing from people who really know this stuff is pretty much unanimously in favor of this being legal in at least most of the world based on caselaw--while acknowledging why some might have ethical concerns. I'm actually sort of curious as to the vigor of the backlash. Because Microsoft? Because of concerns about perceived further undermining of the GPL in particular? Because of people anxious to get their credit? Because...?
- IncRnd 5y ago
  > I'm actually sort of curious as to the vigor of the backlash. Because Microsoft? Because of concerns about perceived further undermining of the GPL in particular? Because of people anxious to get their credit? Because...? Because, this is really against the understanding of what was possible for copyrighted works. So, now that this is possible for anyone, copyright will start to get examined and hopefully updated to be useful in today's environment. There are about a million problems with this. This can even be used to intentionally launder source codes from a competitor. Apparently, all it will take will be to steal code (or just fork it), then create more than 10 copies on Github. At that point, copilot will start to emit the code during use. With all the legal commentary saying this isn't infringement, imagine how companies will be able to use this product. Similarly, the training set can be intentionally polluted, so your competitor finds the output of Copilot worthless.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Because they’re not getting a share of GitHub’s future revenues from their works or from derivations or their work. (Why do they care so much about revenue? Open source coders and ‘starving artists’, not to mention Covid economic wreckage, the US approach to medical insurance, and the total absence of Universal Basic Income in virtually all countries permitted to access GitHub.)
  - ghaff 5y ago
    So don't open source it and/or put it on GitHub?
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      The latter, it turns out, is more important than the former.
IncRnd 5y ago
> For example, GitHub license section D.4 specifically grants GitHub the right to display your content, analyze your content, and reproduce it in full to other users of the service. Yet no one seems particularly interested in discussing that here today, because it isn't compatible with the outrage that people are prioritizing on HN when discussion Copilot. Well, Copilot isn't really an analaysis and display of the source code within the original meaning that people held. That was meant more to run codeql, github actions, and other analysis while presenting the results in a repository to people. People never anticipated that github would strip their licenses from files and present their source code inside of VSCode for people to use freely. It may be legal, but what we are seeing now is an abuse of the sentences you just quoted that goes outside what they were originally understood to mean.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Is it fair use to remix two musical albums into a new derivative work, that cannot plausibly be judged to replace demand for either original work? Is it fair use to autogenerate GIFs from movies, perhaps the most protected digital works on the Internet today, in order to use them as reaction memes on Imgur? Is it fair use to autoextract code fragments from a code base, in order to use them as suggestions on GitHub? The Internet, and I imagine HN, was in an uproar when the music industry attempted to kill the White Album, because it infringed on their freedom to remix and derive. The Internet, and I imagine HN, was in an uproar when MLB attempted to kill unauthorized baseball GIFs and replace them with official curated ones, because it infringed on their freedom to remix and derive. How, precisely, is remixing and deriving from code ‘abusive’, in contrast to the past ten or twenty years of pressure on the Internet to the contrary when remixing and deriving from music or movies? This is a core point of the original post linked above, where the author is shocked by our demands for more prohibitive copyright interpretations, and I want to call this out more bluntly and less politely than they did: Fair use of a work is almost always perceived as abusive and unfair by the creator of a work. Creators ignore the cognitive dissonance between their demand to have fair use rights granted more easily to the protected works of others, and their demand to have fair use rights granted less easily to their own protected works. I see that dissonance go unaddressed in every top-level comment in today’s discussion. I see that desire to deny fair use rights driving hundreds of emotional me-too posts, without considering the framing of whether it is fair use in alignment with every prior copyright outrage we’ve discussed over the years. My theory is that permitting discussion of fair use would weaken their efforts to groundswell a pitchfork mob, and no one wants to confront their own biases or emotional investment or inability to profit from their code. Whatever the motivations, HN deserves better than this.
ben0x539 5y ago
> For example, GitHub license section D.4 specifically grants GitHub the right to display your content, analyze your content, and reproduce it in full to other users of the service. Yet no one seems particularly interested in discussing that here today, because it isn't compatible with the outrage that people are prioritizing on HN when discussion Copilot. How applicable is the Github license when a lot of code on Github (let's say eg. the Linux kernel) was posted there by people other than the individual copyright holders? I'd assume they can only rely on the open source license of the code in question, and not really on additional license terms. As far as I can tell, Github claims fair use rather than citing their license.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  That's perhaps the most important question of this entire debate, and it's the one that no one is considering seriously here in the comments. I personally think that it's because no one at HN is both competent enough at copyright and licensing law to debate it and willing to spend time debating it with Internet commenters for a $0/hour wage.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    > That's perhaps the most important question of this entire debate, and it's the one that no one is considering seriously here in the comments. You missed the comment on this page, 4 hours prior to your comment, that mentioned this. It's difficult to take your comments seriously.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      If an oversight is all the excuse needed to dismiss considering anything I’ve said that you find unpalatable, then I can save you trouble and instruct you to dismiss everything I ever say, now and in the future, as I am merely human and will continue to be imperfect forever. I don’t generally intend to post this disclaimer on every comment I make, as this is a standard human condition defect in all of us, but I hope this one-time exception allows you to reject my opinions and move on to other discussions with a clear conscience.
hnfong 5y ago
Good point. Here's my 2 cents - > D.4 specifically grants GitHub the right to display your content, analyze your content, and reproduce it in full to other users of the service If you read the section carefully, this covers the right of GitHub to do those things to your content "as necessary to provide the Service". "It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service". So, does "Service" only cover the type of Github's service at the time of the agreement, or does it allow Github to invent all kinds of unrelated services and use the code as such? If Github can provide a "Copilot" service that arguably "learns" the code, can it also provide a service that blatantly "copies" large pieces of source code for the user (without complying to OSS license terms)? It's not very clear what the answer would be, but if what I described is allowed, the consequences of this term being so broad would imply that if you're not the copyright owner of code you uploaded to Github, you've probably violated some OSS license by agreeing to Github's terms.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Which OSS licenses are potentially incompatible with GitHub? Are they also incompatible with GitLab? How can one or the other be judged to have exceeded the bounds of what is permissible as a user-generated content provider, and/or fair use rights, in the legal jurisdiction of each?

ghaff 5y ago

The legal commentary I'm seeing from people who really know this stuff is pretty much unanimously in favor of this being legal in at least most of the world based on caselaw--while acknowledging why some might have ethical concerns. I'm actually sort of curious as to the vigor of the backlash. Because Microsoft? Because of concerns about perceived further undermining of the GPL in particular? Because of people anxious to get their credit? Because...?

IncRnd 5y ago
> I'm actually sort of curious as to the vigor of the backlash. Because Microsoft? Because of concerns about perceived further undermining of the GPL in particular? Because of people anxious to get their credit? Because...? Because, this is really against the understanding of what was possible for copyrighted works. So, now that this is possible for anyone, copyright will start to get examined and hopefully updated to be useful in today's environment. There are about a million problems with this. This can even be used to intentionally launder source codes from a competitor. Apparently, all it will take will be to steal code (or just fork it), then create more than 10 copies on Github. At that point, copilot will start to emit the code during use. With all the legal commentary saying this isn't infringement, imagine how companies will be able to use this product. Similarly, the training set can be intentionally polluted, so your competitor finds the output of Copilot worthless.
floatingatoll 5y ago
Because they’re not getting a share of GitHub’s future revenues from their works or from derivations or their work. (Why do they care so much about revenue? Open source coders and ‘starving artists’, not to mention Covid economic wreckage, the US approach to medical insurance, and the total absence of Universal Basic Income in virtually all countries permitted to access GitHub.)
- ghaff 5y ago
  So don't open source it and/or put it on GitHub?
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    The latter, it turns out, is more important than the former.

IncRnd 5y ago

> For example, GitHub license section D.4 specifically grants GitHub the right to display your content, analyze your content, and reproduce it in full to other users of the service. Yet no one seems particularly interested in discussing that here today, because it isn't compatible with the outrage that people are prioritizing on HN when discussion Copilot. Well, Copilot isn't really an analaysis and display of the source code within the original meaning that people held. That was meant more to run codeql, github actions, and other analysis while presenting the results in a repository to people. People never anticipated that github would strip their licenses from files and present their source code inside of VSCode for people to use freely. It may be legal, but what we are seeing now is an abuse of the sentences you just quoted that goes outside what they were originally understood to mean.

floatingatoll 5y ago
Is it fair use to remix two musical albums into a new derivative work, that cannot plausibly be judged to replace demand for either original work? Is it fair use to autogenerate GIFs from movies, perhaps the most protected digital works on the Internet today, in order to use them as reaction memes on Imgur? Is it fair use to autoextract code fragments from a code base, in order to use them as suggestions on GitHub? The Internet, and I imagine HN, was in an uproar when the music industry attempted to kill the White Album, because it infringed on their freedom to remix and derive. The Internet, and I imagine HN, was in an uproar when MLB attempted to kill unauthorized baseball GIFs and replace them with official curated ones, because it infringed on their freedom to remix and derive. How, precisely, is remixing and deriving from code ‘abusive’, in contrast to the past ten or twenty years of pressure on the Internet to the contrary when remixing and deriving from music or movies? This is a core point of the original post linked above, where the author is shocked by our demands for more prohibitive copyright interpretations, and I want to call this out more bluntly and less politely than they did: Fair use of a work is almost always perceived as abusive and unfair by the creator of a work. Creators ignore the cognitive dissonance between their demand to have fair use rights granted more easily to the protected works of others, and their demand to have fair use rights granted less easily to their own protected works. I see that dissonance go unaddressed in every top-level comment in today’s discussion. I see that desire to deny fair use rights driving hundreds of emotional me-too posts, without considering the framing of whether it is fair use in alignment with every prior copyright outrage we’ve discussed over the years. My theory is that permitting discussion of fair use would weaken their efforts to groundswell a pitchfork mob, and no one wants to confront their own biases or emotional investment or inability to profit from their code. Whatever the motivations, HN deserves better than this.

ben0x539 5y ago

> For example, GitHub license section D.4 specifically grants GitHub the right to display your content, analyze your content, and reproduce it in full to other users of the service. Yet no one seems particularly interested in discussing that here today, because it isn't compatible with the outrage that people are prioritizing on HN when discussion Copilot. How applicable is the Github license when a lot of code on Github (let's say eg. the Linux kernel) was posted there by people other than the individual copyright holders? I'd assume they can only rely on the open source license of the code in question, and not really on additional license terms. As far as I can tell, Github claims fair use rather than citing their license.

floatingatoll 5y ago
That's perhaps the most important question of this entire debate, and it's the one that no one is considering seriously here in the comments. I personally think that it's because no one at HN is both competent enough at copyright and licensing law to debate it and willing to spend time debating it with Internet commenters for a $0/hour wage.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  > That's perhaps the most important question of this entire debate, and it's the one that no one is considering seriously here in the comments. You missed the comment on this page, 4 hours prior to your comment, that mentioned this. It's difficult to take your comments seriously.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    If an oversight is all the excuse needed to dismiss considering anything I’ve said that you find unpalatable, then I can save you trouble and instruct you to dismiss everything I ever say, now and in the future, as I am merely human and will continue to be imperfect forever. I don’t generally intend to post this disclaimer on every comment I make, as this is a standard human condition defect in all of us, but I hope this one-time exception allows you to reject my opinions and move on to other discussions with a clear conscience.

hnfong 5y ago

Good point. Here's my 2 cents - > D.4 specifically grants GitHub the right to display your content, analyze your content, and reproduce it in full to other users of the service If you read the section carefully, this covers the right of GitHub to do those things to your content "as necessary to provide the Service". "It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service". So, does "Service" only cover the type of Github's service at the time of the agreement, or does it allow Github to invent all kinds of unrelated services and use the code as such? If Github can provide a "Copilot" service that arguably "learns" the code, can it also provide a service that blatantly "copies" large pieces of source code for the user (without complying to OSS license terms)? It's not very clear what the answer would be, but if what I described is allowed, the consequences of this term being so broad would imply that if you're not the copyright owner of code you uploaded to Github, you've probably violated some OSS license by agreeing to Github's terms.

floatingatoll 5y ago
Which OSS licenses are potentially incompatible with GitHub? Are they also incompatible with GitLab? How can one or the other be judged to have exceeded the bounds of what is permissible as a user-generated content provider, and/or fair use rights, in the legal jurisdiction of each?