4 ms·

I'm kinda sceptical that this goes anywhere given that basically they say that whatever copilot outputs is your responsibility to vet that it doesn't break any

by naillo 4y ago

I'm kinda sceptical that this goes anywhere given that basically they say that whatever copilot outputs is your responsibility to vet that it doesn't break any copyright (obviously that goes against the promise of it and the PR but that's the small print that gets them out of trouble).

dmitrygr 4y ago
So, if i made napster 2.0 and said that it is your job to make sure that you do not download anything copyrighted, that would be ok?
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Yes that would be okay. It would also be okay to create Internet 2.0.
- nicolashahn 4y ago
  That's basically the situation for any torrent client
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Well, if the trackers also hosted mixed-up blocks of data for all the torrents they tracked and their protection was "LOL make sure you don't accidentally download any of these tiny data blocks in the correct order to reconstruct the copyrighted material they may be parts of wink"
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  Isn’t that already how everything on the internet works?
  - donatj 4y ago
    I think it's arguably how anything works. You can have a fork, but if you stab it in someones eye that's on you.
- donatj 4y ago
  Yep. That's exactly why Bittorrent clients can exist.
- dmalik 4y ago
  You mean like every torrent client that currently exists?
- ketralnis 4y ago
  I think you're looking for consistency that the legal system just doesn't provide. The music industry is more organised and litigious than the software industry and that gives them power that you and I don't have. If you called it "Napster 2.0" specifically you'd probably be prevented from shipping by a preliminary injunction. Is that fair or consistent? No. But it's the world we live in. Programmers want laws to be irrefutable and executable logic but they just aren't.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- brookst 4y ago
  The legal system takes intent into account. So if you produce napster 2.0 to be the best music piracy tool, and you test it for piracy, and you promote it for piracy... you're going to have trouble. If you produce napster 2.0 as a general purpose file sharing system, let's call it a torrent client, and you can claim no ill intent... you may have trouble but it's a lot more defensible in court. I would find it a big stretch to say Github's intent here is to illegally distribute copyrighted code. No judgment on whether the class action has any merit, just saying I would be very surprised if discovery turns up lots of emails where Github execs are saying "this is great, it'll let people steal code."
  - kube-system 4y ago
    > I would find it a big stretch to say Github's intent here is to illegally distribute copyrighted code. Almost everything on GitHub is subject to copyright, except for some very old works (maybe something written by Ada Lovelace?), and US government works not eligible for copyright. Now, many of the works there are also licensed under permissive licenses, but that is only a defense to copyright infringement if the terms of those licenses are being adequately fulfilled.
    - brookst 4y ago
      > Almost everything on GitHub is subject to copyright, Agreed. Like I said, it's about intent. Can anyone say with a straight face that copilot is an elaborate scheme to profit by duplicating copyrighted work? I don't think the defense is that it wasn't trained on copyrighted data. It obviously was. I think the defense is that anything, including a person, that learns from a large corpus of copyrighted data will sometimes produce verbatim snippets that reflect their training data. So when it comes to copyright infringement, are we moving the goalposts to where merely learning from copyrighted material is already infringement? I'm not sure I want to go there.
- jasonlotito 4y ago
  Now, IANAL, but iirc, that is all 100% okay and legal. In fact, I can even download copyrighted music and movies without issue. So, I don't even need to make sure I don't download anything under copyright. The issue isn't downloading copyrighted stuff. Rather, it's making available and letting others download it. That was where you got in trouble.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Knowingly downloading copyrighted material, say to get it for free, still violates the rights of the copyright holders. It's just that litigating against members of the public is bad PR and not exactly lucrative, especially when it's likely that kids downloaded the content. People used to get busted from buying bootleg VHS and DVDs on the street before P2P filesharing was a common thing. Then, early on, people were sued for downloading copyrighted files before rightsholders decided to take a different legal strategy to go after sharers and bootleggers.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  This is a bad analogy because P2P networks exist that are legal to operate, because Section 230 of the CDA prevents interactive computer services from being held responsible for user generated content. What made Napster illegal is that the company did not create their network for fair use of content, but to explicitly violate copyright for profit. Copilot is like Napster in this case, in that both services launder copyrighted data and distributed it to users for profit. Copilot is not like other P2P networks that exist to share data that is either free to distribute or can be used under the fair use doctrine. Copilot explicitly takes copyrighted content and distributes it to users in violation of licenses, that's its explicit purpose. It's entirely possible to make a Copilot-like product that was trained on data that doesn't have restrictive licensing in the same way it's entirely possible to create a P2P network for sharing files that you have the right to share legally.
heavyset_go 4y ago
Saying "it's your responsibility to not breach licenses or violate copyright" doesn't absolve your service from breaching licenses and violating copyright itself.
- mdaEyebot 4y ago
  "It is the customer's responsibility to ensure that they only drink the water molecules which come out of their tap, and not the lead ones."
- golemotron 4y ago
  Yet we all use web browsers that copy copyrighted text from buffer to buffer all the time. This doesn't even include all of the copying that ISPs perform. It might be fair to say that the read performed in training has the same character since no human is involved. The real copyright violation would be using a derived work.
  - ginsider_oaks 4y ago
    the actual copying isn't a problem, it's distribution. if i buy access to a PDF i'm not going to get in trouble for duplicating the file unless i send it to someone else. when someone uploads their copyrighted text to a web page they are distributing it to whoever visits that page. the browser is just the medium.
    - golemotron 4y ago
      Is that the legal standard in copyright cases?
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    A browser isn't a amalgamation of billions of pieces of other works. A browser executes and renders code it's served. Copilot's corpus is quite literally tomes of copyrighted work that are encoded and compressed in its neural network, from which it launders that work to create similar works. Copilot itself, the neutral network, is that corpus of encoded and compressed information, you can't separate the two. Copilot stores and distributes that work without any input from rightsholders, and it does it for profit. A better analogy would be between a browser and a file server filled with copyrighted movies whose operator charges $10/mo for access. The browser is just a browser in this analogy, where the file server is the corpus that forms Copilot itself.
shoshoshosho 4y ago
You could argue that it’s the individual projects using copilot that are violating here, I guess? Like you can use curl or git to dump some AGPL code into your commercial closed software but no one would (hopefully) blame those tools. So copilot is fine but anyone using it must abide by the collective set of licenses that it used to write code for you…?
stonemetal12 4y ago
If I remember correctly that only works if you can prove that your system has "substantial non infringing use".
BeefWellington 4y ago
If a license requires attribution, and you reproduce the code without attribution using your editor plugin, it seems to me the infringement is on the editor plugin. Note that even licenses like MIT ostensibly require attribution.

by naillo 4y ago

dmitrygr 4y ago

So, if i made napster 2.0 and said that it is your job to make sure that you do not download anything copyrighted, that would be ok?

charcircuit 4y ago
Yes that would be okay. It would also be okay to create Internet 2.0.
nicolashahn 4y ago
That's basically the situation for any torrent client
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Well, if the trackers also hosted mixed-up blocks of data for all the torrents they tracked and their protection was "LOL make sure you don't accidentally download any of these tiny data blocks in the correct order to reconstruct the copyrighted material they may be parts of wink"
eurasiantiger 4y ago
Isn’t that already how everything on the internet works?
- donatj 4y ago
  I think it's arguably how anything works. You can have a fork, but if you stab it in someones eye that's on you.
donatj 4y ago
Yep. That's exactly why Bittorrent clients can exist.
dmalik 4y ago
You mean like every torrent client that currently exists?
ketralnis 4y ago
I think you're looking for consistency that the legal system just doesn't provide. The music industry is more organised and litigious than the software industry and that gives them power that you and I don't have. If you called it "Napster 2.0" specifically you'd probably be prevented from shipping by a preliminary injunction. Is that fair or consistent? No. But it's the world we live in. Programmers want laws to be irrefutable and executable logic but they just aren't.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
brookst 4y ago
The legal system takes intent into account. So if you produce napster 2.0 to be the best music piracy tool, and you test it for piracy, and you promote it for piracy... you're going to have trouble. If you produce napster 2.0 as a general purpose file sharing system, let's call it a torrent client, and you can claim no ill intent... you may have trouble but it's a lot more defensible in court. I would find it a big stretch to say Github's intent here is to illegally distribute copyrighted code. No judgment on whether the class action has any merit, just saying I would be very surprised if discovery turns up lots of emails where Github execs are saying "this is great, it'll let people steal code."
- kube-system 4y ago
  > I would find it a big stretch to say Github's intent here is to illegally distribute copyrighted code. Almost everything on GitHub is subject to copyright, except for some very old works (maybe something written by Ada Lovelace?), and US government works not eligible for copyright. Now, many of the works there are also licensed under permissive licenses, but that is only a defense to copyright infringement if the terms of those licenses are being adequately fulfilled.
  - brookst 4y ago
    > Almost everything on GitHub is subject to copyright, Agreed. Like I said, it's about intent. Can anyone say with a straight face that copilot is an elaborate scheme to profit by duplicating copyrighted work? I don't think the defense is that it wasn't trained on copyrighted data. It obviously was. I think the defense is that anything, including a person, that learns from a large corpus of copyrighted data will sometimes produce verbatim snippets that reflect their training data. So when it comes to copyright infringement, are we moving the goalposts to where merely learning from copyrighted material is already infringement? I'm not sure I want to go there.
jasonlotito 4y ago
Now, IANAL, but iirc, that is all 100% okay and legal. In fact, I can even download copyrighted music and movies without issue. So, I don't even need to make sure I don't download anything under copyright. The issue isn't downloading copyrighted stuff. Rather, it's making available and letting others download it. That was where you got in trouble.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Knowingly downloading copyrighted material, say to get it for free, still violates the rights of the copyright holders. It's just that litigating against members of the public is bad PR and not exactly lucrative, especially when it's likely that kids downloaded the content. People used to get busted from buying bootleg VHS and DVDs on the street before P2P filesharing was a common thing. Then, early on, people were sued for downloading copyrighted files before rightsholders decided to take a different legal strategy to go after sharers and bootleggers.
heavyset_go 4y ago
This is a bad analogy because P2P networks exist that are legal to operate, because Section 230 of the CDA prevents interactive computer services from being held responsible for user generated content. What made Napster illegal is that the company did not create their network for fair use of content, but to explicitly violate copyright for profit. Copilot is like Napster in this case, in that both services launder copyrighted data and distributed it to users for profit. Copilot is not like other P2P networks that exist to share data that is either free to distribute or can be used under the fair use doctrine. Copilot explicitly takes copyrighted content and distributes it to users in violation of licenses, that's its explicit purpose. It's entirely possible to make a Copilot-like product that was trained on data that doesn't have restrictive licensing in the same way it's entirely possible to create a P2P network for sharing files that you have the right to share legally.

heavyset_go 4y ago

Saying "it's your responsibility to not breach licenses or violate copyright" doesn't absolve your service from breaching licenses and violating copyright itself.

mdaEyebot 4y ago
"It is the customer's responsibility to ensure that they only drink the water molecules which come out of their tap, and not the lead ones."
golemotron 4y ago
Yet we all use web browsers that copy copyrighted text from buffer to buffer all the time. This doesn't even include all of the copying that ISPs perform. It might be fair to say that the read performed in training has the same character since no human is involved. The real copyright violation would be using a derived work.
- ginsider_oaks 4y ago
  the actual copying isn't a problem, it's distribution. if i buy access to a PDF i'm not going to get in trouble for duplicating the file unless i send it to someone else. when someone uploads their copyrighted text to a web page they are distributing it to whoever visits that page. the browser is just the medium.
  - golemotron 4y ago
    Is that the legal standard in copyright cases?
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  A browser isn't a amalgamation of billions of pieces of other works. A browser executes and renders code it's served. Copilot's corpus is quite literally tomes of copyrighted work that are encoded and compressed in its neural network, from which it launders that work to create similar works. Copilot itself, the neutral network, is that corpus of encoded and compressed information, you can't separate the two. Copilot stores and distributes that work without any input from rightsholders, and it does it for profit. A better analogy would be between a browser and a file server filled with copyrighted movies whose operator charges $10/mo for access. The browser is just a browser in this analogy, where the file server is the corpus that forms Copilot itself.

shoshoshosho 4y ago

You could argue that it’s the individual projects using copilot that are violating here, I guess? Like you can use curl or git to dump some AGPL code into your commercial closed software but no one would (hopefully) blame those tools. So copilot is fine but anyone using it must abide by the collective set of licenses that it used to write code for you…?

stonemetal12 4y ago

If I remember correctly that only works if you can prove that your system has "substantial non infringing use".

BeefWellington 4y ago

If a license requires attribution, and you reproduce the code without attribution using your editor plugin, it seems to me the infringement is on the editor plugin. Note that even licenses like MIT ostensibly require attribution.