3 ms·

lol @ "open-source soft­ware piracy" If I'm being honest I'm a bit annoyed at this. What's the problem and what's the point of this?

• bpodgursky 4y ago
  Lawyers want $$$$.
  • RamblingCTO 4y ago
    Yeah I guess so. This website reads like bullshit bingo from some weird twitter dude trying to sell you his newest product: "AI needs to be fair & eth­i­cal for every­one. If it’s not, then it can never achieve its vaunted aims of ele­vat­ing human­ity. It will just become another way for the priv­i­leged few to profit from the work of the many." Blah blah. Can we get back to the hacking on stuff mentality?
    • gcmrtc 4y ago
      Looks like that lawyer guy is not new on hacking stuff: https://matthewbutterick.com/ https://matthewbutterick.com/ Not exactly the curriculum of a twitter weirdo.
      • RamblingCTO 4y ago
        Hah, funny. I've used Pollen before and think I've had contact with him a few years ago! The blah blah about AI elevating the world is still bs imho. I still disagree with his views (https://matthewbutterick.com/chron/this-copilot-is-stupid-and-wants-to-kill-me.html https://matthewbutterick.com/chron/this-copilot-is-stupid-an...) and this law suit. I wasn't actually talking about him specifically btw when saying "this sounds like a crypto bro from twitter". The overly enthusiastic AI talk reminded me of that, that's what I wanted to say.
• finneganscat 4y ago
• opine-at-random 4y ago
  If you'd ever read even a single one of the licenses to the software I'm sure you use everyday, you'd understand. This is such an obvious and pathetic strawman. I notice often on hackernews that people don't seem to understand anything about free or open-source software outside of the pragmatics of whether they can abuse the work for free.
  • RamblingCTO 4y ago
    You read a lot into my not so serious comment. Maybe internet comment sections aren't the right place for you. But I'll bite: I know licensing, thank you. But what's copyrightable is not so easy. Licenses are not so easy. Copilot does not copy entire works and it's very questionable if a few lines of code are "piracy". It's a repeating discussion again and again, there's nothing novel about it except for the fact that a machine learns (and overfits for small portions of code). So please get off your high horse. I don't care for your fundamentalism.
    • an1sotropy 4y ago
      If you know this area of IP law then you know that LOTs of licenses, copyleft or not, require attribution (which copilot never does, and can’t do by its construction), and you know that what’s problematic is when the model output is arguably not “fair use”. Examples of that abound. You don’t need any fundamentalism to know that copilot’s output carries huge and untested legal risk. If this lawsuit clears some of this up, that’s a big win for everyone.
      • RamblingCTO 4y ago
        Yes, you're right. But my point also was that it's not so easy when it's just a few lines, isn't it? Especially since this is an international issue and the definitions of copyrightable work is not easily definable. > You don’t need any fundamentalism to know that copilot’s output carries huge and untested legal risk. If this lawsuit clears some of this up, that’s a big win for everyone. I agree with that! I also see this as the only proper takeaway that I think is ok. The rest is making money off this thing. But the US has a different law suit culture anyway, which I find weird.