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Correct legally, morally, or both? Legally a copyright claim seems weak, but they didn't assert one. Some of their claims look stronger than others. The DMCA c

• williamtrask 4y ago
  I don’t think this lawsuit would hinder innovation but it would greatly change it and who owns it. If an AI model is the joint property of all the people who contributed IP to it, it’s a pretty hugely democratic and decentralizing force. It also will incentivise a huge amount of innovation on better, richer data sources for AI. If an AI model isn’t joint property of the IP it learned then it’s a great way to build extractive business models because the raw resource is mostly free. This will incentivise larger, more centralised entities. Much of the most interesting data comes from everyday people. A class action precedent is probably good for society and good for innovation (particularly pushing innovation on the edge/data collection side)
  • shanusmagnus 4y ago
    If the resource is free and non-rivalrous, what is being extracted?
    • saurik 4y ago
      The resource is not "free": it is provided under a license that attempts to lay out the terms the entity using the resource must comply with in order to get the benefit of using their product; just because this is a non-monetary compensation doesn't mean it is "free".
      • D13Fd 4y ago
        Authors of code (open source or otherwise) hold a copyright in that code. The purpose of the license agreement is to set out the terms on which the authors will permit others to take actions that would otherwise infringe copyright. Using code, photographs, documents, or other material to train a model isn't copyright infringement. The person operating the model is not violating the exclusive rights of the copyright author: they are not making copies or derivative works. Any other result means that all AI development based on training models is going to grind to a screeching halt, because essentially all training material—text, pictures, recordings—is copyrighted.
        • still_grokking 4y ago
          > The person operating the model is not violating the exclusive rights of the copyright author: they are not making copies or derivative works. How do they not make copies? Do you know how a computer works? Ever heard of RAM? (At least the German Urheberrecht recognizes this clearly: You can't do any processing on any data with the help of a computer without at least making temporary local copies, so there are exceptions to some rules. I'm quite sure common law copyright also recognizes this!) Also the claim that this is not a derivative work is actually one of the disputed claims here… > Any other result means that all AI development based on training models is going to grind to a screeching halt, because essentially all training material—text, pictures, recordings—is copyrighted. Exactly, it's all copyrighted! That's why you can't use it for whatever you like. That's the whole point of copyright. As a result this means that whoever wants to exploit that work in said way needs to buy (or get otherwise) a license! Nobody said that feeding AI with properly licensed work would be problematic. Only the original creators need to get their fair cut form the outcome of such process.
          • AnnasVirtual 4y ago
            you are clearly doesn't understand how machine learning works, if machine learning ok copyrighted data becomes illegal then most of our infrastructures will be down because most of it uses machine learning, the first that will affect many people is probably google search
  • kmeisthax 4y ago
    The problem of jointly-owned AI is that the actual value of a particular contribution to the training set is not particularly easy to calculate. We can't tie a particular model weight back to individual training set examples, nor can we take an output that's a statistical mix of two different peoples' work and trace it back to them. With current technology, the only licensing model we can offer is "give us your training set example, we'll chuck a few pennies at you out of credit sales and nothing more". We can't even comply with CC-BY because the model can't determine who to attribute to.
• kelnos 4y ago
  I'm fine with Copilot, but I think all rightsholders should be allowed to decide if they want their code training it or not. And that should be opt-in, not opt-out. (And refusing to opt in shouldn't have to mean switching to a new hosting platform.) > Beyond that, the class members aren't likely to get much if any money. The only party here who stands to clearly benefit is the attorneys. That's the case in pretty much any class action. I look at class actions as having two purposes: to require that the defendant stops doing something, and to fine the defendant some amount of money. Sure, individual class members will see very little of that money, but I look at it as a way of hurting a company that has done people wrong. Hopefully they won't do that anymore, and other companies will be on notice that they shouldn't do those bad things either. Of course, sometimes monetary damages end up being a slap on the wrist, just something a company considers a cost of doing business.
  • D13Fd 4y ago
    >I look at class actions as having two purposes . . . to require that the defendant stops doing something That's my point. Many of the class members don't want the company to stop doing this. I have code on GitHub, and Copilot is a useful tool. I don't care if my code was used to train the model. Sure, I personally could opt out of the suit, but that would be utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The bottom line is, if I'm a coder with code on Github and I like Copilot, this suit is a huge net negative. Even more importantly, I want to see the next version of Copilot that will be created by some other company, and then the next version after that. I want development to continue in this area at a high velocity. This suit does nothing but put giant screeching brakes on that development, and that is just a shame.
    • heavyset_go 4y ago
      If you don't feel like you're being represented, you're free to choose not to be a member of class in the lawsuit.
      • D13Fd 4y ago
        > If you don't feel like you're being represented, you're free to choose not to be a member of class in the lawsuit. I think you missed this part: > Sure, I personally could opt out of the suit, but that would be utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
• heavyset_go 4y ago
  Innovation dies when creators can't create without someone ripping off their work against the terms they release it under. I am more hesitant to release code on GitHub under any licenses now. Even outside of GPL-esque terms, I've considered open sourcing some of my product's components under a source available but otherwise proprietary license, but if Microsoft won't adhere to popular licenses like the GPL, why would they adhere my own licensing terms? If my licenses mean nothing, why would I release my work in a form that will be ripped off by a trillion dollar company without any attribution, compensation or even a license to do so? The incentives to create and share are diminished by companies that won't respect the terms you've released your creations under. That's just me as an individual. Thinking in terms of for-profit companies, many of them would choose not to share their source code if they know their competitors can ignore their licenses, slurp it up and regurgitate it at an incomprehensible scale.
  • codebje 4y ago
    I find your comment a bit perplexing, perhaps you can help me understand. Why do you want to release code on GitHub with an oppressive license? What's the motivation for you, and what's the benefit for anyone else in it being released? The size of code fragments being generated with these AI tools is, as far as I can tell, extremely small. Do you think you could even notice if your own implementation of sqrt, comments and all, wound up in Excel?
    • account42 4y ago
      The point of copyleft licenses (which I assume are what you mean with "opressive") is to subvert copyright in order to incentivize others to share their code by providing them with something to build on if they return the favor. You cannot possibly call these licenses opressive since the default state with copyright is that you are not allowed to do much at all (at least when it comes to copying). In fact copyleft licenses allow you to do much much more than your average corp-lawyer approved proprietary license. The problem (or A problem) with copilot is that it tries to sidestep those licenses, purpotedly allowing you to build upon the work of others without giving anything back even if the work you are building on has been published on the explicit condition that what you create with it should also be shared in the same way. While the great AI tumbler makes the legal copyright infringement argument complicated by giving you lots of small bits from lots of different sources it really does not change the moral situation: you are explicitly going against the wishes of the people that are enabling you to do what you are doing. Beyond copyleft, this kind of disregard for other peoples wishes also applies to attribution even with more liberal licenses. Programming is already a field where proper attrubution is woefully lacking - we don't need to make it worse by introducing processes where it becomes much harder if not impossible to tell who contributed to the creation. Now I am all for maximum code sharing. I'm all for abolishing copyright entirely and letting everyone build what they want without being shackled by so-called intellectual property. But that is not something Microsoft is doing with Copilot. What they have created is a one way funnel from OSS to proprietary software. If Microsoft had initially trained Copilot on their own proprietary sources this would have been seen very differently. But they did not. Because the way Microsoft "loves open source" is not in the way of a mutally beneficial symbiotic relationship but that of an abuser that loves taking advantage of whatever they can with giving as little back as they can get away with.
• commoner 4y ago
  For a long time, Microsoft has used software licenses to reap profits from Windows and Office, the two products that enabled Microsoft to capture near-monopolies in their respective markets. Now, Microsoft is violating other people's software licenses to repackage the work of numerous free and open source software contributors into a proprietary product. There is nothing moral about flouting the same type of contract that you depend on every day, for the sake of generating more money. Either the entire Copilot dataset needs to be made available under a license that would be compatible with the code it was derived from (most likely AGPLv3), or Windows and Office need to be brought into the commons. Microsoft cannot have it both ways without legal repercussions.
• mbreese 4y ago
  > Morally I think this class action is dead wrong. This is how innovation dies. This legal challenge is coming one way or another. I think it’s better to get it out of the way early. At least then we will know the rules going forward, as opposed to being in some quasi-legal gray area for years.
  • D13Fd 4y ago
    I disagree. The more entrenched a practice is, like training AI models on media content, the less willing a court is going to be to take that practice away.
    • ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
      that seems like a machiavellian way of avoiding The People deciding the issue for themselves via their government representatives, and it'd just make things harder when the court takes the practice away anyways