4 ms·

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
      - bobbruno 4y ago
        I believe this is the core point of the lawsuit - is Copilot really creating code from what it learned (which happens to, by some weird glitch, mimic the source code) or is it just a big overfitting model that learned to encode and memorize a large number of answers and spit them out verbatim when prompted? I think that losing this lawsuit has much more serious consequences for Copilot than just having to connect to a list of millions of potential copyright owners - it would mean the model behind it is essentially a failure. Personal opinion: the real situation lies somewhere in the middle. From what I’ve seen, I think Copilot has some ability to actually generate code, or at least adapt and connect unrelated code pieces it remembers to respond to prompts - but I also believe it just “remembers” (i.e., has a close-to-lossless encoding of the input) how to do some operations and spits them out as part of the response to some prompts. I hardly think the lawsuit will really explore this discussion, but it sounds like a great investigation into what DL models like transformers actually learn. For all I know, it might even give insight into how we learn. I have no reason to believe that humans don’t use the same strategy of memorising some operations and learning how to adjust them “at the edges” to combine them.
        still_grokking 4y ago
        I don't think that anybody will try to answer the philosophical question in what regard what this machine does has anything to do with human reasoning. In the end it's just a machine. It's not a person. So trying to anthropomorphize this case makes no sense from the get go. Looking at it this way (and I guess this is the right way to look at it from the law standpoint) Copilot is just a fancy database. It's a database full of copyrighted work… How this database (and it's query system) works from the technical viewpoint isn't relevant. It just makes no difference as by law machines aren't people. End of story. But should the curt (to my extreme surprise) rule that what MS did was "fair use" than the flood gates of "fairuseify through ML"[1] would be open. Given the history of copyright and/or other IP laws in the US this just won't happen! The US won't ever accept that someone would be allowed to grab all Mikey Mouse movies put them into some AI and start to create new Mikey Mouse movies. That's the unthinkable. Just imagine what this would mean. You could "launder" any copyrighted work just by uploading and re-querying it form some "ML-based database system". That would be the end of copyright. This just won't happen. MS is going lose this trail. There is no other option. The only real question is how severe their loose will be. They used for sure also AGPLv4 code for training. Thinking this through to the end with all consequences would mean that large chunks of MS's infrastructure, and all supporting code, which means more or less all of Azure, which means more or less all of MS's software, would need to be offered in (usable!) source to all users of Copilot. I think this won't happen. I expect the court to find a way to weasel out of this consequence. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220121020414/fairuseify.ml/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220121020414/fairuseify.ml/

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
    - bobbruno 4y ago
      I believe this is the core point of the lawsuit - is Copilot really creating code from what it learned (which happens to, by some weird glitch, mimic the source code) or is it just a big overfitting model that learned to encode and memorize a large number of answers and spit them out verbatim when prompted? I think that losing this lawsuit has much more serious consequences for Copilot than just having to connect to a list of millions of potential copyright owners - it would mean the model behind it is essentially a failure. Personal opinion: the real situation lies somewhere in the middle. From what I’ve seen, I think Copilot has some ability to actually generate code, or at least adapt and connect unrelated code pieces it remembers to respond to prompts - but I also believe it just “remembers” (i.e., has a close-to-lossless encoding of the input) how to do some operations and spits them out as part of the response to some prompts. I hardly think the lawsuit will really explore this discussion, but it sounds like a great investigation into what DL models like transformers actually learn. For all I know, it might even give insight into how we learn. I have no reason to believe that humans don’t use the same strategy of memorising some operations and learning how to adjust them “at the edges” to combine them.
      - still_grokking 4y ago
        I don't think that anybody will try to answer the philosophical question in what regard what this machine does has anything to do with human reasoning. In the end it's just a machine. It's not a person. So trying to anthropomorphize this case makes no sense from the get go. Looking at it this way (and I guess this is the right way to look at it from the law standpoint) Copilot is just a fancy database. It's a database full of copyrighted work… How this database (and it's query system) works from the technical viewpoint isn't relevant. It just makes no difference as by law machines aren't people. End of story. But should the curt (to my extreme surprise) rule that what MS did was "fair use" than the flood gates of "fairuseify through ML"[1] would be open. Given the history of copyright and/or other IP laws in the US this just won't happen! The US won't ever accept that someone would be allowed to grab all Mikey Mouse movies put them into some AI and start to create new Mikey Mouse movies. That's the unthinkable. Just imagine what this would mean. You could "launder" any copyrighted work just by uploading and re-querying it form some "ML-based database system". That would be the end of copyright. This just won't happen. MS is going lose this trail. There is no other option. The only real question is how severe their loose will be. They used for sure also AGPLv4 code for training. Thinking this through to the end with all consequences would mean that large chunks of MS's infrastructure, and all supporting code, which means more or less all of Azure, which means more or less all of MS's software, would need to be offered in (usable!) source to all users of Copilot. I think this won't happen. I expect the court to find a way to weasel out of this consequence. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220121020414/fairuseify.ml/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220121020414/fairuseify.ml/