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A hypothetical question: imagine a filmmaker, who had studied a lot of obviously copyrighted movies by famous renowned directors. This means he has trained his

A hypothetical question: imagine a filmmaker, who had studied a lot of obviously copyrighted movies by famous renowned directors. This means he has trained his neural network using their copyrighted licensed content. Does he breach copyright when he composes and films a scene? Are visual quotes copyright theft? Homages? Did George Lucas infringe copyright when he was borrowing compositions from "Triumph of the will"?

jackdaniel 4y ago
I see this argument over and over again, and it is so flawed that it is hard to bear. There is no equal sign between a person and a program. There is also that thing called "scale" that is critical to the interpretation of the action. Is eating meat fine? - maybe. Is eating all animals OK? - Hmm...
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  > Is eating meat fine? - maybe. Is eating all animals OK? - Hmm... This argument is hardly less flawed than the one you are criticizing. And you statement that 'there is no equal sign ...' is also unconvincing, as we're not equating these two, but the process of learning, which is quite similar.
  - jimktrains2 4y ago
    > but the process of learning, which is quite similar. Thats the thing, there is no reason to think that they are similar.
    - falcor84 4y ago
      What do you mean? What is this definition of "learning" that would exclude machine learning?
      - rwmj 4y ago
        Can a human read and learn every single line of code on github?
        TuringTest 4y ago
        If an excavator is digging a trench so large that no human could dig it by hand, does that mean that what the excavator is doing can't be called digging?
        rwmj 4y ago
        We can see that the way a human digs and the way an excavator digs are similar, except for the matter of scale. We don't know if the way humans study code is the same way that Copilot learns. Learning methods aside, humans do seem to be far more sophisticated about the ways they use code (understanding subtleties of copyright, attribution and so on) compared to Copilot.
        TuringTest 4y ago
        > We don't know if the way humans study code is the same way that Copilot learns. It may well be so. I was arguing with respect to your previous post, in which you stated as a relevant difference merely the size of the job.
      - jimktrains2 4y ago
        I'm not going to have an epistemological debate on what is knowledge or skill. Humans are more lossy and able to bring in much more varied knowledge and experience in ways a computer cannot. Ai/ml is not artificial general intelligence. It's a mathematical model.
        falcor84 4y ago
        I don't think we need epistemology here, and can instead keep it at the level of semantics. According to the definitions I'm use to, an AI/ML system is not just a mathematical model, but rather a concrete implementation of an information processing system, which when treated as a black box also applies to a brain.
  - jackdaniel 4y ago
    I've touched two things - that's why they were put in separate paragraphs. Let me spell it out in different words: 1. People have certain rights, duties and prohibitions. Equating the right of George Lucas to use ideas he saw with rights of a machine to do that misses the point by the same measure as asserting that MS enslaves the copilot, but in the opposite direction. 2. Scale does matter. If I'm an ordinary person then the act of eating won't ruin the ecosystem. Now imagine a construct that operates under the same principle of eating, but its jaw, stomach and speed of eating is many magnitudes larger - do we apply same limitations to both, because the principle of eating is the same? Also, since I'm spelling things out, the fact that I'm seeing the same argument many times over, and that it is so obviously flawed, makes me think that this is a symptom of astroturfing.
    - TuringTest 4y ago
      > People have certain rights, duties and prohibitions. Equating the right of George Lucas to use ideas he saw with rights of a machine to do that misses the point Hardly relevant, given that the machine has no rights, so no one is equating those with anything. The point is that the machine is doing automated learning on behalf of the developers who are training it, so what should be decided is whether those very human people have a right to train their model in that way.
      - jackdaniel 4y ago
        The op hypothetical assertion was that there is no difference between person and machine being 'inspired' by some creative work, so if we don't pursue George Lucas then why would we pursue copilot? And the thing is that the machine does not benefit from the same rights as a person, so we can't absolve MS from responsibility because "it does a similar thing to what people do". So, to add one more point to spell out: the context matters! ;)
  - hoseja 4y ago
    You're right. One is eating meat, the other is slaughtering all wildlife in an industrial meatgrinder.
- albertzeyer 4y ago
  The question is not whether a person is equal to a program. The question is whether a person is doing the same as Copilot for this particular case, i.e. reading source code to learn. You have not really given any argument why this is not the case. Or maybe your reference to scale? So only because Copilot has read more code than a human possibly could, that makes it different? But why exactly is reading a bit of code fine w.r.t. copyright, but reading more code suddenly violates copyright? Note that the reason why Copilot needs more code to learn is just because the learning currently is not as efficient as for humans.
  - TuringTest 4y ago
    > But why exactly is reading a bit of code fine w.r.t. copyright, but reading more code suddenly violates copyright? In all fairness, the article mentions the Fair Use doctrine. You could make the argument that reading a bit of code is allowed, but doing it at a large scale would not be covered as an exemption to copyright.
    - albertzeyer 4y ago
      But where is the limit then? Counting all the code I have read in my life, it's also quite a lot.
uklgrant 4y ago
Humans are not neural networks, that's just a thesis. Even novelists do not sit all day long in a closed room reading other people's work and then do a collage of what they've read. Otherwise no books would have been written in the first place. Cut the AI off humans' work, let it interact with the real world and see what it produces. It will be nothing. Once (if ever?) an AI is capable of producing an actual original work, I'm fine with other AIs stealing from the first one. Please leave humans alone.
- nomilk 4y ago
  > Humans are not neural networks That's correct, but it misses the point. This is about reconciling 1. being allowed but 2. not being allowed: 1. The human uses a machine, where the machine is an organic one it grew itself. 2. The human uses a machine, where the machine is one it made or acquired. To a lot of us, there's no difference.
- carpenecopinum 4y ago
  > Cut the AI off humans' work, let it interact with the real world and see what it produces. It will be nothing. That "experiment" could just as well be done on humans, though, cut them off of any work that any human has done before and you may get simple cave paintings, if you're lucky.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Do not underestimate the instincts of any living being. The implicit knowledge and the foundation carried with every one of us is immense. Monkeys have evolved enough to start making their own tools [0]. [0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/monkeys-make-stone-ldquo-tools-rdquo-that-bear-a-striking-resemblance-to-early-human-artifacts/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/monkeys-make-ston...
  - jimktrains2 4y ago
    Simple cave paintings are much more than nothing.
  - sensanaty 4y ago
6stringmerc 4y ago
No. Next hypothetical.
- tsukikage 4y ago
  The production of anime music videos is a fan activity where tiny clips from animated shows are pasted together, with a piece of music replacing the audio track. The result is typically 3-4 minutes long. The audio may or may not be original; regardless, the video content never is, barring some very very light editing. These can be quite inventive works; nevertheless, no-one seriously argues that the video content does not breach the original animators' copyright. The video content of an amv is a much better analogy for what copilot does to third parties' code than anything else I've seen in this post's discussion so far.
orangesite 4y ago
Your magic box is not a film maker and the inputs you are encoding with it are verbatim file content. Said content belonging to someone else. Please study the series of events that unfolded in the music industry after folk begun incorporating recordings made by other artists in their own work and proceeded to sell the result. Spoiler: The deeply nuanced question of feeding a mechanical recording through a series of complex physical and mathematical apparatus and whether that constituted a transformational creative act did not come up during the proceedings or final judgements!
- nomilk 4y ago
  > Said content belonging to someone else. Is CoPilot just trained on OSS, or on private repos too?
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Just on public repositories, as far as I know, however regardless of license. There are GPL repositories which force you to open your code, which is one aspect, and there are "source available" repositories, which allows you to see the code, but forbids everything else. There are a lot of blurry areas about this, and in my opinion, an AI learns like a human is not a solid basis for fair use. On the other hand, if private repositories are crawled too, this would be very, very bad.
    - ufo 4y ago
      There is also plenty on code on the training set that violates OSS licenses (e.g. copying code without attribution)
      - bayindirh 4y ago
        Yes, however humans making mistakes knowingly or unknowingly doesn't make what Copilot does right. We just talked this with a couple of friends. I always cite what I got from where (it's just two occasions, but it's not zero), and always respect their licenses. I'm worried about both ways of the permeation: GPL to closed and closed to open. Open source is a widely misunderstood concept and people (and companies) are using that misunderstanding to validate their blanket options. That's wrong on so many (legal to ethical, and everything in between) levels. Emulator writers are afraid to read leaked console code, because any resemblance of their code to it means destruction of years (or decades) of reverse engineering and clean room development done in that domain. If code licensing is that important and crucial, why a court tested license (e.g. GPL) is so worthless? Is this fair, again in the same cross-section (legal to ethical)? There's a lot to be discussed, and a lot of ideas to be re-learnt here. Open Source (or precisely Free / Copylefted software) doesn't mean free for all. We need to understand that.
ssivark 4y ago
Just because machine learning uses the word “learning” doesn’t mean it “learns” in the same way a human mind does — that analogy is doing a lot of load bearing in your argument, and needs proving why the program’s nature of creative remixing (for lack of a better word) is the same as a human’s. Right now it seems like you’re just reusing the same word for two phenomena we don’t understand, and therefore claiming they’re equivalent. See Marvin Minsky’s comment regarding “suitcase words”.
- albertzeyer 4y ago
  But effectively learning here really means the same thing: Based on the input (source code), you will adapt the synaptic weights between neurons, in a similar way for humans and for the artificial neural networks. Of course, it's not exactly the same. There are some differences in the details, and the artificial neural network is really much more simplified, and thus also less efficient at learning. But why is this relevant for the copyright question?
  - belorn 4y ago
    I can easily write an simplistic suggestion algorithm by doing the following: Hash the content. If the content has been viewed by the user in the past, halve the numerical hash value. Then sort the list. Doing this to a music list will create a list that is biased toward music the user has listened to before but will still seem random enough to look like intelligent suggestion that the system has learned to identify. It is just math that mimics learning.
    - albertzeyer 4y ago
      How is this relevant to what I wrote? You are not learning with a neural network in your example. You are not adapting synaptic weights.
      - belorn 4y ago
        {a_{j}(t+1)=f(a_{j}(t),p_{j}(t),\theta _{j}),} The mathematics of artificial neural networks is math. It is only math. One can make it very complex or very simple but in the end it is just math and pointers.
jules 4y ago
I bet he would if his movie scene is pixel for pixel identical to the scene he watched.
polaris64 4y ago
A difference is that I can't just spin up a copy of George Lucas on my GPU in seconds and request it to produce something from a prompt like "a disappointing prequel".
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  > A difference is that I can't just spin up a copy of George Lucas ... yet.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
The beauty of the law is that it does not take such philosophical things into consideration. The only thing that matters is the text of the law and it's documented interpretation in various court cases. That's why copyright is excluded from this court case because there are a lot of documented interpretations of fair use. Which also apply here. The simple layman's version of copyright is that copyright applies to a specific form of a thing and not about the ideas behind that thing. So, no, George Lucas was not infringing anything. Nor is hip hop music making use of samples infringing anything. Or Andy Warhol integrating photos into his works. Nor is it illegal to paraphrase or refer other authors. And as Oracle found out by challenging it in court, trying to claim ownership over APIs to prevent third party implementations is also not going to work. All of that falls under fair use. Fair use is what makes copyright useful. Without it you'd have to live in fear that legal copyright holders might come after you if you apply the ideas that you might have been exposed to via their copyrighted work. Fair use exists such that you can make use of information provided to you via a copyrighted work.
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  All those examples you give are transformative in some way or other. It's an interesting test of open source licensing because I'm not aware of any other area of copyright where works come with an explicit "if you use this somewhere else you must credit me as the initial author" in the implied/provided license. Comparing music, literature, etc. to code is difficult because of both this difference and the existence of software patents. The manner in which infringement happens (and the scale) is often different as well.
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    Actually, it might be challenging to programmers to grasp but it's a lot easier for a non technical judge. Same difference and easy comparison: Specific form and fair use. Nothing else matters. Two very simple concepts with a long history of being challenged in courts. There's nothing new here for a judge to consider. The specific form here is small blurbs of code that are suggested to end users by Github. Does that constitute a copyright violation? Answer no, because it's a small sample that falls under fair use. It doesn't matter whether it's music, literature, or code. Fair use is fair use. And it's been challenged so often that no judge is going to make any exceptions just because we are now dealing with software. End of story. No basis for any copyright infringement here. Not even worth trying out in a court because you'd be laughed away. The plaintiffs in this case clearly realized that and did not bother with even trying to prove otherwise. Software patents are not part of this court case either for the obvious reason that the vast majority of copyright holders in this case don't actually hold any patents whatsoever. And if they would, it would not be Github's problem but the problem of those creating possibly infringing products without a license. Github just gives people access to (public) knowledge here. That's what a patent is: public knowledge. It's up to the user to decide if they are OK shipping products that include that. And it's their problem to do any due diligence.
badcppdev 4y ago
I like the scenario: Imagine I've hired an assistant with an eidetic memory who has read loads of books. I pay them to help me write a book and they reproduce a few paragraphs from a different book into my book. Am I violating copyright? Yes Imagine they change the character names in those paragraphs. Am I still violating copyright? Yes At some point you can change enough of the text to not violate copyright. The grey area involves the courts. It feels very simple to me so I might be missing something.
- q-big 4y ago
  > At some point you can change enough of the text to not violate copyright. The grey area involves the courts. > It feels very simple to me so I might be missing something. In my opinion, you are missing something subtle: In continental Europe, there is a different law tradition - civil law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system) ) - that is different from the Anglo-American common law tradition. To quote from the wikipedia article: "The civil law system is often contrasted with the common law system, which originated in medieval England, whose intellectual framework historically came from uncodified judge-made case law, and gives precedential authority to prior court decisions. [...] Conceptually, civil law proceeds from abstractions, formulates general principles, and distinguishes substantive rules from procedural rules. It holds case law secondary and subordinate to statutory law." So if you are attached to the civil law system, you seriously want to avoid this grey area involving the courts (which is much more accepted in common law) and instead want to codify into laws what you mean by this grey area.
dathinab 4y ago
If him "composing a scene" means copy pasting clips of the movies he studied and smooth things over, then yes that would be obvious infringement. And that is what copoilots AI mostly does. It doesn't "understand the concepts and reproduce something alike" in the sense a human does. It might understand some concepts here and there but it also does a lot of heavy lifting my verbatim "remembering" (i.e. copy pasting) code. This is also why some people argue that the cases for copilot and some of the image generation networks are different as some of the image generation networks get much closer to "understanding and reproducing a style". (Through potentially just by it being much easier to blend over copy-pasted snippets in images to a point its unrecognizable.) One of the main problems GitHub has IMHO is that anyone who has studied such generative methods knows that: 1) they are prone to copy-pasting 2) you don't know what they remembered (i.e. stored copies of in a obscure human unreadable encoding, i.e. just distributing such a network can be a copyright infrigement) 3) you don't know when they copy past 4) the copy pasted code often is a bit obscured, ironically (and coincidentally) often comparable with how someone who knowingly commits copyright theft would obscure the code to avoid automated detection Which means GitHub knowingly accepted and continued with tricking its copilote users into committing copyright infringement under the assumption that such infringement is most times obscured enough to evade automatic detection....
sensanaty 4y ago
Philosophical bullshitting aside (and it really is philosophical bullshitting), I just genuinely don't care if a human or a machine "think" or "learn" in the same way. I don't want Github or any other megacorp-backed entity abusing the open source community in the way micro$oft is here, it's as simple as that. If they wish to train it on entirely proprietary Microsoft code, then by all means go nuts, but to take the work of open source projects and to hide behind the pretense of the mathematical model behind the A"I" learning something is simply ridiculous to me. I find it quite curious that they're not doing that (training it on their own codebase). Perhaps they're afraid of their little intelligence spitting out proprietary code verbatim like it's been shown to do many times with licensed open source code.

jackdaniel 4y ago

I see this argument over and over again, and it is so flawed that it is hard to bear. There is no equal sign between a person and a program. There is also that thing called "scale" that is critical to the interpretation of the action. Is eating meat fine? - maybe. Is eating all animals OK? - Hmm...

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
> Is eating meat fine? - maybe. Is eating all animals OK? - Hmm... This argument is hardly less flawed than the one you are criticizing. And you statement that 'there is no equal sign ...' is also unconvincing, as we're not equating these two, but the process of learning, which is quite similar.
- jimktrains2 4y ago
  > but the process of learning, which is quite similar. Thats the thing, there is no reason to think that they are similar.
  - falcor84 4y ago
    What do you mean? What is this definition of "learning" that would exclude machine learning?
    - rwmj 4y ago
      Can a human read and learn every single line of code on github?
      - TuringTest 4y ago
        If an excavator is digging a trench so large that no human could dig it by hand, does that mean that what the excavator is doing can't be called digging?
        rwmj 4y ago
        We can see that the way a human digs and the way an excavator digs are similar, except for the matter of scale. We don't know if the way humans study code is the same way that Copilot learns. Learning methods aside, humans do seem to be far more sophisticated about the ways they use code (understanding subtleties of copyright, attribution and so on) compared to Copilot.
        TuringTest 4y ago
        > We don't know if the way humans study code is the same way that Copilot learns. It may well be so. I was arguing with respect to your previous post, in which you stated as a relevant difference merely the size of the job.
    - jimktrains2 4y ago
      I'm not going to have an epistemological debate on what is knowledge or skill. Humans are more lossy and able to bring in much more varied knowledge and experience in ways a computer cannot. Ai/ml is not artificial general intelligence. It's a mathematical model.
      - falcor84 4y ago
        I don't think we need epistemology here, and can instead keep it at the level of semantics. According to the definitions I'm use to, an AI/ML system is not just a mathematical model, but rather a concrete implementation of an information processing system, which when treated as a black box also applies to a brain.
- jackdaniel 4y ago
  I've touched two things - that's why they were put in separate paragraphs. Let me spell it out in different words: 1. People have certain rights, duties and prohibitions. Equating the right of George Lucas to use ideas he saw with rights of a machine to do that misses the point by the same measure as asserting that MS enslaves the copilot, but in the opposite direction. 2. Scale does matter. If I'm an ordinary person then the act of eating won't ruin the ecosystem. Now imagine a construct that operates under the same principle of eating, but its jaw, stomach and speed of eating is many magnitudes larger - do we apply same limitations to both, because the principle of eating is the same? Also, since I'm spelling things out, the fact that I'm seeing the same argument many times over, and that it is so obviously flawed, makes me think that this is a symptom of astroturfing.
  - TuringTest 4y ago
    > People have certain rights, duties and prohibitions. Equating the right of George Lucas to use ideas he saw with rights of a machine to do that misses the point Hardly relevant, given that the machine has no rights, so no one is equating those with anything. The point is that the machine is doing automated learning on behalf of the developers who are training it, so what should be decided is whether those very human people have a right to train their model in that way.
    - jackdaniel 4y ago
      The op hypothetical assertion was that there is no difference between person and machine being 'inspired' by some creative work, so if we don't pursue George Lucas then why would we pursue copilot? And the thing is that the machine does not benefit from the same rights as a person, so we can't absolve MS from responsibility because "it does a similar thing to what people do". So, to add one more point to spell out: the context matters! ;)
- hoseja 4y ago
  You're right. One is eating meat, the other is slaughtering all wildlife in an industrial meatgrinder.
albertzeyer 4y ago
The question is not whether a person is equal to a program. The question is whether a person is doing the same as Copilot for this particular case, i.e. reading source code to learn. You have not really given any argument why this is not the case. Or maybe your reference to scale? So only because Copilot has read more code than a human possibly could, that makes it different? But why exactly is reading a bit of code fine w.r.t. copyright, but reading more code suddenly violates copyright? Note that the reason why Copilot needs more code to learn is just because the learning currently is not as efficient as for humans.
- TuringTest 4y ago
  > But why exactly is reading a bit of code fine w.r.t. copyright, but reading more code suddenly violates copyright? In all fairness, the article mentions the Fair Use doctrine. You could make the argument that reading a bit of code is allowed, but doing it at a large scale would not be covered as an exemption to copyright.
  - albertzeyer 4y ago
    But where is the limit then? Counting all the code I have read in my life, it's also quite a lot.

uklgrant 4y ago

Humans are not neural networks, that's just a thesis. Even novelists do not sit all day long in a closed room reading other people's work and then do a collage of what they've read. Otherwise no books would have been written in the first place. Cut the AI off humans' work, let it interact with the real world and see what it produces. It will be nothing. Once (if ever?) an AI is capable of producing an actual original work, I'm fine with other AIs stealing from the first one. Please leave humans alone.

nomilk 4y ago
> Humans are not neural networks That's correct, but it misses the point. This is about reconciling 1. being allowed but 2. not being allowed: 1. The human uses a machine, where the machine is an organic one it grew itself. 2. The human uses a machine, where the machine is one it made or acquired. To a lot of us, there's no difference.
carpenecopinum 4y ago
> Cut the AI off humans' work, let it interact with the real world and see what it produces. It will be nothing. That "experiment" could just as well be done on humans, though, cut them off of any work that any human has done before and you may get simple cave paintings, if you're lucky.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Do not underestimate the instincts of any living being. The implicit knowledge and the foundation carried with every one of us is immense. Monkeys have evolved enough to start making their own tools [0]. [0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/monkeys-make-stone-ldquo-tools-rdquo-that-bear-a-striking-resemblance-to-early-human-artifacts/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/monkeys-make-ston...
- jimktrains2 4y ago
  Simple cave paintings are much more than nothing.
- sensanaty 4y ago

6stringmerc 4y ago

No. Next hypothetical.

tsukikage 4y ago
The production of anime music videos is a fan activity where tiny clips from animated shows are pasted together, with a piece of music replacing the audio track. The result is typically 3-4 minutes long. The audio may or may not be original; regardless, the video content never is, barring some very very light editing. These can be quite inventive works; nevertheless, no-one seriously argues that the video content does not breach the original animators' copyright. The video content of an amv is a much better analogy for what copilot does to third parties' code than anything else I've seen in this post's discussion so far.

orangesite 4y ago

Your magic box is not a film maker and the inputs you are encoding with it are verbatim file content. Said content belonging to someone else. Please study the series of events that unfolded in the music industry after folk begun incorporating recordings made by other artists in their own work and proceeded to sell the result. Spoiler: The deeply nuanced question of feeding a mechanical recording through a series of complex physical and mathematical apparatus and whether that constituted a transformational creative act did not come up during the proceedings or final judgements!

nomilk 4y ago
> Said content belonging to someone else. Is CoPilot just trained on OSS, or on private repos too?
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Just on public repositories, as far as I know, however regardless of license. There are GPL repositories which force you to open your code, which is one aspect, and there are "source available" repositories, which allows you to see the code, but forbids everything else. There are a lot of blurry areas about this, and in my opinion, an AI learns like a human is not a solid basis for fair use. On the other hand, if private repositories are crawled too, this would be very, very bad.
  - ufo 4y ago
    There is also plenty on code on the training set that violates OSS licenses (e.g. copying code without attribution)
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      Yes, however humans making mistakes knowingly or unknowingly doesn't make what Copilot does right. We just talked this with a couple of friends. I always cite what I got from where (it's just two occasions, but it's not zero), and always respect their licenses. I'm worried about both ways of the permeation: GPL to closed and closed to open. Open source is a widely misunderstood concept and people (and companies) are using that misunderstanding to validate their blanket options. That's wrong on so many (legal to ethical, and everything in between) levels. Emulator writers are afraid to read leaked console code, because any resemblance of their code to it means destruction of years (or decades) of reverse engineering and clean room development done in that domain. If code licensing is that important and crucial, why a court tested license (e.g. GPL) is so worthless? Is this fair, again in the same cross-section (legal to ethical)? There's a lot to be discussed, and a lot of ideas to be re-learnt here. Open Source (or precisely Free / Copylefted software) doesn't mean free for all. We need to understand that.

ssivark 4y ago

Just because machine learning uses the word “learning” doesn’t mean it “learns” in the same way a human mind does — that analogy is doing a lot of load bearing in your argument, and needs proving why the program’s nature of creative remixing (for lack of a better word) is the same as a human’s. Right now it seems like you’re just reusing the same word for two phenomena we don’t understand, and therefore claiming they’re equivalent. See Marvin Minsky’s comment regarding “suitcase words”.

albertzeyer 4y ago
But effectively learning here really means the same thing: Based on the input (source code), you will adapt the synaptic weights between neurons, in a similar way for humans and for the artificial neural networks. Of course, it's not exactly the same. There are some differences in the details, and the artificial neural network is really much more simplified, and thus also less efficient at learning. But why is this relevant for the copyright question?
- belorn 4y ago
  I can easily write an simplistic suggestion algorithm by doing the following: Hash the content. If the content has been viewed by the user in the past, halve the numerical hash value. Then sort the list. Doing this to a music list will create a list that is biased toward music the user has listened to before but will still seem random enough to look like intelligent suggestion that the system has learned to identify. It is just math that mimics learning.
  - albertzeyer 4y ago
    How is this relevant to what I wrote? You are not learning with a neural network in your example. You are not adapting synaptic weights.
    - belorn 4y ago
      {a_{j}(t+1)=f(a_{j}(t),p_{j}(t),\theta _{j}),} The mathematics of artificial neural networks is math. It is only math. One can make it very complex or very simple but in the end it is just math and pointers.

jules 4y ago

I bet he would if his movie scene is pixel for pixel identical to the scene he watched.

polaris64 4y ago

A difference is that I can't just spin up a copy of George Lucas on my GPU in seconds and request it to produce something from a prompt like "a disappointing prequel".

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
> A difference is that I can't just spin up a copy of George Lucas ... yet.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

The beauty of the law is that it does not take such philosophical things into consideration. The only thing that matters is the text of the law and it's documented interpretation in various court cases. That's why copyright is excluded from this court case because there are a lot of documented interpretations of fair use. Which also apply here. The simple layman's version of copyright is that copyright applies to a specific form of a thing and not about the ideas behind that thing. So, no, George Lucas was not infringing anything. Nor is hip hop music making use of samples infringing anything. Or Andy Warhol integrating photos into his works. Nor is it illegal to paraphrase or refer other authors. And as Oracle found out by challenging it in court, trying to claim ownership over APIs to prevent third party implementations is also not going to work. All of that falls under fair use. Fair use is what makes copyright useful. Without it you'd have to live in fear that legal copyright holders might come after you if you apply the ideas that you might have been exposed to via their copyrighted work. Fair use exists such that you can make use of information provided to you via a copyrighted work.

BeefWellington 4y ago
All those examples you give are transformative in some way or other. It's an interesting test of open source licensing because I'm not aware of any other area of copyright where works come with an explicit "if you use this somewhere else you must credit me as the initial author" in the implied/provided license. Comparing music, literature, etc. to code is difficult because of both this difference and the existence of software patents. The manner in which infringement happens (and the scale) is often different as well.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Actually, it might be challenging to programmers to grasp but it's a lot easier for a non technical judge. Same difference and easy comparison: Specific form and fair use. Nothing else matters. Two very simple concepts with a long history of being challenged in courts. There's nothing new here for a judge to consider. The specific form here is small blurbs of code that are suggested to end users by Github. Does that constitute a copyright violation? Answer no, because it's a small sample that falls under fair use. It doesn't matter whether it's music, literature, or code. Fair use is fair use. And it's been challenged so often that no judge is going to make any exceptions just because we are now dealing with software. End of story. No basis for any copyright infringement here. Not even worth trying out in a court because you'd be laughed away. The plaintiffs in this case clearly realized that and did not bother with even trying to prove otherwise. Software patents are not part of this court case either for the obvious reason that the vast majority of copyright holders in this case don't actually hold any patents whatsoever. And if they would, it would not be Github's problem but the problem of those creating possibly infringing products without a license. Github just gives people access to (public) knowledge here. That's what a patent is: public knowledge. It's up to the user to decide if they are OK shipping products that include that. And it's their problem to do any due diligence.

badcppdev 4y ago

I like the scenario: Imagine I've hired an assistant with an eidetic memory who has read loads of books. I pay them to help me write a book and they reproduce a few paragraphs from a different book into my book. Am I violating copyright? Yes Imagine they change the character names in those paragraphs. Am I still violating copyright? Yes At some point you can change enough of the text to not violate copyright. The grey area involves the courts. It feels very simple to me so I might be missing something.

q-big 4y ago
> At some point you can change enough of the text to not violate copyright. The grey area involves the courts. > It feels very simple to me so I might be missing something. In my opinion, you are missing something subtle: In continental Europe, there is a different law tradition - civil law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system) ) - that is different from the Anglo-American common law tradition. To quote from the wikipedia article: "The civil law system is often contrasted with the common law system, which originated in medieval England, whose intellectual framework historically came from uncodified judge-made case law, and gives precedential authority to prior court decisions. [...] Conceptually, civil law proceeds from abstractions, formulates general principles, and distinguishes substantive rules from procedural rules. It holds case law secondary and subordinate to statutory law." So if you are attached to the civil law system, you seriously want to avoid this grey area involving the courts (which is much more accepted in common law) and instead want to codify into laws what you mean by this grey area.

dathinab 4y ago

If him "composing a scene" means copy pasting clips of the movies he studied and smooth things over, then yes that would be obvious infringement. And that is what copoilots AI mostly does. It doesn't "understand the concepts and reproduce something alike" in the sense a human does. It might understand some concepts here and there but it also does a lot of heavy lifting my verbatim "remembering" (i.e. copy pasting) code. This is also why some people argue that the cases for copilot and some of the image generation networks are different as some of the image generation networks get much closer to "understanding and reproducing a style". (Through potentially just by it being much easier to blend over copy-pasted snippets in images to a point its unrecognizable.) One of the main problems GitHub has IMHO is that anyone who has studied such generative methods knows that: 1) they are prone to copy-pasting 2) you don't know what they remembered (i.e. stored copies of in a obscure human unreadable encoding, i.e. just distributing such a network can be a copyright infrigement) 3) you don't know when they copy past 4) the copy pasted code often is a bit obscured, ironically (and coincidentally) often comparable with how someone who knowingly commits copyright theft would obscure the code to avoid automated detection Which means GitHub knowingly accepted and continued with tricking its copilote users into committing copyright infringement under the assumption that such infringement is most times obscured enough to evade automatic detection....

sensanaty 4y ago

Philosophical bullshitting aside (and it really is philosophical bullshitting), I just genuinely don't care if a human or a machine "think" or "learn" in the same way. I don't want Github or any other megacorp-backed entity abusing the open source community in the way micro$oft is here, it's as simple as that. If they wish to train it on entirely proprietary Microsoft code, then by all means go nuts, but to take the work of open source projects and to hide behind the pretense of the mathematical model behind the A"I" learning something is simply ridiculous to me. I find it quite curious that they're not doing that (training it on their own codebase). Perhaps they're afraid of their little intelligence spitting out proprietary code verbatim like it's been shown to do many times with licensed open source code.