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I think one of the interesting things that will be covered in this lawsuit is whether the licence under which the code is released applies at all in the case of

I think one of the interesting things that will be covered in this lawsuit is whether the licence under which the code is released applies at all in the case of screen scraping. The current understanding of screen scraping is that it is allowed, despite what is in the websites terms. Effectively if a human can access the content freely without having to actively agree to a license or terms you can scrape the content. You can't republish verbatim, but you can data mine and perform an analysis and publish that. This is how the legal status of all AI training data scraped from the web is being interpreted. When it comes to open source code I suspect it will be found to be similar, if the code is freely visible on the web by a human without an active agreement to view it, then it will be possible to "scrape" it. I don't think the license the code is under will apply if that is the case. Obviously in this case is GitHub "scraping" its own site for the training data? Probably not, that may come back to bite them. This then also opens up all sorts of interesting questions of whether you can copy paste code from a website and use it internally (not republishing), despite the license attached to the code. If it is freely visible. Clearly a test case, this one, is needed to clarify the situation. And just because it's legal, it doesn't mean it's moral or ethical. We may yet see the outcome of this case change the current interpolation of legal screen scraping, it's going to be an interesting time. On top of all this there is then the question of an AI model reproducing code (or and image or music) verbatim. That obviously needs to be clarified by the courts too.

ascagnel_ 4y ago
> When it comes to open source code I suspect it will be found to be similar, if the code is freely visible on the web by a human without an active agreement to view it, then it will be possible to "scrape" it. I don't think the license the code is under will apply if that is the case. I don't see the scraping case applying here -- the idea that all human-readable code accessible on the public internet can be ingested into such a system without regard for its license would effectively mean that anything posted to the public internet is entered into the public domain, which seems ridiculous on its face (especially when the author(s) is including an explicit license alongside that code, which the scraper can theoretically also read and account for).
- visarga 4y ago
  I think we're facing a copyright extinction event. The whole concept is out of touch with the new reality - when you can generate 100 variations for your text, code or image with the click of a button, what does it even mean to hold copyright over the original? "In the style of" killed copyright in 2022.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    How many people want to read AI generated text in the style of Lord of the Rings vs how many people want to read Lord of the Rings?
    - visarga 4y ago
      Maybe it's not interesting to see what other people generate with it. I want to have chatGPT answer my questions, and reference materials when doing that. For example I could paste an article and start asking probing questions, debating it, asking for summary, ELI5, etc. It would be a research assistant and tutor.
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      If an AI can generate an infinite number of stories that take place in the LotR world and do it well and faithfully in the style of JRR Tolkien then I would happily read it. You can only read the trilogy and The Hobbit so many times.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        You'd happily read it, but that's an answer to a different question. You've already read LotR. An AI generated novel in a similar style doesn't take money from Tolkien's estate. Some people will want to read the AI generated knockoff. That number of people will usually be much smaller than the number of people who want to read the original and many of those people interested in the AI generated knockoff will also read the original.
jcranmer 4y ago
> I think one of the interesting things that will be covered in this lawsuit is whether the licence under which the code is released applies at all in the case of screen scraping. Screen scraping is essentially a question of whether or not the actions constitute something akin to hacking, which is almost completely orthogonal to copyright. The main intersection you get is that many screen scraping scenarios are about things that aren't copyrightable (the US doesn't recognize "sweat of the brow" doctrine, so databases aren't copyrightable). When Google was scraping lyrics off of lyric sites--lyrics being totally and clearly copyrightable--it was dinged pretty hard for that.
- Permit 4y ago
  > When Google was scraping lyrics off of lyric sites--lyrics being totally and clearly copyrightable--it was dinged pretty hard for that. Was google dinged for scraping the lyrics or publishing them verbatim? My understanding is that it was the latter.
hoherd 4y ago
> Effectively if a human can access the content freely without having to actively agree to a license or terms you can scrape the content. You can't republish verbatim, but you can data mine and perform an analysis and publish that. Would this apply to books? I can walk into a library or book store and OCR countless pages of countless books without agreeing to any license.
- chasing 4y ago
  Try publishing those OCRed pages and see what happens.
  - jfk13 4y ago
    As I understand it, "fair use" would allow you to do various kinds of analysis of all those pages, and to quote fragments of them in your own work, which is arguably similar to what copilot etc might do. But republishing large chunks of the content, whether verbatim or in a "derivative" form such as a translation, would generally not be allowed without explicit permission. How much "fair use" allows when it comes to copilot spitting out copies of functions it saw in somebody's repo.... well, that's a line that hasn't been defined yet, afaik.

ascagnel_ 4y ago

> When it comes to open source code I suspect it will be found to be similar, if the code is freely visible on the web by a human without an active agreement to view it, then it will be possible to "scrape" it. I don't think the license the code is under will apply if that is the case. I don't see the scraping case applying here -- the idea that all human-readable code accessible on the public internet can be ingested into such a system without regard for its license would effectively mean that anything posted to the public internet is entered into the public domain, which seems ridiculous on its face (especially when the author(s) is including an explicit license alongside that code, which the scraper can theoretically also read and account for).

visarga 4y ago
I think we're facing a copyright extinction event. The whole concept is out of touch with the new reality - when you can generate 100 variations for your text, code or image with the click of a button, what does it even mean to hold copyright over the original? "In the style of" killed copyright in 2022.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  How many people want to read AI generated text in the style of Lord of the Rings vs how many people want to read Lord of the Rings?
  - visarga 4y ago
    Maybe it's not interesting to see what other people generate with it. I want to have chatGPT answer my questions, and reference materials when doing that. For example I could paste an article and start asking probing questions, debating it, asking for summary, ELI5, etc. It would be a research assistant and tutor.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    If an AI can generate an infinite number of stories that take place in the LotR world and do it well and faithfully in the style of JRR Tolkien then I would happily read it. You can only read the trilogy and The Hobbit so many times.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      You'd happily read it, but that's an answer to a different question. You've already read LotR. An AI generated novel in a similar style doesn't take money from Tolkien's estate. Some people will want to read the AI generated knockoff. That number of people will usually be much smaller than the number of people who want to read the original and many of those people interested in the AI generated knockoff will also read the original.

jcranmer 4y ago

> I think one of the interesting things that will be covered in this lawsuit is whether the licence under which the code is released applies at all in the case of screen scraping. Screen scraping is essentially a question of whether or not the actions constitute something akin to hacking, which is almost completely orthogonal to copyright. The main intersection you get is that many screen scraping scenarios are about things that aren't copyrightable (the US doesn't recognize "sweat of the brow" doctrine, so databases aren't copyrightable). When Google was scraping lyrics off of lyric sites--lyrics being totally and clearly copyrightable--it was dinged pretty hard for that.

Permit 4y ago
> When Google was scraping lyrics off of lyric sites--lyrics being totally and clearly copyrightable--it was dinged pretty hard for that. Was google dinged for scraping the lyrics or publishing them verbatim? My understanding is that it was the latter.

hoherd 4y ago

> Effectively if a human can access the content freely without having to actively agree to a license or terms you can scrape the content. You can't republish verbatim, but you can data mine and perform an analysis and publish that. Would this apply to books? I can walk into a library or book store and OCR countless pages of countless books without agreeing to any license.

chasing 4y ago
Try publishing those OCRed pages and see what happens.
- jfk13 4y ago
  As I understand it, "fair use" would allow you to do various kinds of analysis of all those pages, and to quote fragments of them in your own work, which is arguably similar to what copilot etc might do. But republishing large chunks of the content, whether verbatim or in a "derivative" form such as a translation, would generally not be allowed without explicit permission. How much "fair use" allows when it comes to copilot spitting out copies of functions it saw in somebody's repo.... well, that's a line that hasn't been defined yet, afaik.