7 ms·

>lines here that should not have been crossed without the authors explicit permission, regardless of the utility of the tool they built. Fyi... Google Books (s

• jacquesm 4y ago
  A number of points in Google's favor: they are not passing off Google books content as their own, they limit your access to a small fraction of the offering. The thing that surprised me about that ruling is that it was deemed final without a chance of an appeal.
  • b112 4y ago
    As well, Google is, because of these things, somewhat acting as a library. An libraries are very special entities.
    • toomuchtodo 4y ago
      What if a library builds AI models from the content they host? The Internet Archive, for example.
    • kmeisthax 4y ago
      Not really. Google won because Google Books was not actually a new concept; someone else had already built a book search engine the same way Google did, also got sued by the Authors Guild, and also prevailed. The only thing different about Google Books was that it'd give you two pages worth of excerpt out of the book. So it was very easy for a court to extend the fair use logic that they had already weaved into the law. I still think "training is fair use" still has a leg to stand on, though. But it doesn't save GitHub Copilot because they're not merely training a model; they're selling access to its outputs and telling people they have "full commercial rights" to its outputs (i.e. sublicensing). Fair use is not transitive; if I make 100 Google Books searches to get all the pages out of a book, I don't suddenly own the book. There is no "copyright laundry" here.
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        Precisely, that is the key point.
      • gnramires 4y ago
        > I still think "training is fair use" still has a leg to stand on, though If that's the case, we need to serious re-consider how we reward Open Source as a society (I think that would be fantastic anyway!) -- we have people producing knowledge and others profiting directly from this material, producing new content and new code that's incompatible with the original license. You make GPL code, a make an AI that learns from GPL code, shouldn't its output be GPL licensed as well? I think meanwhile the most reasonable solution is that an AI should always produce content compatible with the training material licenses. So if you want to use GPL training sets, you can only use that to create GPL-compatible code. If you use public domain (or e.g. 0BSD?) training sets, you can produce any code I guess.
        • nradov 4y ago
          If open source code authors (and other content creators) don't want their IP to be used in AI training data sets then they can simply change the license terms to prohibit that use. And if they really want to control how their IP is used then they shouldn't host it on GitHub in the first place. Of course Microsoft is going to look for ways to monetize that data.
          • b112 4y ago
            And if they really want to control how their IP is used then they shouldn't host it on GitHub in the first place No. It's called copyright, it is enforceable, and that's the control. GPL source code is available everywhere, in all formats, in textbooks, on CDs, on websites, but it is still gpl. And Microsoft doesn't get to scrub the license.
          • b3morales 4y ago
            > they can simply change the license terms to prohibit that use GitHub's argument* is not that they're following the license but that the license does not apply to their use. So they would continue to ignore any provision that says they can't use the material for training. Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740001 Moving off GitHub is a better step at a practical level. But again they claim the license doesn't matter, so even if it's hosted publicly elsewhere they would (presumably) maintain that they can still scoop it up. It just becomes more work, for them, to do so. *Which is completely wrong in my opinion, for the record
    • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
      And Google kept the copyright notices and attributions; probably not super relevant, but it's a difference between the two cases. I mean in essence Github is a library; they did have a license to a point to do with the code as they pleased, but they then started to create a derivative work in the form of an AI, without correctly crediting the source materials. I mean I think they made a gamble on it; as far as I'm aware, AI training sets were yet unchallenged in a court of law, so legally not fully defined yet. These lawsuits - and the ones (if any) aimed at the image generators, using CC artwork from e.g. artstation - will lay the legal groundwork for future AI / ML development.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      Libraries are really not very special. They mostly exist on the basis of first-sale doctrine and have to subscribe to electronic services like everyone else. Entities like the Internet Archive skate by (at least before their book lending stunt during COVID) by being non-profit and bending over backwards to respect even retrospective robots.txt instructions, meaning that it's not really worth suing them given they'll mostly do what you ask anyway. But I guarantee you that if I set up a best comic strips of all time library I'll probably be in court.
  • judge2020 4y ago
    Google also used all of this to improve their OCR algorithms, almost certainly used in Google Cloud Vision[0], but I doubt this was a consideration when deciding if it was transformative/fair use. 0: https://cloud.google.com/vision https://cloud.google.com/vision
    • tremon 4y ago
      Yet they did not build and market a service to authors that would write novels for them based on their OCR-ed catalog.
      • Jensson 4y ago
        Maybe they will? They still have that data and the kind of people to make such a service.
        • jacquesm 4y ago
          I guess we'll discuss that if and when they do.
      • Tozen 4y ago
        > Yet they did not build and market a service to authors that would write novels for them based on their OCR-ed catalog. I find this to be a very appropriate analogy. If Google had done such a thing, they would be facing the same kinds of lawsuits that Microsoft is facing now. And despite Microsoft's money, I don't see how they can wiggle their way out of this one. They basically ignored the license terms and attribution requirements of the authors. Something Microsoft would never stand for, if "the shoe was on the other foot".
      • emodendroket 4y ago
        That's not really what Copilot proposes to do either.
    • altairprime 4y ago
      Indeed; that would be an excellent topic for litigation, and they would fight it with every lawyer they have b/c it could invalidate their efforts to zero out human labor costs in all possible areas.
  • chimeracoder 4y ago
    > The thing that surprised me about that ruling is that it was deemed final without a chance of an appeal. They did appeal it. SCOTUS declined to hear the case. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/technology/google-books-case.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/technology/google-books-c...
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      Yes, sorry I could have worded that more precisely.
• nequo 4y ago
  There are two important differences. Google Books retains the bibliographical information so you can properly cite the authors or contact them for permission to use their material. And Google Books does not automatically write new books for you that you can then send off to Penguin Books or self-publish on Amazon.
  • naasking 4y ago
    Copilot also isn't retaining the actual content of the source code repositories and then deriving works from that. If I wrote a giant table of token frequencies and associative keywords by analyzing a bunch of source, and sold that to people as a "github code analysis" book, I'm pretty sure that's perfectly fine because it's not a derivative work. I'm not sure that the fact that a program can then take that associative data and generate new code doesn't suddenly make it not ok.
    • nequo 4y ago
      Yeah, I guess the court will be the real test of what is allowed here.
    • TeMPOraL 4y ago
      > If I wrote a giant table of token frequencies and associative keywords by analyzing a bunch of source, and sold that to people as a "github code analysis" book, I'm pretty sure that's perfectly fine because it's not a derivative work. That sounds to me somewhat close to "if I take an FFT of each of those copyrighted images, glue them together, and sell this as a picture, is that a derivative work?" - I'd say yes, or perhaps even a different encoding of the original work, since you can reverse the frequency domain representation and get the original spatial representation - the original images - back.
      • naasking 4y ago
        Sure, ROT13 encoding is a derivative work because the entire original work is still there, encoded. Ditto for FFT. Large language models are not that. Sometimes parts of the original works are still encoded, which we've seen when some code is reproduced verbatim, and I'm sure that happens to people as well, ie. they see some algorithm and down the road have to write something similar and end up reproducing the exact same thing. Once they iron out those wrinkles, it's not clear to me that a large language model is a directly reversible function of the original works. At least, not any more than a human learning from reading a bunch of code and then going on to have a career selling his skills at writing code. Edit: by which I mean, LLMs are lossy encodings, not lossless encodings.
• bhuga 4y ago
  > So there is some precedent that courts do look at the "utility" or "sufficiently transformative" aspect when weighing copyright infringement. Curiously, from the article, copyright infringement is not alleged: > As a final note, the complaint alleges a violation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for removal of copyright notices, attribution, and license terms, but conspicuously does not allege copyright infringement. Perhaps the plaintiffs are trying to avoid exactly this prior law?
• cyanydeez 4y ago
  GitHub is actively driving a product as opposed to duplicating and those products may go on to generate income