4 ms·

> The range of possible outcomes is enormous The most likely of which – if this lawsuit ends up winning – is that corporations will have new ways to sue everyo

> The range of possible outcomes is enormous The most likely of which – if this lawsuit ends up winning – is that corporations will have new ways to sue everyone and that the world will be a worse place. Copyright expansion has never benefited the "little guy" such as Open Source authors, only large entities with deep pockets who can litigate to no end.

ralph84 4y ago
Agreed. It's quite bemusing how so many people are now copyright maximalists because they somehow think Microsoft will be hurt in such a world.
jacquesm 4y ago
It's not so much copyright expansion as it is copyright re-affirmation. In this case it is especially open source authors whose rights are in play. Keep in mind that all of open source relies on copyright, without that everything is PD from Microsofts point of view, if they hosted it. Think of Copilot as a trial balloon, if they get away with it they will likely use that as the stepping stone to the next level and bit by bit your rights are salamied out of existence. This is the first slice, it should stop right here.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  I don't see any rights being taken away from me. CoPilot doesn't copy my code, it just learns from it, just as you can. "Others can learn from this" is one reason I release stuff as open source in the first place. People will quote that John Carmack Doom example where it copies the function verbatim, but as far as I can tell that's a rare thing, and it's a function that's been widely copied around without proper licensing; a human could also get it wrong by copying it from github.com/random-person/mit-project with the wrong license (and since then there's also been work to prevent this kind of thing). Co-pilot isn't unique, or the first AI/ML project to use copyrighted works; all the GPT models use copyrighted works as their input. Some doubts have been raised over the legality of that too, but it's received nowhere near the amount of criticism that Co-Pilot has, certainly not on HN, and I've never seen anyone doubt the morality of it – only the legality. If you were to go through my public open source code I'm sure you can find stuff that's very similar to some code from my previous employers or other open source projects. Not because I copy/pasted anything, but because my brain was trained on that dataset: you see or write something that works, you face a similar problem a few years later, you write a similar solution. "Using existing works as input" is common throughout creative works. As Phil Anselmo once said: "with Pantera we took our five favourite bands and ripped 'em off to hell". People are already getting sued because "that one melody sounds a bit similar to this other melody"; fair use is already widely ignored/disrespected. Much will depend on the exact details, but any win in this lawsuit has a very real chance of empowering that sort of nonsense.
eternalban 4y ago
One way to address this is to somehow turn "little guy" into a "giant". For labor, this was accomplished via unions. A union of creative minds seems long overdue. It can provide a copyright trust, addressing your concerns, as well as removing the excuse of inability to get permission from n thousand creators used. It can also address matter beyond OSS, such as overreaching employment agreement clauses that assert ownership of everything in your head. [Possibly 'trust' is more suitable than 'union'. Something like Creative Commons Trust.]
- Aerroon 4y ago
  Then you consider that there are many countries in the world and the whole system breaks down. Sorry, we don't allow this copyrighted code to your country!

ralph84 4y ago

Agreed. It's quite bemusing how so many people are now copyright maximalists because they somehow think Microsoft will be hurt in such a world.

jacquesm 4y ago

It's not so much copyright expansion as it is copyright re-affirmation. In this case it is especially open source authors whose rights are in play. Keep in mind that all of open source relies on copyright, without that everything is PD from Microsofts point of view, if they hosted it. Think of Copilot as a trial balloon, if they get away with it they will likely use that as the stepping stone to the next level and bit by bit your rights are salamied out of existence. This is the first slice, it should stop right here.

Beltalowda 4y ago
I don't see any rights being taken away from me. CoPilot doesn't copy my code, it just learns from it, just as you can. "Others can learn from this" is one reason I release stuff as open source in the first place. People will quote that John Carmack Doom example where it copies the function verbatim, but as far as I can tell that's a rare thing, and it's a function that's been widely copied around without proper licensing; a human could also get it wrong by copying it from github.com/random-person/mit-project with the wrong license (and since then there's also been work to prevent this kind of thing). Co-pilot isn't unique, or the first AI/ML project to use copyrighted works; all the GPT models use copyrighted works as their input. Some doubts have been raised over the legality of that too, but it's received nowhere near the amount of criticism that Co-Pilot has, certainly not on HN, and I've never seen anyone doubt the morality of it – only the legality. If you were to go through my public open source code I'm sure you can find stuff that's very similar to some code from my previous employers or other open source projects. Not because I copy/pasted anything, but because my brain was trained on that dataset: you see or write something that works, you face a similar problem a few years later, you write a similar solution. "Using existing works as input" is common throughout creative works. As Phil Anselmo once said: "with Pantera we took our five favourite bands and ripped 'em off to hell". People are already getting sued because "that one melody sounds a bit similar to this other melody"; fair use is already widely ignored/disrespected. Much will depend on the exact details, but any win in this lawsuit has a very real chance of empowering that sort of nonsense.

eternalban 4y ago

One way to address this is to somehow turn "little guy" into a "giant". For labor, this was accomplished via unions. A union of creative minds seems long overdue. It can provide a copyright trust, addressing your concerns, as well as removing the excuse of inability to get permission from n thousand creators used. It can also address matter beyond OSS, such as overreaching employment agreement clauses that assert ownership of everything in your head. [Possibly 'trust' is more suitable than 'union'. Something like Creative Commons Trust.]

Aerroon 4y ago
Then you consider that there are many countries in the world and the whole system breaks down. Sorry, we don't allow this copyrighted code to your country!