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> The anonymous programmers have repeatedly insisted Copilot could, and would, generate code identical to what they had written themselves, which is a key pilla

> The anonymous programmers have repeatedly insisted Copilot could, and would, generate code identical to what they had written themselves, which is a key pillar of their lawsuit since there is an identicality requirement for their DMCA claim. However, Judge Tigar earlier ruled the plaintiffs hadn't actually demonstrated instances of this happening, which prompted a dismissal of the claim with a chance to amend it. It sounds fair from how the article describes it

whimsicalism 2y ago
Huh. There have definitely been well publicized examples of this happening, like the quake inverse square root
- polishTar 2y ago
  Fast inverse square root is now part of the public domain. Also, even if this weren’t the case you can’t sue for damages to other people (they’d need to bring their own suit)
  - anonymoushn 2y ago
    Is the particular implementation that the model spits out 70+ years old?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
      - voxic11 2y ago
        But copilot distributed it (allegedly) without complying with the GPL license (which requires any distribution to be accompanied by the license) so it still would be an instance of copyright infringement. https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674
  - immibis 2y ago
    Has it really already been 70 years since John Carmack died?
    - polishTar 2y ago
      Ah, you're right. I was wrong to say "public domain". It would be more correct to say Quake III Arena was released to the public as free software under the GPLv2 license.
      - KnightHawk3 2y ago
        There is a large gap between public domain and GPL. For starters if Copilot is emitting GPL code for closed source projects... that's copyright infringement.
        FireBeyond 2y ago
        That would be license infringement, not copyright infringement.
        immibis 2y ago
        Copyright infringement is emitting the code. The license gives you permission to emit the code, under certain conditions. If you don't meet the conditions, it's still copyright infringement like before.
        FireBeyond 2y ago
        No. Copyright infringement could be emitting the code in a manner that exceeds fair use. The license gives you permission to utilize the code in a certain way. If Copilot gives you GPLed code that you then put into your closed source project, you have infringed the license, not Copilot. > If you don't meet the conditions, it's still copyright infringement like before. Licensing and copyright are two separate things. Neither has anything to do with the other. You can be in compliance with copyright, but out of license compliance, you can be the reverse. But nothing about copyright infringement here is tied to licensing. To be clear: I am a person who trashed his Reddit account when they said they were going to license that text for training (trashed in the sense of "ran a script that scrubbed each of my comments first with nonsense edits, then deleted them"). I am a photographer who has significant concerns with training other models on people's creative output. I have similar concerns about Copilot. But confusing licensing and copyright here only muddies waters.
- voxic11 2y ago
  You can't copyright a mathematical operation. Only a particular implementation of it, and even then it may not be copyrightable if its a straightforward and obvious implementation. That said the implementation doesn't appear to be totally trivial and copilot apparently even copies the comments which are almost certainly copyrightable in themselves. https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/dbe4ddb10315479fc00086f08e25d968b4b43c49/code/game/q_math.c#L552 https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/dbe4ddb1... However a twitter post on its own isn't evidence a court will accept. You would need the original poster to testify that what is seen in the post is actually what he got from copilot and not just a meme or joke that he made. Also the plaintiffs in this case don't include id-Software and there is some evidence that id-Software actually stole the fast inverse sqrt code from 3dfx so they might not want to bring a claim here anyways.
  - beeboobaa3 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    Not sure where you thought I said you could copyright a mathematical operation, I was clearly referring to the implementation due to the mention of “quake”. When it was reported, I was able to reproduce it myself.
    - TechDebtDevin 2y ago
      Weren't people getting it to spit out valid windows keys also?
      - pas 2y ago
        GPT4 regurgitated almost full NYT articles verbatim. It's strange that this lawsuit seems to be so amateurish that they failed to properly demonstrate the reproduction. Though of course it might require a lot of legal technicalities that we naively think are trivial but they might be not.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  It reads like the judge required them to show it happened to their code, not to any code in general. That's a much higher bar. There are thousands of instances of fast inverse square root in the training data but only one copy of your random github repositories. Getting to model to reproduce your code verbatim might be possible for all we know, but it isn't trivial.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    of course for standing. but it seems like with the right plaintiffs this could have gone forward
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      If it only copies code that has been widely stolen already then that's a lot weaker of a case and is something they can do a lot to prevent on a technical level.
      - account42 2y ago
        Code that has been copied widely != code that has been widely stolen. Open source licenses allow sharing under certain conditions.
    - brookst 2y ago
      But that’s like saying my lawsuit alleging Taylor Swift copied my song could have gone forward with a plaintiff who had, years ago, written a song similar to what Ms. Swift recorded recently. That”s true, but perhaps the lesson here is that damages that hinge on statistically rare victims should not extrapolated out to provide windfalls for people who have not been harmed.
      - whimsicalism 2y ago
        i think that is a weak analogy and also unnecessary bc it is already clear what i am saying
  - 2y ago
- daedrdev 2y ago
  The article mentions that GitHub copilot has been trained to avoid directly copying specific cases it knows, and that although you can get it to spit out copyright code by prefixing the copyrighted code as a starting point, in normal us cases its quite rare.
- dathinab 2y ago
  yes, but you need to show that it happened _in your case_, not that it can happen in general.
ADeerAppeared 2y ago
Where it gets ethnically dubious is that: 1. The copilot team rushed to slap a copyright filter on top to keep these verbatim examples from showing up, and now claims they never happen. 2. LLMs are prone to paraphrasing. Just because you filter out verbatim copies doesn't mean there isn't still copyright infringement/plagiarism/whatever you want to call it. The copyright filter is only a legal protection, not a practical protection against the issue of copyright infringement. Everyone who knows how these systems work understand this. The copilot FAQ to this day claims that you should run copyright scanning tools on your codebase because your developers might "copy code from an online source or library". Github has it's own research from 2021 showing that these tools do indeed copy their training data occasionally: https://github.blog/2021-06-30-github-copilot-research-recitation/ https://github.blog/2021-06-30-github-copilot-research-recit... They clearly know the problem is real. Their own research agreed, their FAQs and legal documents are carefully phrased to avoid admitting it. But rather than owning up to the problem, it's "Ner ner ner ner ner, you can't prove it to a boomer judge".
- squarefoot 2y ago
  > 1. Isn't that akin to destruction of evidence?
  - ADeerAppeared 2y ago
    Legally? No. In spirit? ... Probably? Unlike most LLMs, Github copilot can trivially solve their copyright problem by just using only code they have the right to reproduce. They have a giant corpus of code tagged with license, SELECT BY license MIT/Equivalent and you're done, problem solved because those licenses explicitly grant permission for this kind of reuse. (It's still not very cash money to take open source work for commercial gain without paying the original authors, and there's a humorous question if MIT-copilot would need to come with a multi-gigabyte attribution file, but everyone widely agrees it's legal and permitted.) The only reason you'd hack a filter on top rather than doing the above is if you'd want to hide the copyright problem. It's an objectively worse solution.
    - deleted 2y ago
klabb3 2y ago
This is so stupid. Going after likeness is doomed to fail against constantly mutating enemies like booming tech companies with infinite resources. And likeness itself isn’t even that big of a deal, and even if you win it’s such a minor case-by-case event that puts an enormous burden of proof on the victims to even get started. If the narrative centers around likeness, they’ve already won. The main issue, as I see it, is that they took copyrighted material and made new commercial products without compensating (let alone acquiring permission from) the rights holders, ie their suppliers. Specifically, they sneaked a fair use sticker on mass AI training, with neither precedent nor a ruling anywhere. Fair use originates in times before there were even computers. (Imo it’s as outrageous as applying a free-mushroom-picking-on-non-cultivated-land law to justify industrial scale farming on private land.) That’s what should be challenged.

whimsicalism 2y ago

Huh. There have definitely been well publicized examples of this happening, like the quake inverse square root

polishTar 2y ago
Fast inverse square root is now part of the public domain. Also, even if this weren’t the case you can’t sue for damages to other people (they’d need to bring their own suit)
- anonymoushn 2y ago
  Is the particular implementation that the model spits out 70+ years old?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
    - voxic11 2y ago
      But copilot distributed it (allegedly) without complying with the GPL license (which requires any distribution to be accompanied by the license) so it still would be an instance of copyright infringement. https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674
- immibis 2y ago
  Has it really already been 70 years since John Carmack died?
  - polishTar 2y ago
    Ah, you're right. I was wrong to say "public domain". It would be more correct to say Quake III Arena was released to the public as free software under the GPLv2 license.
    - KnightHawk3 2y ago
      There is a large gap between public domain and GPL. For starters if Copilot is emitting GPL code for closed source projects... that's copyright infringement.
      - FireBeyond 2y ago
        That would be license infringement, not copyright infringement.
        immibis 2y ago
        Copyright infringement is emitting the code. The license gives you permission to emit the code, under certain conditions. If you don't meet the conditions, it's still copyright infringement like before.
        FireBeyond 2y ago
        No. Copyright infringement could be emitting the code in a manner that exceeds fair use. The license gives you permission to utilize the code in a certain way. If Copilot gives you GPLed code that you then put into your closed source project, you have infringed the license, not Copilot. > If you don't meet the conditions, it's still copyright infringement like before. Licensing and copyright are two separate things. Neither has anything to do with the other. You can be in compliance with copyright, but out of license compliance, you can be the reverse. But nothing about copyright infringement here is tied to licensing. To be clear: I am a person who trashed his Reddit account when they said they were going to license that text for training (trashed in the sense of "ran a script that scrubbed each of my comments first with nonsense edits, then deleted them"). I am a photographer who has significant concerns with training other models on people's creative output. I have similar concerns about Copilot. But confusing licensing and copyright here only muddies waters.
voxic11 2y ago
You can't copyright a mathematical operation. Only a particular implementation of it, and even then it may not be copyrightable if its a straightforward and obvious implementation. That said the implementation doesn't appear to be totally trivial and copilot apparently even copies the comments which are almost certainly copyrightable in themselves. https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/dbe4ddb10315479fc00086f08e25d968b4b43c49/code/game/q_math.c#L552 https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/dbe4ddb1... However a twitter post on its own isn't evidence a court will accept. You would need the original poster to testify that what is seen in the post is actually what he got from copilot and not just a meme or joke that he made. Also the plaintiffs in this case don't include id-Software and there is some evidence that id-Software actually stole the fast inverse sqrt code from 3dfx so they might not want to bring a claim here anyways.
- beeboobaa3 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  Not sure where you thought I said you could copyright a mathematical operation, I was clearly referring to the implementation due to the mention of “quake”. When it was reported, I was able to reproduce it myself.
  - TechDebtDevin 2y ago
    Weren't people getting it to spit out valid windows keys also?
    - pas 2y ago
      GPT4 regurgitated almost full NYT articles verbatim. It's strange that this lawsuit seems to be so amateurish that they failed to properly demonstrate the reproduction. Though of course it might require a lot of legal technicalities that we naively think are trivial but they might be not.
wongarsu 2y ago
It reads like the judge required them to show it happened to their code, not to any code in general. That's a much higher bar. There are thousands of instances of fast inverse square root in the training data but only one copy of your random github repositories. Getting to model to reproduce your code verbatim might be possible for all we know, but it isn't trivial.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  of course for standing. but it seems like with the right plaintiffs this could have gone forward
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    If it only copies code that has been widely stolen already then that's a lot weaker of a case and is something they can do a lot to prevent on a technical level.
    - account42 2y ago
      Code that has been copied widely != code that has been widely stolen. Open source licenses allow sharing under certain conditions.
  - brookst 2y ago
    But that’s like saying my lawsuit alleging Taylor Swift copied my song could have gone forward with a plaintiff who had, years ago, written a song similar to what Ms. Swift recorded recently. That”s true, but perhaps the lesson here is that damages that hinge on statistically rare victims should not extrapolated out to provide windfalls for people who have not been harmed.
    - whimsicalism 2y ago
      i think that is a weak analogy and also unnecessary bc it is already clear what i am saying
- 2y ago
daedrdev 2y ago
The article mentions that GitHub copilot has been trained to avoid directly copying specific cases it knows, and that although you can get it to spit out copyright code by prefixing the copyrighted code as a starting point, in normal us cases its quite rare.
dathinab 2y ago
yes, but you need to show that it happened _in your case_, not that it can happen in general.

ADeerAppeared 2y ago

Where it gets ethnically dubious is that: 1. The copilot team rushed to slap a copyright filter on top to keep these verbatim examples from showing up, and now claims they never happen. 2. LLMs are prone to paraphrasing. Just because you filter out verbatim copies doesn't mean there isn't still copyright infringement/plagiarism/whatever you want to call it. The copyright filter is only a legal protection, not a practical protection against the issue of copyright infringement. Everyone who knows how these systems work understand this. The copilot FAQ to this day claims that you should run copyright scanning tools on your codebase because your developers might "copy code from an online source or library". Github has it's own research from 2021 showing that these tools do indeed copy their training data occasionally: https://github.blog/2021-06-30-github-copilot-research-recitation/ https://github.blog/2021-06-30-github-copilot-research-recit... They clearly know the problem is real. Their own research agreed, their FAQs and legal documents are carefully phrased to avoid admitting it. But rather than owning up to the problem, it's "Ner ner ner ner ner, you can't prove it to a boomer judge".

squarefoot 2y ago
> 1. Isn't that akin to destruction of evidence?
- ADeerAppeared 2y ago
  Legally? No. In spirit? ... Probably? Unlike most LLMs, Github copilot can trivially solve their copyright problem by just using only code they have the right to reproduce. They have a giant corpus of code tagged with license, SELECT BY license MIT/Equivalent and you're done, problem solved because those licenses explicitly grant permission for this kind of reuse. (It's still not very cash money to take open source work for commercial gain without paying the original authors, and there's a humorous question if MIT-copilot would need to come with a multi-gigabyte attribution file, but everyone widely agrees it's legal and permitted.) The only reason you'd hack a filter on top rather than doing the above is if you'd want to hide the copyright problem. It's an objectively worse solution.
  - deleted 2y ago

klabb3 2y ago

This is so stupid. Going after likeness is doomed to fail against constantly mutating enemies like booming tech companies with infinite resources. And likeness itself isn’t even that big of a deal, and even if you win it’s such a minor case-by-case event that puts an enormous burden of proof on the victims to even get started. If the narrative centers around likeness, they’ve already won. The main issue, as I see it, is that they took copyrighted material and made new commercial products without compensating (let alone acquiring permission from) the rights holders, ie their suppliers. Specifically, they sneaked a fair use sticker on mass AI training, with neither precedent nor a ruling anywhere. Fair use originates in times before there were even computers. (Imo it’s as outrageous as applying a free-mushroom-picking-on-non-cultivated-land law to justify industrial scale farming on private land.) That’s what should be challenged.