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I hope this case will fail and establish a good precedent for all future AI litigations and may be even prevent new ones. Your code is open source - irregardles

I hope this case will fail and establish a good precedent for all future AI litigations and may be even prevent new ones. Your code is open source - irregardless of license, one might read it as a text book and then remember or even copy snippets and re-use this somewhere else unrelated to the original application. If you don't like this, don't make your code open source. This was happening and is happening independent of any license all over the world by majority of developers. What Copilot and similar tools did was to make those snippets accessible for extrapolation in new applications. If these folks win - we again throw progress under the bus.

Etheryte 4y ago
> Your code is open source - irregardless of license, one might read it as a text book and then remember or even copy snippets and re-use this somewhere else unrelated to the original application. Yes, but attribution should still be given. Just because you don't copy-paste someone else's creation doesn't mean you're licensed to use it.
- shagie 4y ago
  Is it the role of the tool (in this case copilot) to include the license information? Or is it the responsibility of the organization using the code to make sure that it wasn't copied from somewhere? What if, instead of a tool, you had a random consultant do some work, and it was found out that he asked a ton of stuff on Stack Overflow and copied the CC-BY-SA 4.0 answers into his work? What if it was then found out that one of those answers was based on copying something from the Linux kernel? Who is responsible for doing the license check on the code before releasing the product?
  - alpaca128 4y ago
    > Or is it the responsibility of the organization using the code to make sure that it wasn't copied from somewhere? Do you know whether the code you got from Copilot has an incompatible license? No, so if you plan to use Copilot for serious projects you need it to include sources/licenses either way. In fact that would be a very helpful feature as it would let you filter licenses.
jacooper 4y ago
No thank you. I put a license to be followed, not to just be disregarded by an AI as "Learning material". No human perfectly reproduces their learning material no matter what, but Copilot does.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  So are you ok with it being illegal for humans to learn from copyrighted books unless they have a license that explicitly allows learning? That does not sound like a pleasant consequence.
  - codyb 4y ago
    I doubt it, but they'd probably be against people quoting copyrighted material verbatim without attribution in their own work after.
  - Veen 4y ago
    It's a pleasant consequence for the person who spent years becoming an expert and then writing the book. It's also a pleasant consequence for the people who buy the book, which might not have existed without a copyright system to protect the writer's interests.
  - MontagFTB 4y ago
    I think they're taking issue with the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted code. That's distinct from learning how to code (which I don't think anyone would claim Copilot is doing) which people get from reading a book. If you were to read the book only to copy it verbatim and resell it, you're going to have a bad time.
  - test098 4y ago
    Here's the thing - the US has well-established laws around copyright that don't consider learning from books a violation of those copyrights. This lawsuit is intended to challenge Copilot as a violation of licensing and isn't a litigation of "how people learn." Your program stole my code in violation of my license - there's a clear legal issue here. I'd pose a question to you - would it be okay for me to copy/paste your code verbatim into my paid product in violation of your license and claim that I'm just using it for "learning"?
humanwhosits 4y ago
> irregardless of license Hard no. Please stop using open source code if this is how you think of it. Without licenses being respected, we don't get open source communities.
- az226 4y ago
  Licenses be damned, copyright law sits above it -- and for now, it's hard to see how this isn't fair use. The only case might be an open source Copilot alternative and GitHub and OpenAI can take any such projects out of the training set.
vesinisa 4y ago
Open source does not mean public domain. Open source specifically attaches limitations on how the code may be reused.
- elcomet 4y ago
  There are no limitations on reading the code to learn from it.
  - MontagFTB 4y ago
    Perhaps the lawsuit contends that Copilot isn't in fact learning how to code, but is rather regurgitating information it has managed to glean and statistically categorize, without any real understanding as to what it was doing?
simion314 4y ago
> Your code is open source .... So why MS can screw only with some licenses that you call "open source". Your example with a human reading a book would also work with code available licenses or decompiled binaries. I would have been fine if the open source code was used to create an open model or if MS would have put his ass on the line and also train the model with all the GitHub code because they claim there is no copyright issue.
tfsh 4y ago
If organisations are going to ignore the licenses attached to my OOS and that's legimitised in the law, then that's a surefire way to irreparably damage the open source ecosystem
solomatov 4y ago
The problem is that copyright laws were introduced for a reason, and with a thinking similar to yours we might decide to get rid of copyright altogether, which I think is a bad idea. P.S. I am not a lawyer.
deleted 4y ago
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Etheryte 4y ago

> Your code is open source - irregardless of license, one might read it as a text book and then remember or even copy snippets and re-use this somewhere else unrelated to the original application. Yes, but attribution should still be given. Just because you don't copy-paste someone else's creation doesn't mean you're licensed to use it.

shagie 4y ago
Is it the role of the tool (in this case copilot) to include the license information? Or is it the responsibility of the organization using the code to make sure that it wasn't copied from somewhere? What if, instead of a tool, you had a random consultant do some work, and it was found out that he asked a ton of stuff on Stack Overflow and copied the CC-BY-SA 4.0 answers into his work? What if it was then found out that one of those answers was based on copying something from the Linux kernel? Who is responsible for doing the license check on the code before releasing the product?
- alpaca128 4y ago
  > Or is it the responsibility of the organization using the code to make sure that it wasn't copied from somewhere? Do you know whether the code you got from Copilot has an incompatible license? No, so if you plan to use Copilot for serious projects you need it to include sources/licenses either way. In fact that would be a very helpful feature as it would let you filter licenses.

jacooper 4y ago

No thank you. I put a license to be followed, not to just be disregarded by an AI as "Learning material". No human perfectly reproduces their learning material no matter what, but Copilot does.

IshKebab 4y ago
So are you ok with it being illegal for humans to learn from copyrighted books unless they have a license that explicitly allows learning? That does not sound like a pleasant consequence.
- codyb 4y ago
  I doubt it, but they'd probably be against people quoting copyrighted material verbatim without attribution in their own work after.
- Veen 4y ago
  It's a pleasant consequence for the person who spent years becoming an expert and then writing the book. It's also a pleasant consequence for the people who buy the book, which might not have existed without a copyright system to protect the writer's interests.
- MontagFTB 4y ago
  I think they're taking issue with the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted code. That's distinct from learning how to code (which I don't think anyone would claim Copilot is doing) which people get from reading a book. If you were to read the book only to copy it verbatim and resell it, you're going to have a bad time.
- test098 4y ago
  Here's the thing - the US has well-established laws around copyright that don't consider learning from books a violation of those copyrights. This lawsuit is intended to challenge Copilot as a violation of licensing and isn't a litigation of "how people learn." Your program stole my code in violation of my license - there's a clear legal issue here. I'd pose a question to you - would it be okay for me to copy/paste your code verbatim into my paid product in violation of your license and claim that I'm just using it for "learning"?

humanwhosits 4y ago

> irregardless of license Hard no. Please stop using open source code if this is how you think of it. Without licenses being respected, we don't get open source communities.

az226 4y ago
Licenses be damned, copyright law sits above it -- and for now, it's hard to see how this isn't fair use. The only case might be an open source Copilot alternative and GitHub and OpenAI can take any such projects out of the training set.

vesinisa 4y ago

Open source does not mean public domain. Open source specifically attaches limitations on how the code may be reused.

elcomet 4y ago
There are no limitations on reading the code to learn from it.
- MontagFTB 4y ago
  Perhaps the lawsuit contends that Copilot isn't in fact learning how to code, but is rather regurgitating information it has managed to glean and statistically categorize, without any real understanding as to what it was doing?

simion314 4y ago

> Your code is open source .... So why MS can screw only with some licenses that you call "open source". Your example with a human reading a book would also work with code available licenses or decompiled binaries. I would have been fine if the open source code was used to create an open model or if MS would have put his ass on the line and also train the model with all the GitHub code because they claim there is no copyright issue.

tfsh 4y ago

If organisations are going to ignore the licenses attached to my OOS and that's legimitised in the law, then that's a surefire way to irreparably damage the open source ecosystem

solomatov 4y ago

The problem is that copyright laws were introduced for a reason, and with a thinking similar to yours we might decide to get rid of copyright altogether, which I think is a bad idea. P.S. I am not a lawyer.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]