SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
As projected here back in October, there is now a class action lawsuit, albeit in its earliest stages, against Microsoft over its blatant license violation through its use of the M$ GitHub Copilot tool. The software project, Copilot, strips copyright licensing and attribution from existing copyrighted code on an unprecedented scale. The class action lawsuit insists that machine learning algorithms, often marketed as "Artificial Intelligence", are not exempt from copyright law nor are the wielders of such tools.
The $9 billion in damages is arrived at through scale. When M$ Copilot rips code without attribution and strips the copyright license from it, it violates the DMCA three times. So if olny 1% of its 1.2M users receive such output, the licenses were breached 12k times with translates to 36k DMCA violations, at a very low-ball estimate.
"If each user receives just one Output that violates Section 1202 throughout their time using Copilot (up to fifteen months for the earliest adopters), then GitHub and OpenAI have violated the DMCA 3,600,000 times. At minimum statutory damages of $2500 per violation, that translates to $9,000,000,000," the litigants stated.
Besides open-source licenses and DMCA (§ 1202, which forbids the removal of copyright-management information), the lawsuit alleges violation of GitHub's terms of service and privacy policies, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other laws.
The suit is on twelve (12) counts:
– Violation of the DMCA.
– Breach of contract. x2
– Tortuous interference.
– Fraud.
– False designation of origin.
– Unjust enrichment.
– Unfair competition.
– Violation of privacy act.
– Negligence.
– Civil conspiracy.
– Declaratory relief.
Furthermore, these actions are contrary to what GitHub stood for prior to its sale to M$ and indicate yet another step in ongoing attempts by M$ to undermine and sabotage Free and Open Source Software and the supporting communities.
Previously:
(2022) GitHub Copilot May Steer Microsoft Into a Copyright Lawsuit
(2022) Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!
(2021) GitHub's Automatic Coding Tool Rests on Untested Legal Ground
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Friday January 06 2023, @04:35PM (7 children)
Just imagine how long and complex the license text would be if they did somehow manage to attribute everything to everyone that their AI "learned" from. It's not that it should be that hard -- it should remember or could take note where it borrowed all the code-snippets from. But it's not like most people would read it anyway and if they had to click anything they would just click the big OK/Accept button.
Still it's amusing now that they are using the piracy-math on how many violations there have been, even tho they are clearly low-balling it instead of high-balling it like copyright lawyers for various entertainment-outfits do.
That said if Copilot doesn't attribute then shouldn't the same be said for more or less ANY "AI" out there? ChatGPT? That even apparently now then write papers and everything and it doesn't cite or attribute anything to anyone. It should instantly classify anything it produces as plagiarism and be a giant lawsuit waiting to happen. How about the "AI" that draws pictures, composes music, creates medicines etc? Seems AI-tech is basically piracy-tech as it ripsoff everything and everyone and shares non of the glory and credits with anyone, possibly with the exception of the one that made them. But fucks everyone that provided the learning data over completely.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rich on Friday January 06 2023, @05:17PM
It's the same for search engines. Search engines make a local copy of the web (remember "Google Cache")? This is fundamentally required, because a.) the indexing needs to do a differential update to the word indexes and b.) search needs to access the sequence for sentence matching. Yet, when the first search engined (including Google) came up, copyright law did not allow for that. Not that anyone cared (or even understood), yet there were even discussions whether mere copying something into the browser cache might be illegal. But basically they didn't care about any licence and just grabbed everything accessible and copied it to make a profit. "robots.txt" only came after the fact.
The saying goes something like "when you do something borderline that's novel, you infringe the law, but of big money does the same, it becomes the law."
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday January 06 2023, @06:08PM (5 children)
On the one hand, this suit looks absolutely proper by the existing laws, and like if cases were decided on their merits it should win.
On the other hand, the actions being protested look perfectly reasonable.
So, to me, this is more an argument that the existing copyright law should be totally thrown out. And I rather agree. Go back to the copyright laws if 1823, and then update as needed. But explicitly include a working definition of "fair use" so it isn't just "whatever the lawyers can convince the court is reasonable". (I would have said "1723", but the US didn't exist at that point, and the worst changes happened after the civil war. But maybe 1800 would be a better date.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday January 06 2023, @06:57PM (4 children)
On the other hand, the actions being protested look perfectly reasonable.
How is taking copyrighted code and removing references to both the author and the original license ok? It is ok with a machine learning algorithm, would it still be ok with another algorithm like a complex regex with a few conditional statements thrown in? What about hiring unskilled staff that don't understand the code but can read enough to strip both attribution and licensing information? Where is the line drawn?
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday January 06 2023, @09:40PM
The idea that there should be a line is a real problem, but learning, whether human or machine, involves processing lots and lots of stuff, and extracting what is deemed useful. How can you argue against this and yet support spelling bees. Some of those words being spelled are less than 30 years old, so SOMEBODY invented the spelling.
Consider, e.g., the program "Hello, World.". There are lots of variations of it printed, Should you need to respect the copyrights of the authors? But most of them are trivial variations of the original, so maybe only the original should be deemed worthy of copyright. But this would mean that you couldn't illustrate a new language by doing a translation of "Hello, World" into that language.
Basically, what I think ChatGPT *should* be able to argue is that it's productions are functional, and therefore not deserving of copyright. But that kind of argument requires expensive lawyers, and you've got to be ready to pay for appeals. It would be much better if copyright clearly didn't cover that. And didn't cover anything over 20 years old. (Including renewals! Make it 10 years of copyright and up to two renewals for 5 years each, and they've got to be a continuous span of time.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Saturday January 07 2023, @04:28AM (2 children)
How do you think human programs do their job?
I went to school for years to have professors write code on the board for me to copy without attribution.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday January 07 2023, @06:38AM (1 child)
But your professor carefully selected the code he wrote on the blackboard. He didn't copy some random code from the internet without looking at its copyright.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 07 2023, @02:54PM
AND if he did, he could get sued for it.
So if Microsoft is illegally copying random code without permission and getting sued for it, then I'm all for them getting sued.
That said I'm the one who wants people in Microsoft to be imprisoned for "upgrading" people's Windows machines to Windows 10 without their permission. After all I'd probably end up in prison if I did a similar thing to hundreds or thousands of other people's PCs.