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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: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Friday January 06 2023, @05:32PM (2 children)
learning from someone else's work is not a copyright violation. holding a copy of their work in your head is not a copyright violation. producing works that are quite similar to another's work is not a copyright violation.
copyright is fake and useless anyway. without money and power you cannot realistically defend it. it's largely a tool for scam artists, grifters, and middlemen to "earn" comfortable lives off of actual productive and inventive people instead of digging in the cobalt mines where they belong.
(Score: 5, Funny) by canopic jug on Friday January 06 2023, @06:36PM (1 child)
It's not learning in the way you or I or anyone else would consider to be learning. There is no understanding. There is no knowledge. There is no insight. Just blind, arbitrary recombination of code snippet after code snippet of various size. In order to do that, it's stripping the licenses and stripping the attribution and combining random pieces from random project millions and hundreds of millions of times until some conditions are met and the result spewed out. There's no intelligence there, just the ability to chew through an inhuman amount of combinations of code snippets arbitrarily harvested from other people's code, but in a very short time.
I haven't looked under the hood on M$ Copilot but the generic topic to look up is genetic programming aka evolutionary programming, and perhaps neural networks.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Touché) by choose another one on Friday January 06 2023, @11:52PM
Maybe I'm just too old and jaded and cranky, but when I look at code these days (especially the piles of garbage that pass for "web pages" today) that is what it frequently looks like - whoever or whatever wrote it.
Only attribute you missed was maybe "arbitrary library after library, package after package". Vaguely recall someone using more library include lines than the lines of actual code that would have been needed to do the job with a little thought. Dependencies seem to maketh a project - the more you include the more important your project must be (and the more complex the dependency / version management in future, thus keeping you in a job I guess.
To my mind this "AI" has just evolved to the point where human programmers are going anyway, but it's evolution is automated and faster.