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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: 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.