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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: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 06 2023, @08:40PM (4 children)
Yet another reason I don't believe that computer code should be covered by copyright at all. That despite (because of?) the fact that I registered two copyrights for computer programs four decades ago, neither of which can be run on any existing computer today. I'll still hold those copyrights ninety five years after I'm buried.
You can't copyright a food recipe, and a computer program is a recipe of sorts, unlike a book or a painting. You can't copyright a dance. I've never seen any reason, let alone a good one, why computer programs should be covered by copyright.
Why not patents? I will agree that they're too expensive and have way too much bureaucracy, but that's a completely different set of problems.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday January 07 2023, @06:44AM (3 children)
Patents are much worse than copyright for software. With patents, you are in violation even if you provably never saw the patent and came up with the same solution independently.
The only advantage of patents is that their duration is not as excessively long as copyright. But the solution to that is to reduce copyright to a reasonable time; that would not only benefit software.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday January 07 2023, @02:39PM (2 children)
The only advantage of patents is that their duration is not as excessively long as copyright. But the solution to that is to reduce copyright to a reasonable time
About as easy as flying to the moon by flapping your arms in our plutocratic society.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday January 07 2023, @05:00PM (1 child)
Well, still easier than getting completely rid of copyright, don't you think?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Sunday January 08 2023, @01:24AM
Actually, the law now hardly qualifies as copyright, which was never about copying, it was about publishing. In America, for example, foreign works' copyrights were legally ignored, so American authors simply couldn't get published. Congress changed copyright to cover foreign works just to get Americans published.
Real copyright isn't evil, present copyright is simply ridiculous. 25 years ago it had a 20 year monopoly as opposed to the author's lifetime plus 95 years like now.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron