Comment by murgindrag | Hacker News Reader

Comment by murgindrag | Hacker News Reader

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It can be wiggled around. For example, if I ship a robot which can paint a famous painting, but not the painting itself, I would argue the copyright violation happens by the user of the robot when it paints the painting, not by the maker of the robot.

If that's something I'd planned on and intended, and you own the copyright to the painting, you have all sorts of legal tools to go after me -- contributory infringement, collusion, and so on. Still, contributing to a legal violation is not the same as engaging in one.

I suspect an argument can be made that github now incorporates AGPL code generated by co-pilot, and so is AGPL. A fair use argument might be made as well; we've all copied one-liners from blog posts and tutorials, and that's okay. I'm having a harder time seeing a reasonable argument that an ML model is directly infringing just because it can produce a copyrighted work, though.

So I don't think it's a cut-and-dry legal question.

I will give a caveat: Coders tend to read laws much too literally, like computer code. When I was was an obnoxious teenager, I thought I'd found all sorts of contract / license / etc. loopholes in all sorts of legal documents, and I considered myself profoundly clever, thinking I'd outsmarted the lawyers.

Nope.

In college I took law classes, got into the real world, did a few startups, and saw a few legal cases. Court systems have technical rules you need to be aware of, of course (e.g. if you miss a deadline....), but interpreting the law is really grounded in common sense. Common sense is culturally situated, and ours is situated in hundreds of years of case law.

>>> For example, if I ship a robot which can paint a famous painting, but not the painting itself,

Plot twist: Depending on the jurisdiction, you are responsible for distributing means specifically designed to circumvent copyright, which makes you liable for a much greater punishment, and liable for every reproduction done by your users.

There's a reason that painting robots are sold as general painting robots for various industrial usage, they're not advertised to and shipped with templates to reproduce copyrighted paintings. ;)

> if I ship a robot which can paint a famous painting, but not the painting itself, I would argue the copyright violation happens by the user of the robot when it paints the painting, not by the maker of the robot.

How is that different than sending someone a jpeg of a copyrighted painting? Or the jpeg and the executable that can render the jpeg. Or the jpeg and the executable and the computer it runs on. Each of those gets closer to what you said.

If the user of the robot is responsible for the copyright violation, then the user of Copilot is responsible, correct?

If that's the case, then there will not be any users of Copilot except those that unknowingly open themselves to liability. I suspect there will be few.

I would be okay with that situation. But I'm not okay with the situation as it currently stands.

I'm okay with where it stands.

Where it stands: We have a new technology. We don't really understand it. There aren't well-defined ethical or legal bounds. We're figuring them out, blumbering along as we go. People are trying things, and are making all sorts of arguments, some of which will stand the test of time, and some of which won't.

I'm more concerned when we do this with weapons, medicine, or social science, but an autocomplete tool seems like a relatively benign place to start figuring this out.

I don't want to agree with you that an autocomplete tool is a relatively benign place to start, mostly because I am upset about GitHub using my code in this way. But you are correct.

But let's fix this before it goes further, especially since mindlessly copying output from a machine will probably result in more bugs.

> copyright violation happens by the user of the robot when it paints the painting, not by the maker of the robot.

Thats very interesting. Because AFAIK Github is not "shipping" copilot to anyone. They run it and make it available only to those that use their online editor.

Unlike humans, ML models can be attacked to pull out the original training data.

Not all networks are susceptible to this, but if you can get a 1:1 copy, that's no different from bittorrent, limewire, or KaZaA. That doesn't seem implausible for text.

It's very different. Law looks at intent.

Napster was an easy litigation mostly because of intent. There was a document trail a mile long that the primary goal of Napster was to facilitate copyright infringement, although on paper, it could be used to share anything.

Cameras, xerox machines, and audio recorders can all be used for infringement, but aren't illegal since that's not their primary purpose. For even finer lines, see the Betamax case. You can also look at cases about different sorts of transformations and transmissions:

- I buy a DVD. It is transferred via USB cable from a DVD player connected to my computer, temporarily copied to computer memory, and then shown on my monitor.

- I buy a DVD. It is transferred via the internet from a DVD player in my data center, via the Internet, temporarily copied to your computer memory, and then shown on your monitor.

Can you see how these have nearly identical technology, yet different legally? If you ever take a law class, there are a lot of discussions about how to draw such lines (disclaimer: IANAL, but I've sat in on law classes before).

To be clear, I'm not taking a stance about where this ought to land legally. I don't know. But the analogy to bittorrent, limewire, or KaZaA is a faulty one.

GitHub and Microsoft intend to commercialize Copilot. This means they are taking huge swaths of copyrighted material that they did not license and using it to sell a commercial product. That really hurts their “fair use” defense. It’s even worse since they are facilitating the customers to pirate copyrighted material as well, which doubly harms their case.

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