GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot copyright lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot copyright lawsuit

theregister.com

38 pointsDotnaught11 comments

"The judge however said that assuming the facts of the complaint are true, it's reasonable to "infer that, should plaintiffs’ code be reproduced as output, it will be reproduced in a manner that violates the open-source licenses under which plaintiffs published their code."

That seems like one of the most important statements from the judge. Given this, the question then becomes how much responsibility Microsoft has, similar to any other software that can and do reproduce copyright protected material.

You aren’t understanding the judges statement. This only means that the conclusion necessary is sufficiently related to the accusation that additional assertions don’t need to be in the complaint for it to be legally sufficient as a claim of violation. That doesn’t mean that the facts charged in the complaint are proven (this is about whether there is even a chance to do that), nor does it mean that if the facts charged in the complaint are proven, the plaintiff doesn’t still have to prove the additional issue. It literally means “they’ve said enough that the complaint on this point is not dismissed out of hand before even getting to whether it can be proven” (the vast majority of the case was thrown out – though, except for a couple points, with leave to amend, so they may be able to fix the deficiencies.)

It says "assuming the facts of the complaint are true". I think you are seeing misunderstanding where there is none.

The facts need to be true in order for the facts to be true. However, assuming the facts charged in the complain are true in relation to how it get reproduced, one can infer it will be reproduced in a manner that violates the open-source license. It is not making a statement about additional issues.

Can't wait to see the end result of all of this.

I am hoping $150,000 per copyright infringement

which then renders github insolvent

I'm assuming you view that as a good thing for open source projects. Without a large, free platform like GitHub, many open source projects would not exist.

There are other source hosting options, but people don't want to host their own, pay to host their project, email patches, or create an account for every project.

open source hosting existed before GitHub and will continue to exist after it

Github clones are very very cheap to host, what makes the value of Github isn't its features but the fact that it's a central hub for developers

This will affect the entire AI world, if Microsoft loses, training on copyrighted materials will be illegal.

pretty sure that new / updated gpl will be dealing with this sort of (ab)use.

> pretty sure that new / updated gpl will be dealing with this sort of (ab)use.

If Microsoft, et al., win this on fair use, there is nothing the GPL can do about it.

Using a license to constrain actions that don’t require your permission in the first place is ineffective.

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