Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

If I, a human, were to:

1. Carefully read and memorize some copyrighted code.

2. Produce new code that is textually identical to that. But in the process of typing it up, I randomly mechanically tweak a few identifiers or something to produce code that has the exact same semantics but isn't character-wise identical.

3. Claim that as new original code without the original copyright.

I assume that I would get my ass kicked legally speaking. That reads to me exactly like deliberate copyright infringement with willful obfuscation of my infringement.

How is it any different when a machine does the same thing?

It sounds fair from how the article describes it

I wonder, if MS and OpenAI win, does that mean it will be legal for anyone to take the leaked source code for a proprietary product, train an LLM on it, and then ask the LLM to emit a version of it that is different enough to avoid copyright infringement?

That would be quite the double-edged sword for proprietary software companies.

> A few devs versus the powerful forces of Redmond – who did you think was going to win?

I hate that kind of obnoxious "journalism". Sometimes the little guy is actually wrong. To clarify, I'm not commenting on the specifics of this case, I just hate how fake our online discourse has been by appealing to "big guy evil" before even bringing up the specifics of the case.

If I were Microsoft, I’d really be concerned that I’m going to kill my golden goose by causing a large-scale exodus from GitHub or open source development more generally. Another idea I’ve considered is publishing boatloads of useless or incorrect code to poison their training data.

As I see it, people should be able to restrict how people use something that they gave them. If some people prefer that their code is not used to train LLMs, there should be a way to enforce that.

> The anonymous programmers have repeatedly insisted Copilot could, and would, generate code identical to what they had written themselves, which is a key pillar of their lawsuit since there is an identicality requirement for their DMCA claim. However, Judge Tigar earlier ruled the plaintiffs hadn't actually demonstrated instances of this happening, which prompted a dismissal of the claim with a chance to amend it.

So, the problem is really one of the lack of evidence, which seems... like a pretty basic mistake from the plaintiffs?

They could've taken a screencap video back when Copilot still produced code more verbatim, and used that as evidence, I assume.

Found this: https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses

Legally sound or not, these should at least prevent your code from being included in Copilot's training data, hopefully without affecting any other use case. I'm going to use one of these next time I start a new project.

If I made an “advanced music engine” which rips Taylor swift files and duplicates them, I would be sued to oblivion. Why does calling it an AI suddenly fix that?

They should have to train them on information they legally own.

It still doesn't.

Wait, I'm forced to use Teams at work but Microsoft employees are on Slack?!

How did they reach this conclusion? How can you prove that it never copies a code snippet verbatim, versus just showing that it does for one specific code snippet? The latter is a lot easier to show, but I don't know what is it exactly that the prosecution claimed. I guess the size of the copy also matters in copyright violations?

i would package the entire code as a series of comments, [ideally this would be snipped by the pliagarists] leaving a snippet of example code that no one of sound mind would allow to execute, being proffered by copilot.

Until the open tech community is chicken enough to not boycott their no open source stuff such as github and linked in a proof nothing will happen.