DeVault: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering [LWN.net]

DeVault: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering

Posted Jun 24, 2022 19:30 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
In reply to: DeVault: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering by Wol
Parent article: DeVault: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering

Intent will matter in a bunch of cases, but in this case the defining factor is whether or not something is a derived work. In two otherwise identical scenarios, one involving a license that says "I consider this to be a derived work" and one without that claim, from the standpoint of copyright law we'd expect both outcomes to be the same - the license doesn't determine how far copyright law reaches, so anything else would be bizarre.

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DeVault: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering

Posted Jun 24, 2022 20:43 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> Intent will matter in a bunch of cases, but in this case the defining factor is whether or not something is a derived work.

And that is exactly the argument in front of the Judge. *IS* it a derived work? And if the law is unclear, and the licensor is explicit that he considers it a derived work, then the only safe option for the Judge is to rule that it IS a derived work and let the legislators sort it out.

And this is why you can NOT "defer to the law" in this argument. The question at issue is not "is this a derivative work according to the law?", but "what is the law?". THAT is the argument in front of the Judge.

The legislators can choose to let the genie out the bottle. The Judge will not be happy about letting the genie out the bottle off his own bat.

Cheers,
Wol

DeVault: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering

Posted Jun 24, 2022 21:13 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

The license stating that something is considered a derived work doesn't make it a derived work. The copyright holder is still going to have to turn up in court and make that argument, and whoever created the allegedly derived work is going to defend against that. If the same judge heard the same arguments in a case where the license made no claims about whether or not something was a derived work, we'd expect to see the same decision.

DeVault: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering

Posted Jul 1, 2022 8:32 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

It would be very hard to argue in court that code produced by an AI trained on an existing code base is anything else than a derivation of this code base, since there is no human inventivity involved to muddy up waters.

Despite years of commercial pretense to the reverse professionals know “smart” systems are no smarter than the human who coded them.