210
Judge dismisses majority of GitHub Copilot copyright claims
(www.developer-tech.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
210 points (99.1% liked)
Programming
17314 readers
64 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Judge William Alsup. Um, now ask me to name another.
Biden or Harris could do the US a favor and name, say, Shayon Ghosh to the federal bench. He's not quite as qualified as Alsup: whilst he's also from Jackson, MS, he strangely chose to go to Carnegie Mellon over Alsup's choice of Mississippi State.
I mean sure you can cherry pick examples that are outstanding justices in that regard. But that’s never going to hold a candle to implementing a systemic norm that essentially says “a judge ruling on a case primarily concerned with can tap a pool of certified experts on to make the most informed decision possible”. An enhancement to that would be “the pool of experts may also flag decisions made by justices that the a majority of said experts deem inappropriate”.
I’m not saying this hypothetical system would be perfect, or that it wouldn’t need further tweaking and iteration, but specifically including feedback mechanisms like that would probably (hopefully) steer things towards a reasonably decent trajectory.
...
I think you misread the tone of my comment. I can name one. And point out one more potential candidate. I'd say that supports your position.
Also, I'm not sure how that constitutes cherry-picking, as for me that particular word choice implies a lack of good-faith reasoning. Regardless, I greatly appreciate your tone and consideration as well as your thoughtful points. Good discussion!
Fair point. Didn’t mean to come off stabby, or to imply bad faith. I appreciate the discussion as well! Cheers, friend! 🍻
Now I remember that guy. He decided oracle vs google. I can't imagine he has many fans here.
I'd imagine the opposite. I'd be astonished if many programmers who use Lemmy would disagree with Alsup's ruling that "So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the declaration or method header lines are identical."
Yes, I know what you mean. But looking at the comments here, Fair Use is not a popular concept. I remember that Alsup specifically quoted the copyright clause in his ruling. I can't imagine any argument that would make him rule, on the whole, for the plaintiffs in a case such as this.
Huh. Thanks for explaining. I certainly find that surprising, but I definitely don't have enough experience with this community to know the shape of its members' feelings on copyright or fair use.
Thanks.
Don't listen to me on that. I have no idea how the community feels on copyright or fair use. Whenever AI comes up, the most dogmatic copyright maximalism dominates. On other subjects, the debate is more nuanced. I don't know how that fits together at all. But I guarantee you, if Alsup ruled on a case like this/OP, they would... Well, most comments would not like the ruling or him.
Really good point about the AI context. I really hadn't considered how it would leak over into potentially corroding support for fair use.
Come to think of it. That DMCA argument would really wreck fair use.
It's illegal to remove "copyright management information" (CMI). In this case meaning the FOSS license. The argument was, that when copilot spits out verbatim snippets of source code without the license, this constitutes removal of the CMI. The point of the argument was that fair use is not a defense under the DMCA. These verbatim snippets are pretty obvious fair use to me, so countering that defense is important if they hope to get anywhere with their suit.
By the same argument, any meme image is illegal. They are taken from somewhere without the original license or attribution. Yikes.