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Judge dismisses majority of GitHub Copilot copyright claims
(www.developer-tech.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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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.