The new copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI comes a week after The New York Times filed a similar complaint in New York.

Microsoft, OpenAI sued for copyright infringement by nonfiction book authors in class action claim::The new copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI comes a week after The New York Times filed a similar complaint in New York.

  • MelllvarEnglish
    -8•11 months ago

    A better question is: Why not?

    If Copyright doesn’t protect what goes in, why should it protect what comes out?

    • @[email protected]English
      4•11 months ago

      Because sometimes it spits it out verbatim, and sometimes GPLed code gets spat out in the case of Copilot.

      See: the time Copilot spat out the Quake inverse square root algorithm, comments and all.

      Also, if it’s legal to disregard libre/open source licenses for this, then why isn’t it legal for me to look at leaked code, which I also do not have permission to use, and use the knowledge gained from that to write something else?

      • MelllvarEnglish
        4•11 months ago

        Which is exactly why the output of an AI trained on copyrighted inputs should not be copyrightable. It should not become the private property of whichever company owns the language model. That would be bad for a lot more reasons than the potential for laundering open source code.

      • @General_EffortEnglish
        -3•11 months ago

        Well. That sounds perfectly legal. However, mind that “leaked” implies unauthorized copying and/or a violation of trade secrets. But it’s not a given, that looking at such code violates any law.

        • @[email protected]English
          0•11 months ago

          And if they’re not going to respect the copyleft, they are also performing unauthorised copying.

          • @General_EffortEnglish
            1•11 months ago

            “Copyleft” means certain types of copyright licenses. Since these licenses generally allow and encourage public distribution/copying, such code is certainly not leaked. Laws pertaining to trade secrets cannot be involved in principle.

            I think the copies made during AI training would be typically allowed under copyleft licenses. In any case, as it is a copyright license, it is subject to the same limitations.

            • @[email protected]English
              0•11 months ago

              Public distribution and copying is allowed, but only if the license in it’s entirety is respected.

              And when the license is void, it’s all rights reserved, right?

      • MelllvarEnglish
        -5•11 months ago

        The part that you’re apparently having trouble understanding is that a language model is not a human mind and a human mind is not a language model.