<story><title>Is GitHub a derivative work of GPL&apos;d software?</title><url>https://drewdevault.com/2021/07/04/Is-GitHub-a-derivative-work.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pmlnr</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not &amp;quot;fair-use classification of ML models&amp;quot;. If the ML black box:&lt;p&gt;- produces an output&lt;p&gt;- that output is the exact same thing - text, code, image, et c - that went in&lt;p&gt;- that thing is licensed&lt;p&gt;- fails to fulfill the requirements of the license&lt;p&gt;than it&amp;#x27;s breaking the license. I don&amp;#x27;t see how it can be wiggled around.&lt;p&gt;The black boxes that produce entirely different outputs, or the ones that slurped billions of photos without even blinking at license but never vomits actual images are, at least, not reproducing the source material.</text></item><item><author>chrismorgan</author><text>There’s a curious tendency in these discussions to focus on the GPL as though it were special. If the original licenses apply, then you’ll be embedding code under all kinds of different licenses—some of which are sure to be mutually incompatible.&lt;p&gt;To be sure, the infectious nature of the GPL &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; likely to be a bigger deal, but permissive licenses will be violated by missing acknowledgement just as much as the GPL will be violated by not licensing your code GPL.&lt;p&gt;If this license-washing doesn’t work, then you can’t just say “we’ll exclude GPL sources”, because you’ll still be breaking the rules on &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; copyrighted work that doesn’t have very specific public-domain-like do-whatever-you-like-and-don’t-acknowledge-me licensing.&lt;p&gt;The whole thing truly does depend on the fair-use classification of ML models. If that falls apart, the entire thing’s done (and a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of other ML stuff will be, too). And that’s where regurgitation becomes so problematic, because it directly undermines that fair-use exemption.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gravypod</author><text>I think another important analogy is that you couldn&amp;#x27;t do this same operation with a human. In my eyes a human and an ML algorithm are both &amp;quot;agents&amp;quot;. An ML algorithm is a computerized actor on a system but they are still able to do something novel based on previous inputs. If we take these two scenarios:&lt;p&gt;1. A hypothetical employer asks an employee to find a really fast algorithm to find an inverse square root. The employee has a perfect memory and can regurgitate fast inverse square root from Quake 2.&lt;p&gt;2. A hypothetical employer asks an employee to find a really fast algorithm to find an inverse square root. The employee uses this ML algorithm to generate the code which essentially regurgitates the only previously seen inverse square root function it was trained on.&lt;p&gt;At some point in time in the future id Software sees this is happening at our hypothetical company and sues. In neither situation is the &amp;quot;actor&amp;quot; held accountable since the &amp;quot;actor&amp;quot; was employed by the company which allowed for practices that enabled this infringement to take place.&lt;p&gt;I think an important legal question is: Do we consider a ML algorithm being trained on data the same as a human reading prior art for an innovation?</text></comment>
<story><title>Is GitHub a derivative work of GPL&apos;d software?</title><url>https://drewdevault.com/2021/07/04/Is-GitHub-a-derivative-work.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pmlnr</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not &amp;quot;fair-use classification of ML models&amp;quot;. If the ML black box:&lt;p&gt;- produces an output&lt;p&gt;- that output is the exact same thing - text, code, image, et c - that went in&lt;p&gt;- that thing is licensed&lt;p&gt;- fails to fulfill the requirements of the license&lt;p&gt;than it&amp;#x27;s breaking the license. I don&amp;#x27;t see how it can be wiggled around.&lt;p&gt;The black boxes that produce entirely different outputs, or the ones that slurped billions of photos without even blinking at license but never vomits actual images are, at least, not reproducing the source material.</text></item><item><author>chrismorgan</author><text>There’s a curious tendency in these discussions to focus on the GPL as though it were special. If the original licenses apply, then you’ll be embedding code under all kinds of different licenses—some of which are sure to be mutually incompatible.&lt;p&gt;To be sure, the infectious nature of the GPL &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; likely to be a bigger deal, but permissive licenses will be violated by missing acknowledgement just as much as the GPL will be violated by not licensing your code GPL.&lt;p&gt;If this license-washing doesn’t work, then you can’t just say “we’ll exclude GPL sources”, because you’ll still be breaking the rules on &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; copyrighted work that doesn’t have very specific public-domain-like do-whatever-you-like-and-don’t-acknowledge-me licensing.&lt;p&gt;The whole thing truly does depend on the fair-use classification of ML models. If that falls apart, the entire thing’s done (and a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of other ML stuff will be, too). And that’s where regurgitation becomes so problematic, because it directly undermines that fair-use exemption.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>murgindrag</author><text>It can be wiggled around. For example, if I ship a robot which can paint a famous painting, but not the painting itself, I would argue the copyright violation happens by the user of the robot when it paints the painting, not by the maker of the robot.&lt;p&gt;If that&amp;#x27;s something I&amp;#x27;d planned on and intended, and you own the copyright to the painting, you have all sorts of legal tools to go after me -- contributory infringement, collusion, and so on. Still, contributing to a legal violation is not the same as engaging in one.&lt;p&gt;I suspect an argument can be made that github now incorporates AGPL code generated by co-pilot, and so is AGPL. A fair use argument might be made as well; we&amp;#x27;ve all copied one-liners from blog posts and tutorials, and that&amp;#x27;s okay. I&amp;#x27;m having a harder time seeing a reasonable argument that an ML model is directly infringing just because it can produce a copyrighted work, though.&lt;p&gt;So I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s a cut-and-dry legal question.&lt;p&gt;I will give a caveat: Coders tend to read laws much too literally, like computer code. When I was was an obnoxious teenager, I thought I&amp;#x27;d found all sorts of contract &amp;#x2F; license &amp;#x2F; etc. loopholes in all sorts of legal documents, and I considered myself profoundly clever, thinking I&amp;#x27;d outsmarted the lawyers.&lt;p&gt;Nope.&lt;p&gt;In college I took law classes, got into the real world, did a few startups, and saw a few legal cases. Court systems have technical rules you need to be aware of, of course (e.g. if you miss a deadline....), but interpreting the law is really grounded in common sense. Common sense is culturally situated, and ours is situated in hundreds of years of case law.</text></comment>