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0 pointscausi4y ago0 comments

Unfortunately the way IP law works, at least in the US, is that you can use essentially whatever you want as training data and it's up to the user to make sure none of the generated code violates licensing agreements.

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7 comments · 3 top-level

monocasa4y ago· 2 in thread

Can you point to case law backing that up?

causiOP4y ago

Sure.

https://jtip.law.northwestern.edu/2021/05/28/copyright-issue...

However, even if infringement occurs during machine learning, training AI with copyrighted works would likely be excused by the ‘fair use’ doctrine.[ii] For example, in Authors Guild v. Google, Inc.[iii], Google had scanned digital copies of books and established a publicly available search function. The plaintiffs alleged that this constituted infringement of copyrights. The Second Circuit held that Google’s works were non-infringing fair uses because the purpose of the copying was highly transformative, the public display of text was limited, and the revelations did not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals.

monocasa4y ago

That's training for search to lead to a full copy of the original work with citations, not training for regurgitating verbatim chunks of copywritten works to be incorporated at scale into other copyrighted works while obfuscating their original source.

The Second Circuit's tests listed in your citation specifically fail in this case. It's not highly transformative since it's just regurgitating snippets to be used in other competing works rather than applying the body of works to a different domain. And it's specifically to provide a market substitute for the protected aspects of the original works.

Additionally, none of this says 'its all great and it's on the user to figure it out'.

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lupire4y ago· 2 in thread

Did you just make that up? Github is distributing the copied code to users.

monocasa4y ago

They did make it up; their cited case law says nothing of the sort.

causiOP4y ago

Did you just make that up?

Unfortunately not. It's really stupid.

SahAssar4y ago

If that's the case then GH/MS should at least disclose that for the code generated to actually be legal you have to hunt down the actual source (will be hard in a lot of cases) and check the license against your own license.

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