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0 pointsbrookst3y ago0 comments

The legal system takes intent into account.

So if you produce napster 2.0 to be the best music piracy tool, and you test it for piracy, and you promote it for piracy... you're going to have trouble.

If you produce napster 2.0 as a general purpose file sharing system, let's call it a torrent client, and you can claim no ill intent... you may have trouble but it's a lot more defensible in court.

I would find it a big stretch to say Github's intent here is to illegally distribute copyrighted code. No judgment on whether the class action has any merit, just saying I would be very surprised if discovery turns up lots of emails where Github execs are saying "this is great, it'll let people steal code."

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kube-system3y ago

> I would find it a big stretch to say Github's intent here is to illegally distribute copyrighted code.

Almost everything on GitHub is subject to copyright, except for some very old works (maybe something written by Ada Lovelace?), and US government works not eligible for copyright.

Now, many of the works there are also licensed under permissive licenses, but that is only a defense to copyright infringement if the terms of those licenses are being adequately fulfilled.

brookstOP3y ago

> Almost everything on GitHub is subject to copyright,

Agreed. Like I said, it's about intent. Can anyone say with a straight face that copilot is an elaborate scheme to profit by duplicating copyrighted work?

I don't think the defense is that it wasn't trained on copyrighted data. It obviously was.

I think the defense is that anything, including a person, that learns from a large corpus of copyrighted data will sometimes produce verbatim snippets that reflect their training data.

So when it comes to copyright infringement, are we moving the goalposts to where merely learning from copyrighted material is already infringement? I'm not sure I want to go there.

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