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0 pointsbelorn3y ago0 comments

The common practice in copyright cases is to calculate damages based on the theoretical cost that the infringer would have paid if they have bought the rights in the first place. This method was used during the piratebay case to calculate damages caused by the sites founders.

They did not actually calculate damages in terms of lost movie tickets or estimates vs actually sales number of sold game copies. When it came to pre-releases where such product wouldn't have been sold legally in the first place, they simply added a multiplier to indicate that the copyright owner wouldn't have been willing to sell.

For software code, an other practice I have read is to use the man-hours that rewriting copyrighted code would cost. Using such calculations they would likely estimate the man hours based on number of lines of code and multiply that with the average salary of a programmer.

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karaterobot3y ago

The one thing we can say with complete certainty is that most programmers who had their code used without permission will not receive very much money at all if this class action lawsuit is decided in their favor.

mike_d3y ago

I don't care about the money. I support this because it will establish case law that other companies can't ignore licenses as long as they throw AI somewhere in the chain.

If "I took your code and trained an AI that then generated your code" is a legal defense, the GPL and similar licenses all become moot.

bastardoperator3y ago

But that's not what's happening here. Also, you grant GitHub a license.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

"You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content"

Copilot displays content. Case closed.

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sqeaky3y ago

Money likely isn't the main goal (maybe it is for the lawyers), these are open source repos. Maybe they didn't consent to have their code used as training and that seems like the kind of thing consent should be needed for. Maybe this the AI spitting out copied snippets is a violation of open source licensing without attribution.

heavyset_go3y ago

I don't want money, I want the terms of my licenses to be adhered to.

whiddershins3y ago

I believe there are statutory damages or penalties in many cases. At least with music and images.

michaelmrose3y ago

So for iseven can we go for how much a student might accept 20 an hour say and multiply that by the one minute required to create it and offer them 33 cents?

pmoriarty3y ago

"Using such calculations they would likely estimate the man hours based on number of lines of code and multiply that with the average salary of a programmer."

The average salary of a programmer in which country?

So much programming is outsourced these days, and in some places programmers are very cheap.

belornOP3y ago

This is just my guess, but I think the intention from the judges is not to actually calculate a true number. The reason they used the cost of publishing fees in the piratebay case was likely to illustrate how the court distinguished between a legal publisher vs an illegal one. The legal publisher would have bought the publishing rights, and since piratebay did not do this, the court uses those publishing fees in order to illustrate the difference.

If the court wanted to distinguish between Microsoft using their own programmers to generate code vs taking code from github users, then the salary in question would likely be that of Microsoft programmers. It would then be used to illustrate how a legal training data would look like compared to an illegal one.

imoverclocked3y ago

Probably in the place where GitHub copilot is used and the location of the authority of the court.

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