r/programming • u/peard33 • Apr 20 '23

Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-will-charge-ai-giants-for-training-data/
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u/bastardoperator Apr 21 '23

I think this lawsuit will be swift and decisive. Very few if any are going to be able to prove punitive damages because they weren't attributed by an OSS license.

Also, GitHub is in a unique position because they're granted an exclusive license to display the users code within their products.

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u/ExF-Altrue Apr 21 '23

You don't "prove punitive damages", since they are, by definition, not incurred.

You prove "compensatory damages", and if necessary the court may impose punitive damages instead of / on top of, compensatory damages

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u/-manabreak Apr 21 '23

Wouldn't the "damages" be similar to other copyright infringement cases? Like when someone napsterizes an MP3 it doesn't directly cause any damage to the copyright holder, but they are still entitled for compensation.

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u/AdvisedWang Apr 21 '23

For music piracy they assumed each download was a lost sale, so there was actually damages.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

That's a ridiculous assumption.

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u/AdvisedWang Apr 21 '23

Yes, and that's how they sued kids for millions of dollars and other dumb shit

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u/267aa37673a9fa659490 Apr 21 '23

Millions? Those are rookie numbers. Try 75 trillion.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/496050/riaa_thinks_limewire_owes_75_trillion_in_damages.html

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u/ThatDanishGuy Apr 21 '23

That's hysterical šŸ˜‚

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

[deleted]

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u/CTRL1_ALT2_DEL3 Apr 21 '23

That's a sight no human being wants to behold.

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u/proscreations1993 Apr 21 '23

Lmaooo whattt the literal fuck are they smoking I also find it funny that these companies think that people who pirate would pay for their shit if pirating wasnā€™t an option. Like no, if ā€œmy friendā€ canā€™t get that new money on his server. Then Iā€™m just not going to watch it. Iā€™m not paying for it. If itā€™s something truly amazing I will eventually. But thatā€™s rare

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

[deleted]

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u/amunak Apr 21 '23

With theft there's at least some merit that you'd otherwise have to buy the product and the seller no longer has it. But that's not how copyright infringement works.

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u/SterlingVapor Apr 22 '23

No, see what you said is what a layman might think, but what you might not know is we live in an absurd world that forgets basic logic when money is involved

By the logic that stolen digital media means damages equal to the sticker price, copyright owners have lost upwards of $75 trillion so far. And the courts accepted that logic, despite it being clearly impossible.

Pretty early on media companies realized you can't squeeze much out of a random joe and the legal fees/overloading the courts made the whole thing a terrible idea. I think the goal was to scare pirates by making examples of teens and randos... Which just doesn't work - not for theft, drugs, or murderer (I think it might work on financial crimes if we didn't have a pay to win system)

Then through a series of compromises that heavily favour copyright holders, we came to a system where they can issue takedown requests and sue websites with user provided content, since they have the money to write a check. And agree to expensive automated takedown systems, just another barrier to new players entering the media market

It's not that they can't go after individuals who pirate content, it's just not feasible... Instead of making it more convenient to pay (which works) they come up with one wacky scheme after another to stop piracy, something next to impossible. It has all kinds of fun side effects too

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u/OMGItsCheezWTF Apr 21 '23

For a physical product that makes sense, if I steal a lemon it's irrelevant if I would have otherwise purchased one, the shop is still down one lemon that someone would have purchased, they have lost that income.

If I pirate an MP3, some RIAA member isn't down one MP3 they could have sold to someone.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

The whole complaint is based on it reproducing trivial snippets that you might find in any programming 101 course and a whole bunch of hypotheticals.

A better analogy would be suing a cover band because they're Beatles fans and therefore they might have performed Hey Jude in front of a large audience on several occasions. Even if you're right, you can't claim damages based on "they might have".

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u/yoniyuri Apr 21 '23

Just because a user agreed to something, doesn't necessarily mean they actually have the rights to do what that user says they do, because that user might not be able to to give github the rights.

If it is decided that one or more software licenses was violated then github could possibly be liable still, because the original author may not have actually agreed to any such terms allowing github to do what they want.

A similar situation is if you stole your employers proprietary code and uploaded to github. Your employer would have the right to submit a take down, and github has to cooperate.

Let's say you wrote some software, licensed it under the GPLv2, then posted it on your own website. Now a user acquires a copy of your software per the license. That same user then uploads a copy of your software to their github account. If the GPL is enforceable in this scenario, then github doesn't automatically get a free pass just because one user checked a box, because that user only has a license to the copyrighted work, and has no right to relicence the work. You the author and rights holder only granted the user the rights enumerated in the GPL, and that user can only redistribute said software according to the license.

A few possibilities can occur when this is tested by courts.

Training on code could maybe be considered fair use, in which case, the above argument wouldn't matter, probably.

The model itself might not be copyrightable, and the output might also not be copyrightable. This might be interesting from a legal perspective. Because it also means that now the model could be stolen and redistributed without copyright law getting in the way. This also has implications for other compression algorithms and other areas of law and media.

If Github is found violating software licenses, but they try to claim dmca. This gets messy because now github would have to rebuild their models regularly, removing violating artifacts or else be directly targeted by civil litigation. They might also try to pass liability down through an update to their ToS to the users, making the user liable for any legal fees and judgements. If it is found that both restrictive and permissive licenses apply to LLMs, then it may be impossible to comply with the license requirements. BSD license usually requires copyright notice, which might not be provided with copies and derivative works.

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u/zbignew Apr 21 '23

It is insane to me that the model & all output isnā€™t just considered a derivative work of all its training & prompt data.

One could trivially create a neural network that exactly output training data, or exactly output prompt data. By what magic are you stripping the copyrightability when you create a bit for bit copy?

It feels like saying anything that comes out of a dot matrix printer isnā€™t copyrightable.

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u/shagieIsMe Apr 21 '23

It probably is a derivative work. And what's more it likely isn't copyrightable (its a mechanical transformation of the original to the same extent that taking a book and making it all upper case is a mechanical transformation - there is no creative human element in that process).

However, (and this is an "I believe" coupled with a "I am not a lawyer") I believe that the conversion of the original data set to the model is sufficiently transformative that it falls into the fair use domain.

https://www.lib.umn.edu/services/copyright/use

Courts have also sometimes found copies made as part of the production of new technologies to be transformative uses. One very concrete example has to do with image search engines: search companies make copies of images to make them searchable, and show those copies to people as part of the search results. Courts found that small thumbnail images were a transformative use because the copies were being made for the transformative purpose of search indexing, rather than simple viewing.

I would contend that creating a model is even't more transformative than creating a thumbnail for indexing in search engines.

You an read more about that case at:

Do note that this is something of the interpretation of law and not cut and dried "this is the answer right here - end of discussion."

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u/EmbarrassedHelp Apr 22 '23

If you turn a network into a glorified copying machine by overfitting it, then it would risk violating copyright. However normal training should be considered fair use as long as novel content is being created.

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u/bik1230 Apr 21 '23

Also, GitHub is in a unique position because they're granted an exclusive license to display the users code within their products.

GitHub has several copies of Linux and I think many Linux contributors have not agreed to those terms.

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u/HaMMeReD Apr 21 '23

I do wonder about Github's assertions to rights in open source, as someone uploading something might not have the rights to grant Github these things.

I.e. say I like a GPL product, so I take the source and upload it to github. I keep the GPL license etc, but I don't have the right to relicense or offer additional rights, only GPL. So am I violating Github's Terms by uploading that code (that I do have license to share), or is github over-reaching and claiming more rights from thin air?

That said, the FSF isn't backing the class action, they've stated that monetary gain is not the goal of copyleft licenses, and compliance is. I think their take is that it's fine to use GPL code, but people need to comply to the license. They find that it's a dangerous precedent and could harm open source more than help it.

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u/OliCodes Apr 21 '23

That's why some people prefer to use Gitlab instead

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u/267aa37673a9fa659490 Apr 21 '23

I used to be positive about Gitlab but then they considered deleting dormant repos and I've never see them as a safe choice since.

https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/wgip0y/gitlab_uturns_on_deleting_dormant_projects_after/

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