What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?
Few things in software have made me as viscerally angry as witnessing the vocal minority fighting Copilot and now the class action lawsuit. I have no doubts that Microsoft is prepared to defend themselves, but I want to do more.
What is the opposite of class action lawsuit? Has anyone ever done a class-action amicus brief? Can we organize a group of programmers in FAVOR of GitHub Copilot and fight back?
I think it's you who are in the "vocal minority".
Microsoft Copilot is an abuse of open source. It is perhaps the greatest theft of intellectual property in human history.
We should do everything we can to defeat it.
That said, here is my Request For Comments regarding a slightly modified BSD 2-Clause License explicitly prohibiting Copilot-style use:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33458374
We need to do everything we can to defend open source software against Microsoft and the like.
You don't have to do a thing. Microsoft (and Amazon, with it's CodeWhisperer, and every other similar business building such services) went into this fight with their eyes wide open. They knew this would happen and are well prepared for it. And even among the FSF's own invited whitepapers on CoPilot (https://www.fsf.org/news/publication-of-the-fsf-funded-white...) was one ("Copyright implications of the use of code repositories to train a machine learning model") that that seemed to conclude that CoPilot-like services could defensibly say that copyright was not violated regardless of the license.
So if this suit succeeded, I would be very surprised. Even the FSF isn't rushing to file suit and they care about this controversy probably more than anyone.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you. I understand why most of the HN crowd is against this, because Microsoft is big and evil and people want to see them suffer.
But realistically, a win here would effectively ban training AIs on the internet.
Well, if they're profiting by serving copyright or copyleft code up for others to use after stripping the associated licensing I would think they're in a bad place. Unless their side effect is (again?) to break GPL and other open-source licenses?
I would think this a risk that commercial customers would want to avoid - getting something GPLv3 or other "infecting" licenses contaminating their product due to a developer cutting/pasting code. I also think that Microsoft would not be interested in getting a result that code was obvious and so could not be protected by patent or copyright.
Anybody using FOSS should be (vaguely) concerned about this kind of legal battle. Would hate to see Linux or GNU damaged to MS's gain.
I kind of see where the OP is coming from. HNews has been dominated with posts to do with DALL-E and Stable Diffusion and expressing joy at the ease it has made generating concept art, logos, etc. The small volume of artists expressing their displeasure? Glossed over.
Now that AI is showing face at the first step of removing programmers and allowing business-speaking people to generate code suddenly there's websites and links all over the HNews front page trying to shut down Co Pilot.
The best thing you can do is write OSS and not care who uses it or for what purpose. The more people writing truly free and open software the better. In my mind that is the ultimate end goal of OSS.
You could try to contribute a license-finder for copilot that would detect potential copyright violations and emit valid attribution / reproduce the licenses of copyrighted works that copilot's output is derived from.
Oh, and you'll want to detect incompatible software licenses and prevent derivative works from being created with such conflicts .
In so doing, you would be helping Microsoft to follow the law and respect my copyright. The lawsuit would probably evaporate overnight.
If you find a way, I'd like to join you.
What a bizarre post. I haven't come to a definitive conclusion on the subject, but "how can I help a trillion-dollar organization?" is very far from my first thought on it. Is this a service folks have become dependent on?
Buy a 10tb disk on Amazon for ~$300, start backing up every git repo in existence
You want to defend the big company? Why? Copilot is obviously breaking terms of licenses. At the very least it should only be trained on MIT and return MIT code
The best thing you can do is to stay out of the way. Microsoft will hire very talented lawyers who will craft a strategy designed to maximize the odds of winning.
You have no chance to increase those odds; but it’s possible you could reduce them.
You could buy a million copies of Microsoft Office, I think that would help.
Buy Microsoft shares perhaps.