Microsoft getting sued over github Copilot

[SiliconWizard]

It's not like we weren't seeing this coming... 

https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-is-being-sued-over-github-copilot-piracy

[magic]

Absolutely shocking

[Karel]

I moved all my repo's to Gitlab when github announced they had been bought by mircosoft.
Better safe than sorry (relatively speaking).
In general, my level of trust in a company is inversely proportional to their size and
techgiants are the worst of the worst.

[AndyBeez]

More low hanging 'class action' fruit for California's wealthy lawyers.

Details details details: https://githubcopilotlitigation.com

[Siwastaja]

What never stops amusing me is that no matter how obvious it is that:
A) Microsoft is a total criminal organization
B) Microsoft's products, including the cloud tools, are total utter bullshit usage of which totally kills productivity in any company,
C) Microsoft generally sucks more than ever,

companies, including otherwise sane, agile, small startups (some that I have worked with) still fall into the trap of using Microsoft's crap, because "no one ever got fired by buying IBM Microsoft".

My personal view is that people should be fired for buying Microsoft. Just the cost of all wasted time using their crap, and the energy cost of running all that crappy software is staggering.

And I was a long-time Windows user, and didn't hate Microsoft at all. But I don't understand why I should use Outlook for email where clicking a message takes anything between 5-30 seconds for the message to open (without any "please wait, loading" indicator; just blank message area), and then I have 50 cryptic small icons I don't know how to press, when, if compared to Gmail, it just works like one expects from a browser based email service.

Or, logging in to Teams taking anything between 5-30 minutes, sometimes asking me over 20 questions, only to finally reveal me that hey, you have two separate accounts under the exact same user name text string, and there is no sane identifier (integer from example) to describe which one I am using, and instead asking me irrelevant questions like "are you at school" (no, haven't been in decades) to decide which of the two phantom accounts to use. What utter bullcrap. No one else has ever failed basics like this so dramatically.

I'm 110% positive Bill Gates is a reptilian and the whole purpose of Microsoft is to accelerate global warming and cause energy crises all around the globe and destroy the productivity of Western companies and education system by making software required in our modern digital world more difficult, time and power consuming than ever in human history. I have evidenced 1000x increase in time spent in trivial things like logging in to services, starting internet video calls, submitting code, automating compilation etc. Another example being a 5-second compilation job taking 15 minutes when the exact same compiler command is issued through Azure DevOps. And there's more, getting the compiler output is also a massive endeavor (you can only get the status code 0 or -1 through email!) of logging in for half an hour and then trying to find some magical sequence of mystery icons to click.

[golden_labels]

I wonder, how that will end.

Microsoft aren’t idiots. They must have taken this risk into equation. GitHub did not slurp proprietary, private repos into Copilot, which suggest they were aware of licensing issues. So in the worst case this is a loss on an investment, where that kind of risk was accepted from the beginning.

On the industry scale, a verdict favorable to plaintiff is not bringing a qualitative change. The data will have to be taken from safer and more expensive sources, or source will need to be concealed. Microsoft got hit, because they revealed their data set and — GitHub being the developer — people would get suspicious anyway. But I doubt such a verdict helps fighting the idea itself and similar services will continue popping up.

If Microsoft loses, that may become an argument for tightening laws worldwide regarding data collection for research and machine learning. That would be a horrible hit to smaller players, and would shift control over the market to even smaller group of major companies. So, paradoxically, Microsoft getting slammed too hard may be not what FOSS should want.

[SiliconWizard]

Microsoft aren’t idiots.

I wouldn't be 100% positive about that.

They must have taken this risk into equation.

It's not so much that they are taking a "risk" - it's an investment. IMHO, what they are ultimately trying to push, and many other large companies are currently doing the exact same with "AI" in various domains, is shaping new laws for "AI" altogether. Laws that would largely exempt "AI" from the traditional laws we have on intellectual property in particular, property in general and liability.

If they get sanctioned this time, they don't care. If anything, they might even pass as the new "martyrs" of the digital age, facing old laws that will sooner or later be deemed obsolete. They'll keep at it until new, more favorable laws emerge.

[dferyance]

I have very mixed feelings on this. To me, what copilot creates isn't really copying. It might legally be copying (I have no expertise on this), but this is the kind of technicality that came up with the Java Oracle / Google lawsuit. Often times copyright will be used way beyond what it was intended to do. Is the song repeating in your head copying? Is playing your stereo too loud that others can hear against copyright? Lawyers can argue all sorts of things; they are good at it. But to me, none of this really makes any sense as to what copyright ought to say. Coding is way more than copying snippets of code. Very little code that exists has any value outside of the whole. So maybe a snippet that isn't properly licensed gets generated. Is that actually detracting from people's incentive to design software? So many creative works are inspired by past ones -- this is a good thing.

But.... Microsoft is hardly the saint when it comes to be playing nice with IP. Far too often, large companies flaunt the rules and push them to be harshly enforced on everyone else. So It is also hard to be sympathetic either.