OpenAI Faces Early Appeal in First AI Copyright Suit From Coders; Bloomberg Law, September 30, 2024

 Isaiah Poritz , Bloomberg Law; OpenAI Faces Early Appeal in First AI Copyright Suit From Coders

"OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft Corp.‘s GitHub will head to the country’s largest federal appeals court to resolve their first copyright lawsuit from open-source programmers who claim the companies’ AI coding tool Copilot violates a decades-old digital copyright law.

Judge Jon S. Tigar granted the programmers’ request for a mid-case turn to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which must determine whether OpenAI’s copying of open-source code to train its AI model without proper attribution to the programmers could be a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...

The programmers argued that Copilot fails to include authorship and licensing terms when it outputs code. Unlike other lawsuits against AI companies, the programmers didn’t allege that OpenAI and GitHub engaged in copyright infringement, which is different from a DMCA violation."

OpenAI Faces Early Appeal in First AI Copyright Suit From Coders; Bloomberg Law, September 30, 2024

Isaiah Poritz , Bloomberg Law; OpenAI Faces Early Appeal in First AI Copyright Suit From Coders

"The programmers argued that Copilot fails to include authorship and licensing terms when it outputs code. Unlike other lawsuits against AI companies, the programmers didn’t allege that OpenAI and GitHub engaged in copyright infringement, which is different from a DMCA violation."

A new tool for copyright holders can show if their work is in AI training data; MIT Technology Review, July 25, 2024

• Melissa Heikkiläarchive page

, MIT Technology Review; A new tool for copyright holders can show if their work is in AI training data

"Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, content creators have argued that their work has been scraped into AI models without their consent. But until now, it has been difficult to know whether specific text has actually been used in a training data set. 

Now they have a new way to prove it: “copyright traps” developed by a team at Imperial College London, pieces of hidden text that allow writers and publishers to subtly mark their work in order to later detect whether it has been used in AI models or not. The idea is similar to traps that have been used by copyright holders throughout history—strategies like including fake locations on a map or fake words in a dictionary. 

These AI copyright traps tap into one of the biggest fights in AI. A number of publishers and writers are in the middle of litigation against tech companies, claiming their intellectual property has been scraped into AI training data sets without their permission. The New York Times’ ongoing case against OpenAI is probably the most high-profile of these.  

The code to generate and detect traps is currently available on GitHub, but the team also intends to build a tool that allows people to generate and insert copyright traps themselves."

IBM Will Acquire Open-Source Software Company Red Hat In $34 Billion Deal; October 28, 2018

Laurel Wamsley, NPR; IBM Will Acquire Open-Source Software Company Red Hat In $34 Billion Deal

"In what may be the most significant tech acquisition of the year, IBM says it will acquire open-source software company Red Hat for approximately $34 billion...

"The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market," Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer said in a statement. "This is the next chapter of the cloud."

Raleigh, N.C.–based Red Hat makes software for the open-source Linux operating system, an alternative to proprietary software made by Microsoft. It sells features and support on a subscription basis to its corporate customers...

Microsoft completed its $7.5 billion acquisition of open source software company GitHub just two days ago."

As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating; New York Times, May 29, 2017

Jess Bidgood and Jeremy B. Merrill, New York Times; 

As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

"In interviews, professors and students said the causes were not hard to pin down.

To some students drawn to the classes, coding does not come easily. The coursework can be time-consuming. Troves of code online, on sites like GitHub, may have answers to the very assignment the student is wrestling with, posted by someone who previously took the course.

“You’ve got kids who were struggling with spending a third of their time on their problem sets with the option to copy from the internet,” said Jackson Wagner, who took the Harvard course in 2015 and was not accused of copying. “That’s the reason why people cheat.”

Complicating matters is the collaborative ethos among programmers, which encourages code-sharing in ways that might not be acceptable in a class. Professors also frequently allow students to discuss problems among themselves, but not to share actual code, a policy that some students say creates confusion about what constitutes cheating."

Catch My Diff: Github's New Feature Means Big Things for Open Data; Atlantic, 2/7/14

Robinson Meyer, Atlantic; Catch My Diff: Github's New Feature Means Big Things for Open Data:

"On Wednesday, Github announced that maps would be “diffable”—a silly-sounding term that means much in the world of Github. It’s a small and even long-expected feature, but an important one, and one that aids Github’s role in the emerging ecosystem around open data.

First, a gloss on some terms. Github is a San Fransisco-based startup whose main product—also called Github—helps developers manage different versions of a project’s code. Many developers already use a piece of software on their computer called git to manage versions of code, and Github gives them a place to store Git’s files in the cloud and collaborate with others about them. It also provides messaging functions that sometimes supplant company email.

While it costs money to host a project on Github privately, the company provides free hosting to any open-source project. If you make your code public, hosting on Github is free.

Github, then, already plays a happy home to code projects. In the past year, it’s tried to make itself friendlier and more useful for projects that use open data.

Open data, meanwhile—the effort to make information already produced by the government available to the public—is a bigger and bigger deal. Late last year, the Knight Foundation gave $250,000 to explore the creation of a U.S. Open Data Institute, an organization centered around freeing data and making it easier for people to use. Freeing, for instance, municipal restaurant health code data will allow local review apps like Yelp to display it."