The situation unfolded over a weekend, after SVB shut down Friday afternoon. The FDIC attempted to find a buyer on Saturday, and got at least one interested party, but couldn't close a deal. The Administration was getting anxious over the possible fallout: tech companies not meeting payroll, possible banking contagion, who knows what else? Then Powell/Fed proposed some novel mechanisms for temporary rescue. [1]
They worked together to put out a joint press release, and Biden gave a down-to-earth, rough-and-tumble speech about protecting depositors and kicking the failed executives and bad-luck shareholders to the curb, because this is "how capitalism works". It was an unusually blunt attempt to preemptively push back at the perception that this guarantee of FDIC-uninsured deposits will be branded a 'bailout'. (I predict that this attempt will fail and this will widely be perceived as a 'bailout' in casual and political discourse, which is the exact forum at which they've aimed this message.)
After 2008, the public gained awareness of the consolidation -- both forced and emergent -- that occurs in response to these sorts of crises. Public opinion views these outcomes unfavorably, because they seem unfair and irreversible, albeit no palatable alternatives have emerged that are acceptable to both to the public and government and industry incumbents.
If you subscribe to the point of view that Russia's war on Ukraine isn't actually about Ukraine, but about causing lasting pain in Europe, then this action is perfectly rational for Russia.
It drives the market prices up (anything that spooks market participants will), and creates an ongoing situation that adds pressure on governments to act.
A balanced summary of the lead-up to the First (1988-1994) and Second (2020) Nagorno-Karabakh war.
Note that this is article is NOT about the recent escalation on 2022-09-13 when Azerbaijan attacked inside Armenia's internationally-recognized territory, in territory unrelated to the Nagorno-Karabakh question, clearly well past ridgelines used for the border. Technically the border is "undemarcated", but it's a cheap claim that this is a mere border dispute.
Instead, many of the actions of Azerbaijan since the November 2020 ceasefire agreement have been applications of Salami Slicing and Borderization: occupying chunks of the Republic of Armenia bit by bit, to pressure Armenia for a settlement more favorable to Azerbaijan. Specifically, Azerbaijan wants a route between its mainland and its longstanding exclave Nakhchivan (which borders Turkey).
Article 9 of the 2020 ceasefire agreement provides for such a transport connection, but does not use the word "corridor" in reference to it. This is contrasted with the 'Lachin Corridor', mentioned several times in the ceasefire agreement, which provides a connection between Armenia and the Armenian-ethnicity areas of Nagorno-Karabakh. Since 2021, Azerbaijan has unilaterally begun using the term 'Zangezur Corridor' to refer to their desired connection, anchoring their expectation that its guarantees would be similar to that of the ceasefire-defined 'Lachin Corridor'. Despite several rounds of working groups and mediation, no progress has been made on a solution acceptable to both Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan has the upper hand, with superior military and economy, less democratic government (top-down leadership), and a better geopolitical situation. And it's been steadily bullying Armenia to get its way.
- To inconvenience the institutions of the occupier just in that area (Why just there? To avoid removing their incentives to change and to avoid crippling your own companies who provide a service there. If you sanction the occupier fully, they'll double down, perceive it as an escalation, and your own companies will be significantly hurt. They'll find an alternative, and once they do, they won't need your service any longer, so you lose leverage.)
- To frustrate the local populace so that even the milder ones have additional incentives to oppose the occupying regime.
Imagine if Russia occupies Ukraine by force. Following this logic, Ukrainians should now be persuaded (punished) so that they they find the will (as if they don’t already have it) to throw Russia out. The same people that we are helping and sending money and weapons to right now.
Incredibly, this isn't actually true, though it's tempting to think so from looking at the shapes on the map.
The border actually follows the Lusatian Neisse, and then the Oder river, except in the vicinity of the port city of Szczecin; this is the border set by the Allies at the Potsdam Conference after the end of World War 2.
The mine on the eastern side of the river became Poland, but it was still supplying a power plant on the west side of the river in East Germany [1]. Later, in 1962, Poland built its own power plant [2].
The Soviets and the Polish wanted to push this border as far west as possible, while the western allies wanted to set it was far northeast as possible to more closely approximate the German-Polish ethnic divide at the time. Various compromise options were proposed, following various rivers, but in the end the western allies agreed to the Soviet proposal. Germans in these territories gained by Poland were expelled. (Meanwhile, the Soviets took the eastern half of previous Poland and made it [3] part of the Soviet Union, specifically the constituent republics of Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania... it was a messy time.)
The book "Diplomacy" has a precious chapter about two Oder rivers and Stalin fooling the West by picking the most western Oder for the German-Polish border, where nowadays a lot of people has multiple heritages.
Bigger cities typically regulate taxis and sell licenses to operate to taxi companies, who then employ or contract the drivers.
Uber was always an unlicensed taxi scheme. Their planned business model was to ignore the law to reduce costs, then sell rides below cost until everyone else is out of business.
> That law is classic regulatory capture and anti-consumer, though.
Taxis are usually regulated by law to provide mandatory service to an entire area at the same tariff - no discrimination based on the time of the day, the source or destination (e.g. "surge pricing" for events or effectively no service in poor neighborhoods), or if the passengers have any sort of disability.
When the regulated option goes out, a lot of people suddenly live at the whims of capitalist overlords and AI algorithms, but not under the rule of law any more.
This should absolutely be litigated to stop the blatant laundering of copyright under the guise of fair use.
Copilot's API is surfacing snippets of work without licensing information attached alongside. It can be shown in discovery that Copilot does access the origin work.
The sooner this is slapped down, the sooner we can avoid addressing the even more troubling question that exists today: is someone who used Copilot to throw together a bunch of code infringing copyright of works where those portions originate?
This is a complex problem with no satisfying conclusions... how could one be violating copyright if they never accessed the 'copied' work to copy? Copyrights aren't patents. Infringement requires copying.
Using Copilot launders the user's awareness of the origin works, yet making the Copilot users liable for widespread "accidental" copying would be troubling.
It's not complex at all: if you use Copilot to generate code for you you are engaging in copyright infringement.
That you got the code from and entity that stole it somewhere else doesn't really matter. Generative models should respect copyright for their sources, and using a generative model to create new works that you intend to claim copyright on is stupid: someone may well show up one day with ironclad proof that you used their code without permission.
Except every attorney that has taken a look disagrees with you. So it is complex and unless you have any standing or new data I think it's safe to dismiss your entire argument.
Until then all you have is opinions, mine is pretty straightforward: if the generative model can be made to work without first training it on other people's code then it isn't copyright infringement, if not then it is transforming one set of works into another.
The only thing that might let GitHub off the hook is their terms of service, but that might mean mass exodus from GitHub because if they interpret you using GitHub to host your code as a blanket permission to do with that code whatever they want then that's clearly not the original intent of the service.
If Microsoft buying GitHub claims that gave them a blanket license to do as they please with the contributions of millions of FOSS contributors then they are still just as bad as they were in the past.
Almost every GitHub repository comes with a license file, even GitHub should have to abide by that license, otherwise the whole thing is pointless.
Unless you have specialized training in copyright law, your opinion is unfortunately invalid when compared to actual experts in the field. You're making assertions that you clearly cannot substantiate coupled with the fact that we're not seeing an influx of litigants. Personally, I'm yet to see any news of even a single litigant challenging copilot. Also, the outcome of cases in the US are in many cases decided by a jury, not a judge.
I've fielded a couple of copyright lawsuits and won them, obviously the lawyers of the defendants thought they had an excellent case. I may not be a lawyer but I do know a thing or two about copyright law and as far as I'm concerned if you claim that you have created something because you took someone else's copyrighted content and pushed it through a machine of sorts that does not create an original work. There is plenty of settled caselaw around this. So that much we can establish off the bat. Which means if you use this to create your own copyrighted work you may have a problem anyway. Whether or not it is infringing or not is largely a matter of the length of the segment produced and whether or not it matches the original in some non-trivial way. The mechanism in the middle doesn't really matter.
If Microsoft/GitHub want to field the argument that they own the rights to all of the code uploaded to GitHub then I'm perfectly fine with that, the only problem I see with that defense is that it will likely kill GitHub overnight.
As for the jury argument: that's fine, but juries aren't lawyers either. I'm not sure if that should weigh as a positive or a negative for Microsoft.
Finally, regardless of the legality: there is such a thing as ethics and in my book you don't appropriate a large body of work from a whole community without so much as a by-your-leave. There have been other threads on HN regarding this and it is interesting to see the various opinions, even so if Copilot is challenged legally than I'll be cheering on the party bringing the suit.
A reminder that copyright infringement vs fair use is in part dependent on the amount of the copyrighted material that’s being used, the nature of that use and the transformativeness of the infringing work. Just because co-pilot suggests code snippets that can be found in a copyrighted work does not mean that the resulting produced product is in fact an infringement of that copyright.
Also a reminder that outside the copilot debate, the online rights movement has largely been pushing for scraping, deep linking and transforming scrapped data to not be considered copyright infringement, regardless of any TOS on the site being scraped.
To me, co pilot is a exactly that, a scraper that has scraped public websites and is now presenting me the scraped data in an alternative and often transformed form. It’s my responsibility as a developer to ensure that my released product complies with applicable copyright law, but copilot and the use thereof is not in and of itself copyright infringement.
That a tool can be used to create infringing work or infringe on copyright in general is no more a valid argument against co pilot than it is against CD burners, de-drm tools, vcrs, kodi or plex, scanners or any number of day to day items that have the ability to infringe copyright if the user uses it for that purpose.
There are no pipelines that cross the EU's external border that transport crude oil from outside the EU into the EU, except the ones that are fed from Russia.
Before the UK left the EU, there was technically one such pipeline from Norway, but it was mainly used to supply an oil export terminal located in the UK, rather than for importing oil into the UK for domestic consumption.
Europe expects to rely on sea transport to import oil after foregoing use of oil from the Russian pipelines. This is why the landlocked countries of Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia were concerned during the sanction talks, though Hungary's Orban has exaggerated the concern to obstruct sanctions and/or to score dubious Realpolitik points.
Hungary's only alternative is the Adria pipeline that starts at a port in Croatia; it can be used in either direction and has sufficient capacity to meet current demands. Czechia's only alternative is the IKL pipeline that starts at a pipeline junction and tank farm in Vohburg (near Ingolstadt) in Germany. Slovakia's only alternative (if my research is accurate) is to be supplied through Hungary, using the Adria pipeline and a soviet-era connection between Hrkovce and Százhalombatta to be run in reverse mode.
I get why the OSI published this post. They have a vested interest in the conversation and I agree with their points.
But the battle for the narrative has already been lost when people consider this to be a problem with 'open source'. Rather, it's a problem with software that's being given away for reputation brownie points. Here, the author showed exceedingly poor judgment towards users of their software, and this should result in the loss of goodwill and respect towards the author and the forking of their works if the license allows.
Open Source didn't enable this behavior. The author's poor judgement and the author's lack of need to care for the users of one's software is what didn't dissuade this behavior. In this case, it was giveaway software causing harm. In other cases, it's commercial software pushing hamfisted changes users don't want, because the users aren't empowered enough to fight it. The reason commercial software would avoid this particular type of stunt is because it's poor business sense to harm one's direct customers.
So what of Open Source? Open Source allows anyone to review or modify the software that engages in this behavior. So the community can salvage the author's good contributions and better custodians can carry the software forward.
Open Source also allows anyone to discover these cases proactively. Of course, almost nobody does this, because we as an "industry" have gotten used to four troubling trends, and ridicule those who aren't on this "bleeding edge":
* thinking that software that costs $0 to obtain incurs no additional costs
* not auditing our dependencies
* being unconcerned about the sheer quantity of dependencies
* blindly updating dependencies
It's a sad but predictable development that the field of Open Source software has basically merged with the community of authors actively looking to give away software for $0 (for fame or to upsell advanced features). Basically, the Open Source movement was too successful (in its advocacy and in raising the demands of the customers of software), and it has largely subsumed and supplanted the formerly-separate fields of shareware and trialware software.
This development is what truly hurts Open Source: so much software but too little emphasis on (or even demand for) curation, massive imbalance of contributors to users, the decreasing influence programming-language-specific spaces, and increasing dominance of the "move-fast-and-break-things" culture.
The way forward is to achieve stronger curation, more focused maker spaces, tighter (as opposed to larger) communities, and an outreach effort to re-establish the philosophical distinctions between Open Source and freeware.
Reading the list of vulnerabilities that were added on March 3 to the "known exploited vulnerabilities catalog" [1] makes me want to go full Commander Adama and never network any computer ever again.
They worked together to put out a joint press release, and Biden gave a down-to-earth, rough-and-tumble speech about protecting depositors and kicking the failed executives and bad-luck shareholders to the curb, because this is "how capitalism works". It was an unusually blunt attempt to preemptively push back at the perception that this guarantee of FDIC-uninsured deposits will be branded a 'bailout'. (I predict that this attempt will fail and this will widely be perceived as a 'bailout' in casual and political discourse, which is the exact forum at which they've aimed this message.)
After 2008, the public gained awareness of the consolidation -- both forced and emergent -- that occurs in response to these sorts of crises. Public opinion views these outcomes unfavorably, because they seem unfair and irreversible, albeit no palatable alternatives have emerged that are acceptable to both to the public and government and industry incumbents.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/silicon-valley-bank-failure-depos...