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deanjones | 3 years ago | on: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

Well, I don't think it's a DCMA issue, but it does very much depend on the licence you have chosen. That's what the licence is for, to allow people to use the code that you have copyright of, and to define what they are / are not allowed to do with it.

deanjones | 3 years ago | on: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

Section D.3: "If you're posting anything you did not create yourself or do not own the rights to, you agree that you are responsible for any Content you post". A lawsuit against Github has no standing for the scenario you suggest, because Github is not at fault.

deanjones | 3 years ago | on: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

Section D.3: "If you're posting anything you did not create yourself or do not own the rights to, you agree that you are responsible for any Content you post". A lawsuit against Github has no standing for the scenario you suggest, because Github is not at fault.

deanjones | 3 years ago | on: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

> Is it a license violation to push someone's FOSS code to github because the author didn't sign up with GH?

It depends on the licence.

It's very much enforceable that companies who provide content publishing platforms will indemnify themselves against people publishing content to which they do not have an appropriate licence.

deanjones | 3 years ago | on: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

"desperate semantic games" is actually a reasonable description of the legal process :-)

I'm not sure I agree that anything expressed in a legal contract using natural language is "unambiguously clear". MS / Github's expensively-attired lawyers will not doubt forcefully argue that they are not selling the YOUR content, but a service based on a model generated from a large collection of content, which they have been granted a licence to "parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers". There may even be in-court discussion of generalization, which will be exciting.

deanjones | 3 years ago | on: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

There is no such thing as a "content display licence" or "general code licence". There is copyright (literally, the right to make copies) which broadly lies with the author, who can then grant other parties a licence to copy their content.

I'm afraid I do not believe your legal expertise is so extensive that you are able to accurately predict the judgement of "any court".

deanjones | 3 years ago | on: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

It's irrelevant whether it's standard or not. Again, the terms in the code licence (including attribution) do not apply to Github, because that is not the licence under which they are using the code. You grant them a separate licence when you start using their service.

If someone who isn't the author has uploaded code which they do not have a right to copy, they are liable, not Github. This is also clear from the Github Terms: "If you're posting anything you did not create yourself or do not own the rights to, you agree that you are responsible for any Content you post"

It's almost as if these highly paid lawyers know what they're doing.

deanjones | 3 years ago | on: We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

This will fail very quickly. The licence that project owners publish with their code on Github applies to third parties who wish to use the code, but does not apply to Github. Authors who publish their code on Github grant Github a licence under the Github Terms: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

Specifically, sections D.4 to D.7 grant Github the right to "to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video."

deanjones | 4 years ago | on: SARS-CoV-2 infects human adipose tissue and elicits an inflammatory response

Leaving aside all of the possible confounders for the difference in severity of Covid-19 infection in men and women, it's not the case that women on average have more body fat than men. So for a "healthy" man and a "healthy" woman, the woman would tend to have more fatty tissue, but more men are overweight. UK figures show that 40% of men are overweight, compared to 31% of women. In the US, 74% of men are overweight, compared to 67% of women.

deanjones | 6 years ago | on: German expressions that don’t exist in English

Introspection has long ceased to be a valid methodology in linguistics. Lack of a 1:1 mapping between languages clearly does not imply that you "fundamentally lose information". Just because it takes a language two words to express a concept that another language can express using a single word obviously does not mean that the first language is somehow unable to fully express the meaning of the concept.

deanjones | 6 years ago | on: German expressions that don’t exist in English

> No, I'm saying a much more basic, and widely accepted, undisputed even, thing: if language X has a specific term for a situation, then its speakers have captured that situation and understand it better and can refer to it more readily than people whose language lacks the term (and can only describe the notion with different ad-hoc phrases).

Firstly, do you have any evidence for the claim that, if a language has a specific term for a concept, speakers of that language understand that concept better than speakers of languages that require more than one term to describe the concept? I am genuinely interested in references to the studies you have read which demonstrate this.

Secondly, you contradict yourself. The following statements are inconsistent:

1. "if language X has a specific term for a situation, then its speakers have captured that situation and understand it better"

2. "I'm not saying that having such a term or having a syntax structured in such a way, makes the Japanese to thing (sic) this or that way, or affects how they think."

Either having a specific term for a concept allows better understanding of it (which obviously "affects how they think") or not.

deanjones | 6 years ago | on: German expressions that don’t exist in English

When discussing linguistic issues, it's best to use linguistic theory and terminology, rather than misleading analogies to software development. What you are propounding is a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language structure (such as lexical rules which allow free construction of compound nouns) somehow influences or constrains cognitive processes. Among the linguistics community, it is widely accepted that there is very little evidence for this relativistic view, and it has been largely rejected.

The author of the article is obviously not aware of any of this, and doesn't care. He is writing without concern for the truth status of what he is saying, his aim is only for attention. This is the very definition of bullshit according to the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt in his essay "On Bullshit": "It is just this lack of connection to a concern with the truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard as of the essence of bullshit".

deanjones | 6 years ago | on: German expressions that don’t exist in English

From the article: "the unique wisdom of some of these words, that don't have an exact counterpart in the English language". So the claim is precisely that because English doesn't have single-word translations of these German terms, that the German words somehow encode "unique wisdom", which is obviously BS.

In most cases, close examination reveals that it's unfounded BS. "Aufrichtigkeit" (Sincerity/Honesty) has the same 'literal' meaning as the English "upstanding", as in "an upstanding citizen". "Liebenswürdig" is just "lovable", and so on and so forth.

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