Generative AI profits off your code. Make them pay for it

TL;DR our lawyers wrote a clause to protect open source code from being used by generative AI companies for profit. You can find it here: paytotrain.ai

A legal grey area exists as to whether publicly available creations (code or art) can be used to train datasets for generative AI projects without infringing their creators' underlying copyrights. Other types of claims, such as violation of license agreements and DMCA violations, require proof of damages to substantiate.

The legal solution we’ve identified is to add a specific damages amount to the license itself — a licensing fee. The failure to pay such a fee would cause the creator to suffer damages in the amount of the fee. By imbedding a licensing fee into a traditional open-source license, a creator can solve the proof-of-damages issue that could otherwise limit a claim under the DMCA or for breach of contract, and limit the fee to generative AI companies.

That’s why we built the Humans Only Clause. If you don’t want your code used by Copilot in this way, the Humans Only Clause can help strengthen your protections from use for training purposes. It’s a simple addition to your existing open source license to keep it free use and open source for other developers, but to prevent use without attribution by generative AI companies.

You can access the Humans Only Clause and insert it into your GitHub repo by going to PayToTrain.ai — we also built a payments form where you can set your own licensing fee depending on how valuable you believe your repo to be. If we get enough people using this clause, there’s a good chance we can assemble a separate class for a future class action, where each user gets significantly higher damages than what’s available statutorily under existing DMCA lawsuits.

On a philosophical level, we believe that the open source community is based on principles of taking and giving back to the collective. AI-based programming assistants strip away any attribution while drawing from the underlying contributions of the community. We want the open source community to continue to be open source, but we don’t want big companies to profit on our code.

If you’re interested, check it out: paytotrain.ai. We’d love to hear what you think

If you put your code on Github, it's bound by the TOS, which states (https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...):

> We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right 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.

Doesn't that contradict the purpose of this website? Is this performance art?

Also, why is this website so secretive? Why not publish the license on the website?

> Who is PayToTrain created by and why?

> PayToTrain is created by a small group of developers and attorneys who are passionate about open source software and ensuring that developers are properly compensated for their work. The website and service are provided completely free of charge.

Edit: PayToTrain looks like a non-disclosed ad and/or project from legalist . com.

Thank you. Could you paste the Humans Only Clause here so we can read it?

Here was my attempt to write a clause prohibiting language model training/inference:

https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304fa...

  3. Use in source or binary form for the construction or operation
     of predictive software generation systems is prohibited.

How does the Humans Only Clause fix the flaws in my attempt?

The Humans Only Clause adds an explicit licensing fee, and what else?

How is the clause worded?

The only way to add or read the license is to give them read and write access to all public repos in your Github account. Strange.

A lot of people learned to code from completely free materials on the internet. In fact, it's actually amazing how much free learning resources there are on the internet. That's how we create a good internet ecosystem, not by making everyone pay for every little thing.

Teaching AI how to code is a continuation of building this ecosystem because people will use these generative AI coding tools, lowering the bar to code.