151–160 of 314 posts
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Would such a license fall under the definition of free software? Difficult to say. Counter-proposition: a license which permits training if the model is fully open.
It isn't the difficult, a license that forbids how the program is used is a non-free software license. "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)."
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We need a ruling that LLM generated code enters public domain automatically and can't be covered by any license.
It's more or less already the case though. Pure AI-generated works without human touches are not copyrightable.
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Sometime, LLMs actually generate copyright headers as well in their output - lol - like in this PR which was the subject of a recent HN post [1] https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369/files#diff-062dbbe... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274
So what? I can probably produce parts of the header from memory. Doesn't mean my brain is GPLed.
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To my understanding, if the material is publicly available or obtained legally (i.e., not pirated), then training a model with it falls under fair use, at least in the US and some other jurisdictions. If the training is established as fair use, the underlying license doesn't really matter. The term you added would likely be void or deemed unenforceable if someone ever brought it to a court.
Fair use was for citing and so on not for ripping off 100% of the content.
This principle is also explicitly declared in US law:
> In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work. (Section 102 of the U.S. Copyright Act)
https://www.copyrightlaws.com/are-ideas-protected-by-copyrig...
And then also to all code made from the GPL’d ai model?
A program's output is likely not owned by the program's authors. For example, if you create a document with Microsoft Word, you are the one who owns it, not Microsoft.
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It's not just words, except to the extent the law is just words. You said there haven't been any cases involving the "virality portion" but there have. Just not under the "GPL makes other code GPLed" interpretation, because that, as we clearly agree, doesn't exist. What you're calling the "virality portion" says that one of the ways you *are* allowed to use the code is as part of other GPLed software. If you're going…
I do greatly appreciate you talking about cases instead of leaving it at saying there isn't a part of the license and calling any discussion about it FUD. The Cisco case was about distributing GPL binaries, not linking it with the rest of the code base and the rest of that code base then needing to be GPL. It's a standard license enforcement unrelated to the unique requirements of GPL. The BusyBox case is probably th…
It has never been the case that including GPL code in your software automatically makes your software GPL or even requires you to make it GPL. If you do get sued because you are distributing GPL code in a way that colloquially "violates the GPL" (technically, rather, in way that is not covered by the GPL or by fair use or any other licence, so it violates copyright) you might choose to GPL your code as a way of coming into compliance, but doing so is neither the only way to achieve compliance (you can instead remove the GPL code, and companies with significant investments in their proprietary code typically do that), nor a remedy for the harm done by your copyright violation to date, which you will typically have to remedy financially, via damages or a settlement.
As for legally testing, you seem to be to wanting a court to explicitly adjudicate against something so obviously wrong that in well over 20 years of FSF enforcement (edit: actually around 40 years) no company has been daft enough to try and argue it in court.
It might help if you try and delineate exactly what sort of case you'd accept as proof of "enforceability" of "virality". I think it would have to be something like a company embedding GPL code in proprietary code and then trying to argue in court that doing so is explicitly permitted by the GPL, and sticking to their guns all the way to a verdict against them. I'm not sure whether that argument would be considered frivolous enough to get the lawyers involved censured, but I certainly doubt a judge would be impressed.
If it helps make it any clearer, if in defending against a case like this your lawyer were to try and argue that the GPL is invalid and somehow just void, you should fire them immediately because they're trying to do the legal equivalent of shooting their own feet off. The GPL is what allows distribution of code, and allowing things is all it can do, because it is a license (not a contract). It can't forbid anything, and removing it from the equation can only decrease the set of things you are allowed to do with the copyrighted code.
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> Genuine question: if I train my model with copyleft material, how do you prove I did? An inverse of this question is arguably even more relevant: how do you prove that the output of your model is not copyrighted (or otherwise encumbered) material? In other words, even if your model was trained strictly on copyleft material, but properly prompted outputs a copyrighted work is it copyright infringement and if so by w…
> even if your model was trained strictly on copyleft material That's not legal use of the material according to most copyleft licenses. Regardless if you end up trying to reproduce it. It's also quite immoral if technically-strictly-speaking-maybe-not-unlawful.
That probably doesn't matter given the current rulings that training an AI model on otherwise legally acquired material is "fair use", because the copyleft license inherently only has power because of copyright.
I'm sure at some point we'll see litigation over a case where someone attempts to make "not using the material to train AI" a term of the sales contract for something, but my guess would be that if that went anywhere it would be on the back of contract law, not copyright law.
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To my understanding, if the material is publicly available or obtained legally (i.e., not pirated), then training a model with it falls under fair use, at least in the US and some other jurisdictions. If the training is established as fair use, the underlying license doesn't really matter. The term you added would likely be void or deemed unenforceable if someone ever brought it to a court.
Fair use was for citing and so on not for ripping off 100% of the content.
I might be crazy, and I'd love to hear from somebody who knows about this, but I've been assuming that AI companies have been pulling GPL code out of the training material specifically to avoid this. Corporations have always talked about the virality of GPL, sometimes but not always to the point of exaggeration, you'd think that after getting the proof of concept done the AI companies would be running away at full sp…
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It's more or less already the case though. Pure AI-generated works without human touches are not copyrightable.
We need it to be infecting the rest like GPL does.
If your close-sourced project uses some GPL code, it doesn't automatically put your whole project in public domain or under GPL. It just means you're infringing the right of the code author and they can sue you (for money and stopping using their code, not for making your whole project GPL).
In the simplest terms, GPL is:
if codebase.is_gpl_compitable:
gpl_code.give_permission(code_base)
else if codebase.is_using(gpl_code):
throw new COPYRIGHT_INFRINGEMENT // the copyright owner and the court deal with that with usual copyright laws
Similarly, AI code's copyleft status can't affect the rest of the codebase, unless we make new laws specifically saying that.
Also similarly, even if Github lost the class action, it will NOT automatically release the model behind GPL to the public. It will open the possibility for all the GPL repo authors to ask Microsoft for compensation for stealing their code.