Licenses have no bearing on fair use or where otherwise permitted to be ignored by law.
Reference? A lot has changed within the last couple years.
MIT Non-AI License
11–20 of 45 posts
Re: MIT Non-AI License
#12If you want to add restrictions to the MIT license, just don't use the MIT license or name it that way. Your change makes it no longer an open or permissive license so it's bizarre to keep the name. It would be like creating the MIT But-You-Have-To-Pay License.
Re: MIT Non-AI License
#13Doesn't actually count as open source. Per the OSD, you cannot restrict the purpose for which people use the software and still be open source.
If you want to release your code as actual open source but legally restrict what AI companies do with it, use a copyleft license like the GPL. They could still use it for training, but the product of such training may itself fall under the GPL being a derivative work, and the AI corps don't want to touch that legal quagmire. (The GPL continues to be Stallman's brilliant legal aikido at work. Stallman is like that one guy from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance who gives you the power to manipulate the laws to work to your advantage.)
Honestly, it may be time to abandon open source as a concept. There are source-available strategies that cause less social harm than open source, including Coraline Ada Ehmke's "ethical source" and the Sentry project's "fair source" (https://fair.io) models that we can draw inspiration from.
Re: MIT Non-AI License
#14Well the thing is, you have a copyright that you can license. However from what it currently looks like, fine-tuning/training is not copying.
Re: MIT Non-AI License
#15If you want to add restrictions to the MIT license, just don't use the MIT license or name it that way. Your change makes it no longer an open or permissive license so it's bizarre to keep the name. It would be like creating the MIT But-You-Have-To-Pay License.
This is what any AI agent tells
Re: MIT Non-AI License
#16Licenses have no bearing on fair use or where otherwise permitted to be ignored by law.
Reference? A lot has changed within the last couple years.
From a U.S. standpoint: Licensing is a function of copyright. A work not subject to copyright cannot be licensed productively as-is, as the public domain quality of the work is a trivial and conclusive defense against a licensor’s claims of copyright violation. Fair use is not subject to copyright. Since licensing enforcement is only possible with an applicable copyright, enforcement cannot be completed against fair uses, as copyright law is not applicable to fair uses and therefore licensing enforcement has no legal basis. However, a judgment may overturn a defense of fair use brought against a defendant in a licensing enforcement claim, which would then subject the defendant’s use to copyright law and thus to license enforcement.
It’s midnight now, so you’re on your own to dig up and review specific instances of relevant case law, or to contrast with non-U.S. laws. Licensing above refers to i.e. LICENSE files of the specific sort that this post is about ("MIT Non-AI License"); other definitions of licensing, as well as e.g. DMCA exceptions, exist that might be of interest for you to explore further. I believe there’s been a handful of cases related to AI and fair use this past year, but as with all such defenses, unique circumstances are common enough that I hesitate to suggest any future outcome as 100% certain without much more case law than AI has today. (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
Re: MIT Non-AI License
#17If you want to add restrictions to the MIT license, just don't use the MIT license or name it that way. Your change makes it no longer an open or permissive license so it's bizarre to keep the name. It would be like creating the MIT But-You-Have-To-Pay License.
This is what any AI agent tells
Yes, I'm a secret AI agent here to try and stop your powerful new licensing idea. /s
Re: MIT Non-AI License
#18Licenses have no bearing on fair use or where otherwise permitted to be ignored by law.
The AI Act will be fully applicable from 2 August 2026.
Providers of GPAI models must respect Text and Data Mining (TDM) opt-outs.
2.1 Legal Basis: Article 53(1)(c) AI Act and Directive (EU) 2019/790 The Copyright Chapter of the Code directly addresses one of the most contentious legal questions in AI governance: the use of copyrighted material in training GPAI models and the risk of infringing outputs. Article 53(1)(c) AI Act requires GPAI providers to “identify and respect copyright protection and rights reservations” within their datasets. + This obligation complements the framework of Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive). Notably, Article 4(3) DSM Directive allows rightsholders to exclude their works from text and data mining (TDM) operations via machine-readable opt-outs.
https://www.ddg.fr/actualite/the-european-unions-code-of-pra...
Re: MIT Non-AI License
#19How do you propose someone who uses this license to enforce such clauses?