No, it looks like the stance of the FSF is that models should be free as a matter of principle, the same as their stance when it comes to software. Nothing in the linked post contradicts the description that the judgement was that the training was fair use.

In GPL cases for software, making the offending proprietary code publicly available under the GPL has been the usu outcome.

But whether you can actually be compelled to do that isn't well tested in court. Challenging that the GPL is enforcable in that way leads you down the path that you had no valid license at all, and for past GPL offenders that would have been the worse outcome. AI companies could change that

They simply have way too much incentive to train on anything they can get their hands on. They are driving businesses, that are billions in losses so far. Someone somewhere is probably being told to feed the monster anything they can get, and not to document it, threatened with an NDA and personal financial ruin, if the proof of it ever came out. Opaque processes acting as a shield, like they do in so many other businesses.

I don't like the editorialized title either but I would say that the actual post title

"The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement, but when we do, we settle for freedom"

and this sentence at the end

" We are a small organization with limited resources and we have to pick our battles, but if the FSF were to participate in a lawsuit such as Bartz v. Anthropic and find our copyright and license violated, we would certainly request user freedom as compensation."

could be seen as "threatening".

There's already legal requirements in the EU that you must publish what goes into your training set. This information must apparently be publshed before the august 2 next year.

flag the submission?

The rule is fine and clear, it just wasn’t followed here. There’s no reason to have a stricter rule, what you’re complaining about is its enforcement. Two moderators can’t read everything, if you have a complaint, email them (contact link at the bottom of the page), they are quite responsive.

The short answer is that we don't know. The longer answer based purely on this case is that there's an argument that training is fair use and so copyleft doesn't have any impact on the model, but this is one case in California and doesn't inherently set precedent in the US in general and has no impact at all on legal interpretations in other countries.

So if a user can bring an LLM to output a copy of some training data, then the ones who distribute the LLM are engaging in illegal activity?

> but in this case the works in question were released under a license that allowed free duplication and distribution so no harm was caused.

FSF licenses contain attribution and copyleft clauses. It's "do whatever you want with it provided that you X, Y and Z". Just taking the first part without the second part is a breach of the license.

It's like renting a car without paying and then claiming "well you said I can drive around with it for the rest of the day, so where is the harm?" while conveniently ignoring the payment clause.

You maybe confusing this with a "public domain" license.

It’s pretty fucking simple: If GPL code is integrated into Claude, the Claude needs to be distributed under the terms of the GPL.

It's just an indication to model trainers that they should take care to omit FSF software from training.

Not a nothing burger, but not totally insignificant either.

The dearth of case law here still makes a negative outcome for FSF pretty dangerous, even if they don't appeal it and set precedent in higher courts. It might not be binding but every subsequent case will be able to site it, potentially even in other common law countries that lack case law on the topic.

And then there is the chilling effect. If FSF can't enforce their license, who is going to sue to overturn the precedent? Large companies, publishers, and governments have mostly all done deals with the devil now. Joe Blow random developer is going to get a strip mall lawyer and overturn this? Seems unlikely

It isn't illegal as a LLM model is transformative.

Telling mjg59 they are confused about a license is an audacious move. But I understand your question and I have the same question.

They don't need the "do whatever" permission if everything they do is fair use. They only need the downloading permission, and it's free to download.

If what you do with a copyrighted work is covered by fair use it doesn't matter what the license says - you can do it anyway. The GFDL imposes restrictions on distribution, not copying, so merely downloading a copy imposes no obligation on you and so isn't a copyright infringement either.

I used to be on the FSF board of directors. I have provided legal testimony regarding copyleft licenses. I am excruciatingly aware of the difference between a copyleft license and the public domain.

This article is talking about a book though, not software.

"Sam Williams and Richard Stallman's Free as in freedom: Richard Stallman's crusade for free software"

"GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL). This is a free license allowing use of the work for any purpose without payment."

I'm not familiar with this license or how it compares to their software licenses, but it sounds closer to a public domain license.

If it's pretty fucking simple, can you point to the statement in the linked post that supports this assertion? What it says is "According to the notice, the district court ruled that using the books to train LLMs was fair use", and while I accept that this doesn't mean the same would be true for software, I don't see anything in the FSF's post that contradicts the idea that training on GPLed software would also be fair use. I'm not passing a value judgement here, I'm a former board member of the FSF and I strongly believe in the value and effectiveness of copyleft licenses, I'm just asking how you get from what's in the post to such an absolute assertion.

Is it? The FSF's description of the judgement is that the training was fair use, but that the actual downloading of the material may have been a copyright infringement. What software does the FSF hold copyright to that can't be downloaded freely? Under what circumstances would the FSF be in a position to influence the nature of a settlement if they weren't harmed?

It's pretty fucking simple: a judge needs to decide that, not armchair lawyers on HN.

Models, however, can reproduce copyleft code verbatim, and are being redistributed. Doesn't that count?

Licences like AGPL also don't have redistribution as their only restriction.

> I am excruciatingly aware of the difference between a copyleft license and the public domain.

Then why did you say "no harm was caused"? Clearly the harm of "using our copylefted work to create proprietary software" was caused. Do you just mean economic harm? If so, I think that's where the parent comments confusion originates.

FDL is famously annoying.

wikipedia used to be under FDL and they lobbied FSF to allow an escape hatch to Commons for a few months, because FDL was so annoying.

Yet another instance of people jumping to comments based on the title of the submission alone. They don't mention GPL even once in that post...

> The GFDL imposes restrictions on distribution, not copying, so merely downloading a copy imposes no obligation on you and so isn't a copyright infringement either.

The restrictions fall not only on verbatim distribution, but derivative works too. I am not aware whether model outputs are settled to be or not to be (hehe) derivative works in a court of law, but that question is at the vey least very much valid.

This means that you can ignore any part of licenses you don't want to and just copy any software you want, non-free software included.

That's really interesting. I'm a lawyer, and I had always interpreted the license like a ToS between the developers. That (in my mind) meant that the license could impose arbitrary limitations above the default common law and statutory rules and that once you touched the code you were pregnant with those limitations, but this does make sense. TIL. So, thanks.

It sounds that way a bit from the one sentence. But that’s not the case at all.

> 4. MODIFICATIONS

> You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified Version filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of it. In addition, you must do these things in the Modified Version:

Etc etc.

In short, it is a copyleft license. You must also license derivative works under this license.

Just fyi, the gnu fdl is (unsurprisingly) available for free online - so if you want to know what it says, you can read it!

Is harm necessary to show in a copyright infringement case?

Does the reasoning in the cases where people to whom GPL software was distributed could sue the distributor for source code, rather than relying on the copyright holder suing for breach of copyright strengthen the argument that arbitrary limitations are enforceable?

This is in fact how I operate.

Copyright infringement causes harm, so if there's no harm there's no infringement. You can freely duplicate GFDLed material, so downloading it isn't an infringement. If training a model on that downloaded material is fair use then there's no infringement.

> The framing of 'share your weights freely' as a remedy is interesting but underspecified. The FSF's argument is essentially that training on copyrighted code without permission is infringement, and the remedy should be open weights.

Ignoring the fact that the statement doesn't talk about FSF code in the training data at all, [0] are you sure about that? From the start of the last of three paragraph in the statement:

  Obviously, the right thing to do is protect computing freedom: share complete training inputs with every user of the LLM, together with the complete model, training configuration settings, and the accompanying software source code. Therefore, we urge Anthropic and other LLM developers that train models using huge datasets downloaded from the Internet to provide these LLMs to their users in freedom.

This seems to me to be consistent with the FSF's stance of "You told the computer how to do it. The right thing to do is to give the humans operating that computer the software, input data, and instructions that they need to do it, too.".

[0] In fact, it talks about the inclusion of a book published under the terms of the GNU FDL, [1] which requires distribution of modified copies of a covered work to -themselves- be covered by the GNU FDL.

[1] <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html>

We know AI will be pushed through. No matter the laws

It's the third sentence of the article:

> the district court ruled that using the books to train LLMs was fair use but left for trial the question of whether downloading them for this purpose was legal.

For this to stand up in court you'd need to show that an LLM is distributing "a modified version of the document".

If I took a book and cut it up into individual words (or partial words even), and then used some of the words with words from every other book to write a new book, it'd be hard to argue that I'm really "distributing the first book", even if the subject of my book is the same as the first one.

This really just highlights how the law is a long way behind what's achievable with modern computing power.

And the judgement said that the training was fair use, but that the duplication might be an infringement. The GFDL doesn't restrict duplication, only distribution, so if training on GFDLed material is fair use and not the creation of a derivative work then there's no damage.

Last time I checked online LLMs distribute parts of their training corpus when you prompt them.

what I keep wondering is what kind of laws will be rendered useless with the precedent they'll cause. Can this be beginning of the end of copyright and intellectual property?

Presumably, a suitable prompt could get the LLM to produce whole sections of the book which would demonstrate that the LLM contains a modified version.

No, those are separate issues.

The pipeline is something like: download material -> store material -> train models on material -> store models trained on material -> serve output generated from models.

These questions focus on the inputs to the model training, the question I have raised focuses on the outputs of the model. If [certain] outputs are considered derivative works of input material, then we have a cascade of questions which parts of the pipeline are covered by the license requirements. Even if any of the upstream parts of this simplified pipeline are considered legal, it does not imply that that the rest of the pipeline is compliant.

Copyright, possibly. Intellectual property more broadly, no. AI has 0 impact on trademark law, quite clearly (which is anchored in consumer protection, in principle). Patent law is perhaps more related, but it's still pretty far.

Doubt it. I'm sure it will have an exclusion where for example using genAI to train on or replicate leaked or reverse-engineered Windows code will constitute copyright infringement, but doing the same for copyleft will be allowed. Always in favor of corporate interests.

Yes, and for practical purposes the current consensus (and in case of EU, the law) is that only said document would be converted by FDL

In a way, I think so. Just let the code recreate existing code, say it's AI code and doesn't break any copyright laws

If/when you get a postcard/spam email that you're included in a potential class action lawsuit settlement, you can opt out of the class (in which case you preserve your legal rights to sue separately) or file comments with the Court.

> The entire premise of the product is “built on the backs of any & everyone who has ever published a work”

Do any products exist which are not built on uncompensated work of other people in the past?

Generally speaking societies do better when knowledge is shared and not hoarded.

Hoarding knowledge via legal constructs is great at concentrating wealth to the hoarder at the expense of everyone else.

We should restore copyright to its original term lengths.

I agree with the stance of Anthropic et al that these models should be built with all possible information.

I agree with the stance of the FSF that the resulting models should be as freely usable/available as possible.

Consider the net effect and the answer is clear. When these models are properly "trained", are people going to look for the book or a derivative of it, with proper attribution?

Or is the LLM going to regurgitate the same content with zero attribution, and shift all the traffic away from the original work?

When viewed in this frame, it is obvious that the work is derivative and then some.

> Generally speaking societies do better when knowledge is shared and not hoarded.

These companies do even better because we're not allowed to share the knowledge (read, illegally copy protected works) and they are.

You can, but then you lose the power of a collective and have to manage a lawsuit yourself. If you are being represented as part of a group, then you should have means to direct that representation.

Exactly.

That is your opinion, but the judge disagreed with you. The decision may have been overturned on appeal, but as it stands, in that courtroom, the training was fair use.

Surely some firms choose to hold referendums already, but I could see that being a good law! As Better Call Saul explored in its early seasons, the interests of the large law firm can easily diverge significantly from the interests of the plaintiffs.

This is also, unfortunately, the only way this can be settled. Making LLM output legally a derivative work would murder the AI golden rush and nobody wants that

I can memorize a song and it will be fair use too, but it won't be anymore once I start performing it publicly. Training itself is quite obviously fair use, what matters is what happens next.