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> 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.

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.

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

> But open weights don't undo the infringement -- they just make a potentially infringing artifact publicly available.

This is true when talking about the infringement of the copyrights of others. But when discussing the infringement of GPL copyleft, making a potentially infringing artifact publicly available likely satisfies the license conditions.

The evil is that this case was settled, and before being settled was decided in a way contrary to all previous copyright decisions. The courts decided that rap records had to clear every single sample, thereby basically destroying the art form, but now you can literally feed every book into a blender, piece another book together out of the pieces, and sell it.

Hip-hop when it peaked with the Bomb Squad was such a frenetic mix of so many recognizable, unrecognizable, and transformed sources that it doesn't resemble anything that was made after the decisions against Biz Markie and De La Soul. Afterwards, you just licensed one song, slightly cut it up, and rapped over it. It was just a new way to sell old shit to young people unfamiliar with it.

Now you can literally just train a machine on the same stuff, and it's legal. A machine transformation was elevated over human creativity, simply because rich people wanted it.

> 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.

[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>

It's the FSF and their licensing is what it is. What other messagaging would be consistent with the foundation's mission?

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.

I don't think this argument is a winner. It fails on a few grounds:

First, unless you can point to regurgitation of memorized code, you're not able to make an argument about distribution or replication. This is part of the problem that most publishers are having with prose text and LLMs. Modern LLMs don't memorize harry potter like GPT3 did. The memorization older models showed came from problems in the training data, e.g. harry potter and people writing about harry potter are extraordinarily over-represented. It's similar to how with stable diffusion you could prompt for anything in the region of "Van Gogh's Starry Night" and get it, since it was in the training data 50-100 different ways. You can't reliably do this with Opus or GPT5. If they're not redistributing the code verbatim, they're not in violation of the license. One could argue that the models produce "derivative works, but..."

The derivative works argument is inapt. The point of it is to disrupt someone's end-run around the license by saying that building on top of GPL code is not enough to non-GPL it. We imagine this will still work for LLMs because of the GPLs virality--I can't enclose a critical GPL module in non-GPL code and not release the GPL code. But the models aren't DOING THAT. They're not reaching for XYZ GPL'd project to build with. They're vibing out a sparsely connected network of information about literally trillions of lines of software. What comes out is a mishmash of code from here and there, and only coincidentally resembles GPL code, when it does. In order to make this argument work, you need a theory of how LLMs are trained and operate that supports it. Regardless of whether or not one of those theories exist, in court, you'd need to show that your theory was better than the company's expert witness's theory. Good luck.

Second, infringement would need discovery to uncover and would be contingent on user input. This is why the NYT sued for deleted user prompts to ChatGPT--the plaintiffs can't show in public that the content is infringing, so they need to seek discovery to find evidence. That's only going to work in cases where you survive a motion to dismiss--which is EXACTLY where a few of these suits have failed. You need to show first that you can succeed on the merits, then you proceed. That will cut down many of these challenges since they just can't show the actual infringement.

Third, and I think this is the most important, the license protections here are enforced by *copyright*. For copyright it very much matters if something is lifted verbatim vs modified. It is not like patent protection where things like clean room design are shown to have mattered to real courts on real matters. In additional contrast to patents, copyright doesn't care if the outcome is close. That's very much a concern for patents. If I patent a gizmo and you produce a gizmo that operates through nearly identical mechanisms to those I patented, then you can be sued--they don't need to be exact. If I write a novel about a boy wizard with glasses who takes a train to a school in Scotland and you write a novel about a boy wizard with glasses who takes a boat to a school in Inishmurray, I can't sue you for copyright infringement. You need to copy the words I wrote and distribute them to rise to a violation.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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".

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 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.

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