[HN Gopher] The current state of the theory that GPL propagates ...
___________________________________________________________________
The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models
Author : jonymo
Score : 164 points
Date : 2025-11-27 12:48 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shujisado.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (shujisado.org)
| graemep wrote:
| The article repeatedly treats license and contract as though they
| are the same, even though the sidebar links to a post that
| discusses the difference.
|
| A lot of it boils down to whether training an LLM is a breach of
| copyright of the training materials which is not specific to GPL
| or open source.
| xgulfie wrote:
| And the current norm that the trillion dollar companies have
| lobbied for is that you can train on copyrighted material all
| you want so that's the reality we are living in. Everything
| ever published is all theirs.
| exasperaited wrote:
| In practice it wouldn't matter a whit if they lobbied for it
| or not.
|
| Lobbying is for people trying to stop them; externalities are
| for the little people.
| graemep wrote:
| I am really surprised that media businesses, which are
| extremely influential around the world, have not pushed back
| against this more. I wonder whether they are looking at cost
| savings that will get from the technology as a worthwhile
| trade-off.
| gorbachev wrote:
| They're busy trying to profit from it rushing to enter into
| licensing agreements with the LLM vendors.
| xgulfie wrote:
| Yeah, the short term win is to enter a licensing
| agreement so you get some cash for a couple years,
| meanwhile pray someone else with more money fights the
| legal battle to try and set a precedent for you
| mr_toad wrote:
| Several media companies have sued OpenAI already. So far,
| none have been successful.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| All theirs, if they properly obtained the copy.
|
| This is a big difference that already has bit them.
| gruez wrote:
| >And the current norm that the trillion dollar companies have
| lobbied for is that you can train on copyrighted material all
| you want so that's the reality we are living in. Everything
| ever published is all theirs.
|
| What "lobbied"? Copyright law hasn't materially changed since
| AI got popular, so I'm not sure where these lobbying efforts
| are showing up in. If anything the companies that have
| lobbied hard in the past (eg. media companies) are opposed to
| the current status quo, which seems to favor AI companies.
| maxloh wrote:
| 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.
|
| Once training is established as fair use, it doesn't really
| matter if the license is MIT, GPL, or a proprietary one.
| blibble wrote:
| fair use only applies in the united states (and Poland, and a
| very limited set of others)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#/media/File:Fair_use_.
| ..
|
| and it is certainly not part of the Berne Convention
|
| in almost every country in the world even timeshifting using
| your VCR and ripping your own CDs is copyright infringement
| jcelerier wrote:
| France and most of europe has fair use
| (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copie_priv%C3%A9e) but also
| has a mandatory tax on every sold medium that can do
| storage to recover the "lost fees" due to fair use
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Most commonwealth countries have fair dealing, which is
| similar although slightly different
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing
| blibble wrote:
| importantly "fair dealing" has no concept of
| "transformation"
|
| (which is the linch-pin of the sloppers)
| gruez wrote:
| Great, so the US and China can duke it out trying to create
| AGI or whatever, whereas most other countries are stuck in
| the past because of their copyright laws?
| mongol wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Is this legally settled?
| 1gn15 wrote:
| Yes. There have been multiple court cases affirming fair
| use.
| graemep wrote:
| That is just the sort of point I am trying to make. That is a
| copyright law issue, not a contractual one. If the GPL is a
| contract then you are in breach of contract regardless of
| fair use or equivalents.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| It's not specific to open source but it's most clearly
| enforceable with open source as there will be many contributors
| from many jurisdictions with the one unifying factor being they
| all made their copyright available under the same license
| terms.
|
| With proprietary or more importantly single-owner code, it's
| far easier for this to end up in a settlement rather than being
| drug out into an actual ruling, enforcement action, and
| establishment of precedence.
|
| That's the key detail. It's not specific to GPL or open source
| but if you want to see these orgs held to account and some
| precedence established, focusing on GPL and FOSS licensed code
| is the clearest path to that.
| kronicum2025 wrote:
| A GPL license is a contract in most other countries. Just not
| US probably.
| graemep wrote:
| That part of the article is about US cases, so its US law
| that applies.
|
| > A GPL license is a contract in most other countries. Just
| not US probably.
|
| Not just the US. It may vary with version of the GPL too.
| Wikipedia claims its a civil law vs common law country
| difference - not sure the citation shows that though.
| rvnx wrote:
| GPL and copyright in general don't apply to billionaires, so
| pretty much a non-topic.
|
| It's just a side cost of doing business, because asking for
| forgiveness is cheaper and faster than asking for permission.
| throwaway198846 wrote:
| "Information wants to be free"? Many individuals pirated movies
| and games and got away with it. Of course two wrongs don't make
| a right and all that. Nonetheless one should be compensated for
| creating material that ai trained on for the same reasons
| copyright is compensated - to incentives people to produce it.
| rando77 wrote:
| With an attitude like that they don't
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I thought the whole concept of a viral license was legally
| questionable to begin with. There haven't been cases about this,
| as far as I know, and GPL virality enforcement has just been done
| by the community.
| omnicognate wrote:
| The GPL was tested in court as early as 2006 [1] and plenty of
| times since. There are no serious doubts about its
| enforceability.
|
| [1] https://www.fsf.org/news/wallace-vs-fsf
| zamadatix wrote:
| I know it's not popular on HN to have anything but supportive
| statements around GPL, and I'm a big GPL supporter myself,
| but there is nuance in what is being said here.
|
| That case was important, but it's not abojt the virality.
| There have been no concluded court cases involving the
| virality portion causing the rest of the code to also be
| GPL'd, but there are plenty involving enforcement of GPL on
| the GPL code itself.
|
| The distinction is important because the article is about the
| virality causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd, not just
| about the GPL'd code itself.
|
| I'd like to think it wouldn't be a problem to enforce, but
| I've also never seen a court ruling truly about the virality
| portion to back that up either - which is all GP is saying.
| omnicognate wrote:
| There is no "virality", and the article's use of
| "propagation" to mean the same thing is wrong. The GPL
| doesn't "cause" anything to be GPLed that hasn't been
| explicitly licensed under the GPL by the owner of its
| copyright. The GPL grants a license to use the copyright
| material to which it applies. To satisfy the terms of that
| license for a particular use may require that you license
| other code under the GPL, but if you don't the GPL can't
| magically make that code GPLed. You will, however, not be
| covered by the license so unless your use is permitted for
| some other reason (eg. fair use or a different license you
| have been granted) your use of the the original code will
| be a violation of copyright. All of this has been
| repeatedly tested in court.
|
| It's sad to see Microsoft's FUD still festering 20 years
| later.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's not Microsoft FUD, you're describing the license as
| viral too, but playing with words. The fact is that if
| you include GPL'd stuff in your stuff, that assemblage
| has to conform to the GPL's rules.
|
| You're basically saying "the GPL doesn't go back in time
| and relicense unrelated code." But nobody was ever
| claiming it does, and describing it as "viral" doesn't
| imply that it does. It's "viral" because code that you
| stick to it has to conform to its rules. It's _good_ that
| the GPL is viral. I want it to be viral, I don 't want
| people to be able to hide GPL'd code in a proprietary
| structure.
| omnicognate wrote:
| 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 to look for
| court cases that explicitly "involve" that, it would have
| to be someone either:
|
| * using it as a defense, i.e. saying "we're covered by
| the GPL because the software we embedded this code in is
| GPL" (That will probably never happen because people
| don't sue GPLed projects for containing GPLed code), or
|
| * coming into line with the GPL by open sourcing their
| own code as part of resolving a case (The BusyBox case
| [2] was an example of that).
|
| If you just want cases where companies that were
| distributing GPL code in closed source software were
| prevented from doing so, the Cisco [1] and BusyBox [2]
| cases were both notable examples. That they were settled
| doesn't somehow make them a weaker "test of the GPL" -
| rather the companies involved didn't even attempt to
| argue that what they were doing was permitted. They came
| into line and coughed up. If you really must insist on
| one where the defendant dug in and the court ended up
| awarding damages, I don't think there have been any in
| the US but there has been one in France [3].
|
| As for "nobody was ever claiming it does", the "viral"
| wording has been used for as long as the GPL has been
| around as a scare tactic for introducing exactly that
| erroneous idea. Even in cases where people understand
| what the license says, it leads to subtle
| misunderstandings of the law, which is why the Free
| Software Foundation discourages its use. (Also, you
| literally said, in these exact words, "the virality
| causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd".)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundatio
| n,_Inc.....
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits
|
| [3] https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/202
| 4/03/wa...
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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 the closest in the list, but
| as you already point out we didn't get a ruling to set
| precedent and instead got a settlement. It seems obvious
| what the ruling would be (to me at least), but settlement
| was explicitly not what is being talked about.
|
| Bringing in French courts, they issued fines - they
| didn't issue the type of order this article talks about
| which is about releasing the entire thing involved at the
| time with GPL.
|
| This isn't related to fear, uncertainty, or doubt about
| GPL. It's related to what has/hasn't already been ruled
| in the court systems handling this license before as the
| article skips past a bit. Even in the case we assume the
| courts will rule with what seems obvious (to me at
| least), it has a tangible difference in how these cases
| will be run, the assumptions they will have, and how long
| they will last.
| omnicognate wrote:
| TBC, I'm not talking about the article, which I've barely
| read but looks rather misguided as it seems to be talking
| about LLMs having to be GPLed because of training data,
| which is not something that would ever happen.
|
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| If you've barely read the article then I can understand
| why you mistook what and why the comment was trying to
| talk to in response to the virality portions of said
| article. It's pretty much an argument "because of court
| cases, this is how propagation of GPL to the whole LLM
| model could be forced in the future" and the comment was
| saying there is actually no case precedence at all about
| that because it never gets there (usually being something
| obvious with the copyright portions alone or settlement
| to release the GPL portions).
|
| Including GPL code in your app requires/results in
| different things depending on how you do that. E.g. the
| way Cisco did it with binaries is different than doing it
| with static linking/ is different than dynamic
| linking/syscalls/apis is different than expanding the
| code directly. It's not possible to talk about it as
| generically as above, especially in context of discussion
| around an article adding a new method of interaction.
|
| Yes, the point is precisely the article explicitly asks
| about this point being tested in court rulings and the
| comment is that it has never needed to go beyond
| settlement (usually not even that far). I also don't
| really agree with how the article assumes things around
| that in a few places, but that's neither here nor their
| to this point.
|
| It's not that I want proof, it's that the article you
| admit to not reading sets out to look at court cases to
| "consider the path through which the theory of license
| propagation to AI models might be recognized in the
| future". In that regard it's pretty relevant to note past
| no court case, nor really the two ongoing in the article,
| involve propagation of the license to the whole entity
| yet.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Virality is a very good feature of GPL and part of what
| makes it a meaningfully different choice than other open
| licenses, I don't know why you want attribute that to
| Microsoft of all places.
| omnicognate wrote:
| A key pillar of Microsoft's FUD campaign against open
| source was that if you use GPL software you run the risk
| of inadvertantly including some of it in your proprietary
| software and accidentally causing the whole thing to
| suddenly become open source against your horrified
| company's wishes. It was a lie then and it's a lie now.
| The comment I was replying to (along with many others on
| this post) indicates the brainworm lives on.
|
| The difference between a license and a contract may be
| too subtle for the denizens of HN to grasp in 2025 but I
| assure you it's not lost on the legal system. It's not
| lost on those of us who followed groklaw back in the day,
| either. Sad we have to live with an internet devoid of
| such joys now.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Another key pillar of Microsoft's FUD campaign was you
| have to open source any code modifications you write to a
| GPL codebase even if you don't want to. That doesn't make
| that feature of GPL a fallacy others must be too stupid
| to understand, it just means Microsoft was trying to make
| the promises of GPL seem bad when they were actually
| good. I.e. what Microsoft tried to scare people with is
| irrelevant to a discussion about what's in the GPL
| itself. Ironically, it's more akin to FUD than anything
| else in this conversation.
|
| I do miss groklaw, been far too long for something like
| that to appear again.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| That case has little to do with the license itself and
| nothing to do with its virality.
| omnicognate wrote:
| As I said, that was merely the first of many. And there is
| no such thing as "virality" - see my answer to the sibling
| to your comment.
|
| The "enforceability" of the GPL was never in any doubt
| because it's not a contract and doesn't need to be
| "enforced". The license _grants_ you freedoms you otherwise
| may not have under copyright. It doesn 't deny you any
| freedoms you would otherwise have, and it cannot do so
| because it is not a contract. If the terms of the GPL don't
| apply to your use then all you have is the normal freedoms
| under copyright law, which may prohibit it. If so, any
| "enforcement" isn't enforcement of the GPL. It's
| enforcement of copyright, and there's certainly no doubt on
| the enforceability of _that_.
|
| For the GPL to "fail" in court it would have be found to
| effectively grant _greater_ freedoms than it was designed
| to do (or less, resulting in some use not being allowed
| when it should be, but that 's not the sort of case being
| considered here). It doesn't, and it has repeatedly stood
| up in court as not granting additional freedoms than were
| intended.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Look at the "many" if you want to cite better cases about
| this.
| omnicognate wrote:
| I've cited further cases elsewhere in this thread. If
| you'd like to test this yourself feel free to repackage
| some GPL software as closed source, flog it to people and
| see what happens. I'm not your lawyer.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070191
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I see more discussion in the sibling thread, but I am
| still waiting for a case actually relevant to the
| virality of the GPL. The article is about how use of GPL
| code can "infect" LLM weights and force their disclosure,
| and I am personally somewhat doubtful that is legally the
| ccase. I am also further convinced that this theory has
| never been given real legal force.
| iso1631 wrote:
| If you don't like the license, then don't accept it.
|
| You are then restricted by copyright just like with any other
| creation.
|
| If I include the source code of Windows into my product, I
| can't simply choose to re-license it to say public domain and
| give it to someone else, the license that I have from Microsoft
| to allow me to use their code won't let me - it provides
| restrictions. It's just as "viral" as the GPL.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I like the GPL. I just don't know how much you can actually
| enforce it.
|
| Also, "don't use my code" is not viral. If you break the MSFT
| license, you pay them, which is a very well-tested path in
| courts. The idea of forced public disclosure does not seem to
| be.
| iso1631 wrote:
| How much do you pay them?
|
| If the GPL license didn't exist, and instead you just
| relying on copyright, then that's an injunction. You have
| to stop using the code you "stole" and pay reparations.
|
| In UK law, if you distribute copyright material in the
| course of a business you can be facing 10 years in prison
| and an unlimited fine.
|
| Sure you can't get them to agree to the GPL, they could
| simply stop distributing and then turn up to their stint in
| prison and massive fine. In reality I suspect they would
| take the easy way out and comply with the license.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| You pay them an amount determined by the court or your
| settlement, and you also have to stop using the code.
| This is how everything works.
|
| Corporations can't go to prison.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| There have been a number of of cases, which are linked from
| Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_Lic
| ense#Leg...) - most recently Entr'Ouvert v. Orange had a strong
| judgement (under French law) in favour of the GPL.
|
| Conversely, to my knowledge there has been no court decision
| that indicates that the GPL is _not_ enforceable. I think you
| might want to be more familiar with the area before you decide
| if it's legally questionable or not.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I'm not suggesting that you avoid following it. I'm just not
| that convinced it's enforceable in the US. The French ruling
| is good, though.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The article goes deep into these two cases deemed most relevant
| but really there are a wide swath of similar cases all focused
| around defining sharper borders than ever around what is
| essentially the question "exactly when does it become copyright
| violation" with plenty of seemingly "obvious" answers which
| quickly conflict with each other.
|
| I also have the feeling it will be much like Google LLC v. Oracle
| America, Inc., much of this won't really be clearly resolved
| until the end if the decade. I'd also not ve surprised if
| seemingly very different answers ended up bubbling up in the
| different cases, driven by the specifics of the domain.
|
| Not a lawyer, just excited to see the outcomes :).
| twoodfin wrote:
| Ideally, Congress would just settle this basket of copyright
| concerns, as they explicitly have the power to do--and have
| done so repeatedly in the specific context of computers and
| software.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| What is ideal about getting more shitty laws written at the
| behest of massive tech companies? Do you think the DMCA is a
| good thing?
| twoodfin wrote:
| As opposed to waiting for uncertain court cases (based on
| the existing shitty laws) to play out for years, ultimately
| decided by unelected judges?
|
| Democracy is the worst system we've tried, except for all
| the others.
|
| (Also: The GPL can only be enforced because of laws passed
| by Congress in the late '70's and early '80's. And believe
| you me, people said all the same kinds of things about
| those clowns in Congress. _Plus ca change..._ )
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Courts applying legal analysis to existing law and
| precedent is also an operation of democracy in action and
| lately they've been a lot better at it than legislators.
| I don't know if you've noticed, but the quality of our
| legislators has substantially deteriorated since the 80s,
| when 24-hour news networks became a thing. It got even
| worse after the Citizens United decision and social media
| became a thing. "No new laws" is really the safest path
| these days.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| DMCA isn't intrinsically copyright. It's a questionable
| attempt at a safe harbor provision that has horrible
| provisions for abuse. I'm not even of the opinion that
| copyright about computer software is poorly executed. It's
| mostly software patents that don't make any sense to me.
| When you have a concept that essentially every mathematics
| undergrad is familiar with getting labels slapped on it &
| called a novel technique. It's made worse by the fact that
| the patent office itself isn't enabled to perform any real
| review. There are no shortage of impossible devices
| patented each year in the category of things perpetual
| motion.
| tpmoney wrote:
| I've pitched this idea before but my pie in the sky hope is
| to settle most of this with something like a huge rollback of
| copyright terms, to something like 10 or 15 years initially.
| You can get one doubling of that by submitting your work to
| an official "library of congress" data set which will be used
| to produce common, clean, and open models that are available
| to anyone for a nominal fee and prevent any copyright claims
| against the output of those models. The money from the model
| fees is used to pay royalties to people with materials in the
| data set over time, with payouts based on recency and
| quantity of material, and an absolute cap to discourage
| flooding the data sets to game the payments.
|
| This solution to me amounts to an "everybody wins" situation,
| where producers of material are compensated, model trainers
| and companies can get clean, reliable data sets without
| having to waste time and energy scraping and digitizing it
| themselves, and model users can have access to a number of
| known "safe" models. At the same time, people not interested
| in "allowing" their works to be used to train AIs and people
| not interested in only using the public data sets can each
| choose to not participate in this system, and then
| individually resolve their copyright disputes as normal.
| simgt wrote:
| What triggers me is how insistant Claude Code is on adding "co-
| authored by Claude" in commits, in spite of my settings and an
| instruction in CLAUDE.md. I wish all these tech bros were as
| willing to credit the _human_ shoulders on which their products
| are built. But they 'd be much less successful in our current
| system if they were that kind of people.
| euazOn wrote:
| Try changing the system prompt or switch to opencode [0] - they
| allegedly reverse engineered Claude Code, and so the
| performance you get with Claude models should be very similar
| to Claude Code.
|
| [0] https://github.com/sst/opencode
| patrick91 wrote:
| there's an option for claude to disable co-authoring, see:
| https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings
|
| { "includeCoAuthoredBy": false }
| simgt wrote:
| I've changed the settings and added the instruction to the
| prompt, hence my frustration :)
| ljlolel wrote:
| And then also to all code made from the GPL'd ai model?
| maxloh wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Unless the license says otherwise. The fact that Word doesn't
| (I wouldn't even be sure if that was true, honestly,
| especially for the online versions) doesn't mean anything.
|
| They could start selling a version of Word tomorrow that
| gives them the right to train from everything you type on
| your entire computer into any program. Or that requires you
| to relinquish your rights to your writing and to license it
| back from Microsoft, and to only be able to dispute this
| through arbitration. They could add a morals clause.
| javcasas wrote:
| You sure about that? Have you checked the 400-page EULA?
| LtWorf wrote:
| If I take a song and convert it from .mp3 to .ogg, the
| resulting file has no copyright since it's the output of a
| program?
| dmezzetti wrote:
| As someone who has spent a fair amount of time developing open
| source software, I will say I genuinely dislike copyleft and GPL.
|
| For those who are into freedom, I don't see how dictating how you
| use what you build in such a manner is in the spirit of free and
| open.
|
| Just my opinion on it, to each their own on the matter.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| I disagree as someone who has also spent a huge amount of time
| on open source software. It's all GPL or AGPL :)
| dmezzetti wrote:
| That's your prerogative. It's just not for me and GPL is
| basically something I avoid when possible.
| amenhotep wrote:
| It's not dictating how you use what you build? It's dictating
| how you redistribute what you build on top of other people's
| work.
| dmezzetti wrote:
| Ok but I just have no interest in imposing restrictions on
| how people distribute what I build in such a manner either.
| That's just me.
| mr_toad wrote:
| What if they impose their own restrictions on people
| further down the line?
| dmezzetti wrote:
| Once it's out of my hands, so be it. The users can choose
| not to use derivatives.
| pessimizer wrote:
| As somebody who thinks that people currently own the code that
| they write, I wonder why you're in people's business who want
| to write GPL'd software.
|
| Are you complaining about proprietary software? I hear the
| restrictions are a lot tighter for Photoshop's source code, or
| iOS's, but for some reason you are one of the people who hate
| GPL as a hobby. Please don't show up whining about "spirits"
| when Amazon puts you out of business.
| dmezzetti wrote:
| I'm not in anyone's business just sharing my opinion on GPL.
| I understand why people go GPL / AGPL just not for me. To
| each their own if they want to go down that path.
| myrmidon wrote:
| I had a very similar view once, and have since understood that
| this is mainly a difference in perspective:
|
| It's easy as a developer to slip into a role where you want to
| build/package (maybe sell) some software product with minimal
| obligations. BSD-likes are obviously great there.
|
| But the GPL follows a different perspective: It tries to make
| sure that every _user_ of any software product is always
| capable of tinkering and changing it himself, and the more
| permissive licenses do not help there because they don 't
| prevent (or even discourage!) companies from just selling you
| stripped and obfuscated binary blobs that put you fully at the
| vendors mercy.
| dmezzetti wrote:
| I understand people want to control what happens once they
| build something. Too often do you see startups go with a
| permissive model only to go to a more restrictive model once
| something like that happens. Then it ends up upsetting a lot
| of people.
|
| I'm of the opinion that what I build, I'm willing to share it
| and let others use it as they see fit even if it's not to my
| advantage.
| myrmidon wrote:
| I think the GPL mainly suffers with startups because it
| makes monetization pretty difficult. Some "commercial" uses
| of it are also giving it somewhat of an undeserved bad
| taste (when companies use it to benefit from free
| contributions while preventing competitors from getting any
| use out of it).
|
| My view is that every project and library where I can
| peruse the source is a gift/privilege. GPL restrictions I
| view as a small price to "pay it forward", and to keep that
| privilege for all wherever possible.
| dmezzetti wrote:
| Fair enough. You'd like to hope that there is a voluntary
| "pay it back and forward" mentality. But I understand
| that is a leap of faith with a lot of blind trust.
| hgs3 wrote:
| Copyleft isn't about the software authors freedom, it's about
| the end-users freedom. Copyleft grants the end-user the freedom
| to study and modify the code, i.e. the right to repair.
| Contrast this with closed-source software which _may_
| incorporate permissively licensed code: the end-user has no
| right to study, no right to modify, and no right to repair.
| Ergo less freedom.
| dmezzetti wrote:
| I think it makes a lot of sense for hobby software and non-
| commercial software. It's just tough to do in a commercial
| setting for a number of reasons.
|
| So ultimately while good intentioned, you end up limiting how
| many people can use what you've built.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t...
| em-bee wrote:
| just a comment on this article, that may be unrelated to the
| point you want to make: gavin makes a fatal mistake in
| interpreting RMS intent. he claims that he only wanted
| control over his hardware. that is not true. he also wanted
| the right to share his code with others. the person who had
| the code for his printer was not allowed to share that code.
| RMS wanted to ensure that the person who has the code is also
| allowed to share it. source available does not do that.
| phplovesong wrote:
| We need a new license that forbids all training. That is the only
| way to stop big corporations from doing this.
| James_K wrote:
| 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.
| Orygin wrote:
| My next project will be released under a GPL-like license
| with exactly this condition added. If you train a model on
| this code, the model must be open source & open weights
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Not sure why the FSF or any other organization hasn't
| released a license like this years ago already.
| amszmidt wrote:
| Because it would violate freedom zero. Adding such terms
| to the GNU GPL would also mean that you can remove them,
| they would be considered "further restrictions" and can
| be removed (see section 7 of the GNU GPL version 3).
| Orygin wrote:
| Freedom 0 is not violated. GPL includes restrictions for
| how you can use the software, yet it's still open source.
|
| You can do whatever you want with the software, BUT you
| must do a few things. For GPL it's keeping the license,
| distributing the source, etc. Why can't we have a
| different license with the same kind of restrictions, but
| also "Models trained on this licensed work must be open
| source".
|
| Edit: Plus the license would not be "GPL+restriction" but
| a new license altogether, which includes the requirements
| for models to be open.
| amszmidt wrote:
| That is not really correct, the GNU GPL doesn't have any
| terms whatsoever on how you can use, or modify the
| program to do things. You're free to make a GNU GPL
| program do anything (i.e., use).
|
| I suggest a careful reading of the GNU GPL, or the
| definition of Free Software, where this is carefully
| explained.
| Orygin wrote:
| > You may convey a work based on the Program, or the
| modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form
| of source code under the terms of section 4, provided
| that you also meet all of these conditions:
|
| "A work based on the program" can be defined to include
| AI models (just define it, it's your contract). "All of
| these conditions" can include conveying the AI model in
| an open source license.
|
| I'm not restricting your ability to use the program/code
| to train an AI. I'm imposing conditions (the same as the
| GPL does for code) onto the AI model that is derivative
| of the licensed code.
|
| Edit: I know it may not be the best section (the one
| after regarding non-source forms could be better) but in
| spirit, it's exactly the same imo as GPL forcing you to
| keep the GPL license on the work
| amszmidt wrote:
| I think maybe you're mixing up distribution and running a
| program, at least taking your initial comment into
| account, "if you train/run/use a model, it must be open
| source".
| Orygin wrote:
| I should have been more precise: "If you train _and
| distribute_ an AI model on this work, it must use the
| same license as the work ".
|
| Using AGPL as the base instead of GPL (where network
| access is distribution), any user of the software will
| have the rights to the source code of the AI model and
| weights.
|
| My goal is not to impose more restrictions to the AI
| maker, but to guarantee rights to the user of software
| that was trained on my open source code.
| tpmoney wrote:
| In light of the fact that the courts have found training an
| AI model to be fair use under US copyright law, it seems
| unlikely this condition will have any actual relevance to
| anyone. You're probably going to need to not publicly
| distribute your software at all, and make such a condition
| a term of the initial sale. Even there, it's probably going
| to be a long haul to get that to stick.
| amszmidt wrote:
| 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)."
| helterskelter wrote:
| Running the program and analyzing the source code are two
| different things...?
| amszmidt wrote:
| In the context of Free Software, yes. Freedom one is
| about the right to study a program.
| Orygin wrote:
| Yet the GPL imposes requirements for me and we consider it
| free software.
|
| You are still free to train on the licensed work, BUT you
| must meet the requirements (just like the GPL), which would
| include making the model open source/weight.
| LtWorf wrote:
| But training an AI on a text is not running it.
| tpmoney wrote:
| And distributing an AI model trained on that text is
| neither distributing the work nor a modification of the
| work, so the GPL (or other) license terms don't apply. As
| it stands, the courts have found training an AI model to
| be a sufficiently transformative action and fair use
| which means the resulting output of that training is not
| a "copy" for the terms of copyright law.
| tomrod wrote:
| Model weights, source, and output.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Wouldn't it be still legal to train on the data due to fair
| use?
| gus_massa wrote:
| I don't think it's fair use, but everyone on Earth disagree
| with me. So even with the standard default licence that
| prohibits absolutely everything, the humanity-1 consider it
| fair use.
| justin_murray wrote:
| Honest question: why don't you think it is fair use?
|
| I can see how it pushes the boundary, but I can't lay out
| logic that it's not. The code has been publish for the
| public to see. I'm always allowed to read it, remember it,
| tell my friends about it. Certainly, this is what the
| author hoped I would do. Otherwise, wouldn't they have kept
| it to themselves?
|
| These agents are just doing a more sophisticated, faster
| version of that same act.
| mixedbit wrote:
| Before LLMs programmers had pretty good intuition what
| GPL license allowed for. It is of course clear that you
| cannot release a closed source program with GPL code
| integrated into it. I think it was also quite clear, that
| you cannot legally incorporate GPL code into such a
| program, by making changes here and there, renaming some
| stuff, and moving things around, but this is pretty much
| what LLMs are doing. When humans do it intentionally, it
| is violation of the license, when it is automated and
| done on a huge scale, is it really fair use?
| WithinReason wrote:
| > this is pretty much what LLMs are doing
|
| I think this is the part where we disagree. Have you used
| LLMs, or is this based on something you read?
| mixedbit wrote:
| Do you honestly believe there are people on this board
| who haven't used LLMs? Ridiculing someone you disagree
| with is a poor way to make an argument.
| WithinReason wrote:
| lots of people on this board are philosophically opposed
| to them so it was a reasonable question, especially in
| light of your description of them
| gus_massa wrote:
| Some project like Wine forbids you to contribute if you
| ever have seen the source of MS Windows [1]. The meatball
| inside your head is tainted.
|
| I don't remember the exact case now, but someone was
| cloning a program (Lotus123 -> Quatro or Excel???). They
| printed every single screen and made a team write a full
| specification in English. Later another separate team
| look at the screenshots and text and reimplement it.
| Apparently meatballs can get tainted, but the plain
| English text loophole was safe enough.
|
| [1] From
| https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Developer-
| FAQ#wh...
|
| > _Who can 't contribute to Wine?_
|
| > _Some people cannot contribute to Wine because of
| potential copyright violation. This would be anyone who
| has seen Microsoft Windows source code (stolen, under an
| NDA, disassembled, or otherwise). There are some
| exceptions for the source code of add-on components (ATL,
| MFC, msvcrt); see the next question._
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > I don't remember the exact case now, but someone was
| cloning a program (Lotus123 -> Quatro or Excel???). They
| printed every single screen and made a team write a full
| specification in English. Later another separate team
| look at the screenshots and text and reimplement it.
| Apparently meatballs can get tainted, but the plain
| English text loophole was safe enough.
|
| This is close to how I would actually recommend
| reimplementing a legacy system (owned by the re-
| implementer) with AI SWE. Not to avoid copyright, but to
| get the AI to build up everything it needs to maintain
| the system over a long period of time. The separate team
| is just a new AI instance whose context doesn't contain
| the legacy the code (because that would pollute the new
| result). The amplify isn't too apt though since there is
| a difference between having something in your context
| (which you can control and is very targeted) and the code
| that the model was trained on (which all AI instance will
| share unless you use different models, and anyways, it
| isn't supposed to be targeted).
| conartist6 wrote:
| The fair use prong that's problematic is that the fair
| use can't decimate the value of the original work. It's
| the difference between me imitating your art style for a
| personal project and me making 1,000,000 copies of your
| art so that your art isn't worth much anymore. One is a
| fair use, the other is exploitative extraction
| LtWorf wrote:
| Just corporations, their shills, and people who think llms
| are god's gift to humanity disagree with you.
| maxloh wrote:
| 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.
| justin_murray wrote:
| This is at least murky, since a lot of pirated material is
| "publicly available". Certainly some has ended up in the
| training data.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| It isn't? You have to break the law to get it. It's
| publicly available like your TV is if I were to break into
| your house and avoid getting shot.
| basilgohar wrote:
| That isn't even remotely a sensible analogy. Equating
| copyright violation with stealing physical property is an
| extremely failed metaphor.
| tpmoney wrote:
| One of the craziest experiences in this "post AI" world
| is to see how quickly a lot of people in the "information
| wants to be free" or "hell yes I would download a car"
| crowds pivoted to "stop downloading my car, just because
| its on a public and openly available website doesn't make
| it free"
| voidfunc wrote:
| "Rules for thee, but not for me"
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Maybe you have some legalistic point that escapes
| comprehension, but I certainly consider my house to be
| much private and the internet public.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I wouldn't say this is settled law, but it looks like this is
| one of the likely outcomes. It might not be possible to write
| a license to prevent training.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Isn't the court fight on fair use failing pretty hard on
| the prong that flooding the market with cheap copies
| eliminates the market for the original work?
| rileymat2 wrote:
| It depends on the license terms, if you have a license that
| allowed you to get it legally where you agreed to those terms
| it would not be legal for that purpose.
|
| But this is all grey area...
| https://www.authorsalliance.org/2023/02/23/fair-use-
| week-202...
| LtWorf wrote:
| Fair use was for citing and so on not for ripping off 100% of
| the content.
| maxloh wrote:
| Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea
| itself. Therefore, an LLM transforming concepts it learned
| into a response (a new expression) would hardly qualify as
| copyright infringement in court.
|
| 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...
| scotty79 wrote:
| We need a ruling that LLM generated code enters public domain
| automatically and can't be covered by any license.
| palata wrote:
| But then we would need a way to prove that some code was LLM
| generated, right?
|
| Like if I copy-paste GPL-licenced code, the way you realise
| that I copy-pasted it is because 1) you can see it and 2) the
| GPL-licenced code exists. But when code is LLM generated, it
| is "new". If I claim I wrote it, how would you oppose that?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Laws exist to protect those who make and have money. If
| trillions could be made harvesting your kids kidneys it would
| be legal.
| basilgohar wrote:
| It's done extrajudicially in warzones such as Palestine
| where hostages are returned from Israeli jails, with
| missing organs, dead or alive [0].
|
| [0] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/evidence-
| investigat...
| raincole wrote:
| It's more or less already the case though. Pure AI-generated
| works without human touches are not copyrightable.
| LtWorf wrote:
| We need it to be infecting the rest like GPL does.
| raincole wrote:
| You probably misunderstood how "infection" of GPL works.
| (which is very common)
|
| 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
|
| GPL can't do much more than that. A license over a piece
| of code cannot automatically change the copyright status
| of another piece of code. There simply isn't legal
| framework for that.
|
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| _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)._
|
| they can sue you and settle for whatever you will accept
| that makes them happy.
|
| if you lose then the alternative to not making your code
| GPL is to make your code disappear, that is you are no
| longer allowed to sell your product.
|
| consequently, if AI code is subject to the GPL then the
| rest of the codebase is too, or the alternative would be
| that the could not be distributed.
| munchler wrote:
| By that logic, humans would also be prevented from "training"
| on (i.e. learning from) such code. Hard to see how this could
| be a valid license.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Isn't it the very reason why we need cleanroom software
| engineering:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom_software_engineering
| mr_toad wrote:
| If a human reads code, and then reproduces said code, that
| can be a copyright violation. But you can read the code,
| learn from it, and produce something totally different. The
| middle ground, where you read code, and produce something
| similar is a grey area.
| codedokode wrote:
| Bad analogy, probably made up by capitalists to confuse
| people. ML models cannot and do not learn. "learning" is a
| name of a process, when model developer downloads pirated
| material and processes it with an algorithm (computes
| parameters from it).
|
| Also, humans do not need to read million of pirated books to
| learn to talk. And a human artist doesn't need to steal
| million pictures to learn to draw.
| 1gn15 wrote:
| > And a human artist doesn't need to steal million pictures
| to learn to draw.
|
| They... do? Not just pictures, but also real life data,
| which is a lot more data than an average modern ML system
| has. An average artist has probably seen- stolen millions
| of pictures from their social media feeds over their
| lifetime.
|
| Also, claiming to be anti-capitalist while defending one of
| the most offensive types of private property there is. The
| whole point of anti-capitalism is being anti private
| property. And copyright is private property because it
| gives you power over others. You _must_ be against
| copyright and be against the concept of "stealing
| pictures" if you are to be an anti-capitalist.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| How is that enforceable against the fly-by-night startups?
| mr_toad wrote:
| Fair use doesn't need a license, so it doesn't matter what you
| put in the license.
|
| Generally speaking licenses give rights (they literally _grant
| license_ ). They can't take rights away, only the legislature
| can do that.
| tensor wrote:
| So if you put this hypothetical license on spam emails, then
| spam filters can't train to recognize them? I'm sure ad
| companies would LOVE it.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Why forbid it when you could do exactly what this post
| suggests: go explicit and say that by including this
| copyrighted material in AI training you consent to release of
| the model. And you clarify that the terms are contractual, and
| that training the model on data represents implicit acceptance
| of the terms.
| themafia wrote:
| Taken to an extreme:
|
| "Why forbid selling drugs when you can just put a warning
| label on them? And you could clarify that an overdose is
| lethal."
|
| It doesn't solve any problems and just pushes enforcement
| actions into a hopelessly diffuse space. Meanwhile the cartel
| continues to profit and small time users are temporarily
| incarcerated.
| myrmidon wrote:
| I honestly think that the most extreme take that " _any_ output
| of an LLM falls under _all_ the copyright of _all_ its training
| data " is not really defensible, especially when contrasted with
| human learning, and would be curious to hear conflicting
| opinions.
|
| My view is that copyright in general is a pretty abstract and
| artificial concept; thus corresponding regulation needs to
| _justifiy_ itself by being _useful_ , i.e. encouraging and
| rewarding content creation.
|
| /sidenote: Copyright as-is barely holds up there; I would argue
| that nobody (not even old established companies) is significantly
| encouraged or incentivised by potential revenue more than 20
| years in the future (much less current copyright durations). The
| system also leads to bad ressource allocation, with almost all
| the rewards ending up at a small handful of most successful
| producers-- this effectively externalizes large portions of the
| cost of "raising" artists.
|
| I view AI overlap under the same lense-- if current copyright
| rules would lead to undesirable outcomes (by making all AI
| training or use illegal/infeasible) then law/interpretation
| simply has to be changed.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Anyone can very easily avoid training on GPL code. Yes, the
| model might be not be as strong as one that is trained that way
| and _released_ under terms of the GPL, but to me that sounds
| like quite a _good_ outcome if the best models are open source
| /open weight.
|
| Its all about whose outcomes are optimized.
|
| Of course, the law generally favors consideration of the
| outcomes for the massive corporations donating hundreds of
| millions of dollars to legislature campaigns.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Would it even _actually help_ to go down that road though?
| IMO the expected outcome would simply be that AI training
| stalls for a bit while "unencumbered" training material is
| being collected/built up and you achieve basically nothing in
| the end, except creating a big ongoing
| logistical/administrative hassle to keep lawyers/bureaucrats
| fed.
|
| I think the redistribution effect (towards training material
| providers) from such an scenario would be marginal at best,
| especially long-term, and event that might be over-
| optimistic.
|
| I also dislike that stance because it seems obviously
| inconsistent to me-- if humans are allowed to train on
| copyrighted material without their output being generally
| affected, why not machines?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Human learning is materially different from LLM training.
| They're similar in that both involve providing input to a
| system that can, afterwards, produce output sharing certain
| statistical regularities with the input, including rote recital
| in some cases - but the similarities end there.
| gruez wrote:
| >Human learning is materially different from LLM training
| [...] but the similarities end there.
|
| Specifically what "material differences" are there? The only
| arguments I heard are are around human exceptionalism (eg.
| "brains are different, because... they just are ok?"), or
| giving humans a pass because they're not evil corporations.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Why? I'm pretty sure I can learn the lyrics of a song, and
| probabilistically output them in response to a prompt.
|
| Is the existence of my brain copyright infringement?
|
| The main difference I see (apart from that I bullshit way
| less than LLMs), is that I can't learn nearly as much as an
| LLM and I can't talk to 100k people at once 24/7.
|
| I think the real answer here is that AI is a totally new kind
| of copying, and it's useful enough that laws are going to
| have to change to accommodate that. What country is going to
| shoot itself in the foot so much by essentially banning AI,
| just so it can feel smug about keeping its 20th century
| copyright laws?
|
| Maybe that will change when you can just type "generate a
| feature length Pixar blockbuster hit", but I don't see that
| happening for quite a long time.
| cardanome wrote:
| > I view AI overlap under the same lense-- if current copyright
| rules would lead to undesirable outcomes (by making all AI
| training or use illegal/infeasible) then law/interpretation
| simply has to be changed
|
| Not sure about undesirable, I so wish we could just ban all
| generative AI.
|
| I feel profound sadness of having lost the world we had before
| generative AI became widespread. I really loved programming and
| seeing my trade devalued with vibe coding is just heart
| breaking. We will see mass unemployment, deep fakes, more AI
| induced psychosis, a devaluing of human art. I hate this new
| world.
|
| It would be the morally correct thing to bann generative AI as
| it only benefits corporations and doesn't improve the life of
| the people but makes it worse.
|
| The training of the big LLMs has been criminal. Whether we talk
| about GPL licensed code or the millions of artist that never
| released their work under a specific license and would never
| haven consented to it being used for training.
|
| I still think states will allow it and legalize the crime
| because they believe that AI offer competitive advantages and
| they will fear "falling behind". Plus military use.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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 speed from setting a bomb
| like that in their goldmine.
|
| Putting in tons of commonly read books and scientific papers is
| safer, they can just eventually cross-license with the massive
| conglomerates that own everything. But the GPL is by nature
| hostile, and has been openly and specifically hostile from the
| beginning. MIT and Apache, etc. you can just include a fistful of
| licenses to download, or even come up with architectures that
| track names to add for attribution-ware. But the GPL will
| obviously (and legitimately) claim to have relicensed the entire
| model and maybe all its output (unless they restricted it to
| LGPL.)
|
| Wouldn't you just pull it out?
| NateEag wrote:
| If you were a thoughtful, careful, law-abiding business, yes.
|
| I submit the evidence suggests the genAI companies have none of
| those attributes.
| NiloCK wrote:
| Not crazy - there's a rational self-interest in doing this.
|
| But I'm not certain that the relevant players have the same
| consequence-fearing mindset that you do, and to be honest
| they're probably right. The theft is too great to calculate the
| consequences, and by the time it's settled, what are you gonna
| do - turn off Forster's machine?
|
| I hope you're right in at least some cases!
| pessimizer wrote:
| > by the time it's settled
|
| Why would the GPL settle? Even more, who is authorized to
| settle for every author who used the GPL? If the courts
| decided in favor of the GPL, which I think would be likely
| just because of the _age_ and _pervasiveness_ of the GPL,
| they 'd actually have to lobby Congress to write an exception
| to copyright rules for AI.
|
| A large part of the infrastructure of the world is built on
| the GPL, and the people who wrote it were clearly motivated
| by the protection that they thought that the GPL would give
| to what was often a charitable act, or even an act that would
| allow companies to share code without having to compete with
| themselves. I can't imagine too many judges just going
| "nope."
| hananova wrote:
| I think they meant "settled" as in "resolved."
| pessimizer wrote:
| I meant the same. I don't actually think that the GPL is
| an entity that can settle a court case; if I meant that I
| would have said the FSF or something. I mean that in
| order for it to resolve, a judge has to say that the GPL
| does not apply.
|
| If ultimately copyright holds up against the models*, the
| GPL will be a permanent holdout against any intellectual
| property-wide cross-licensing scheme. There's nobody to
| negotiate with other than the license itself, and it's
| not going to say anything it hasn't said before.
|
| * It hasn't done well so far, but Obama didn't appoint
| any SCOTUS judges so maybe the public has a chance
| against the corporations there.
| exasperaited wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Haha no.
|
| https://windsurf.com/blog/copilot-trains-on-gpl-codeium-does...
|
| And just in the last two days, AI generating LGPL headers
| (which it could not do if identifying LGPL code was pulled from
| the codebase) and misattributing authors:
|
| https://devclass.com/2025/11/27/ocaml-maintainers-reject-mas...
| pessimizer wrote:
| Thanks for the links.
|
| That first link shows people actively pulling out GPL code in
| 2023 and marketing around that fact, though. That's not great
| evidence that they're not doing it now, especially if testing
| for if GPL code is still in there seems to be as easy as
| prompting with an incomplete piece of it.
|
| I'd think that companies could amass a collection of all
| known GPL code and test for it regularly in order to refine
| their methods for keeping it out.
|
| > (which it could not do if identifying LGPL code was pulled
| from the codebase)
|
| Are you sure about this? Linking to LGPL code is fine afaik.
| And why not train on code that linked to universally
| available libraries that are legal to use? Seems like one
| might even prefer it.
|
| Seems like this was rejected for size and slop reasons, not
| licensing. If the submitter of the PR isn't even fixing
| possibly hallucinated author's names, it's obvious that they
| didn't really read it. Debugging vibe coded stuff is like
| finding an indeterminate number of needles in a haystack.
| ares623 wrote:
| Why do hard thing when easy thing do trick?
| palata wrote:
| Genuine question: if I train my model with copyleft material, how
| do you prove I did?
|
| Like if there is no way to trace it back to the original
| material, does it make sense to regulate it? Not that I like the
| idea, just wondering.
|
| I have been thinking for a while that LLMs are copyright-
| laundering machines, and I am not sure if there is anything we
| can do about it other than accepting that it fundamentally
| changes what copyright is. Should I keep open sourcing my code
| now that the licence doesn't matter anymore? Is it worth writing
| blog posts now that it will just feed the LLMs that people use?
| etc.
| basilgohar wrote:
| Maybe we should requiring training data be published or at
| least referenced.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > Should I keep open sourcing my code now that the licence
| doesn't matter anymore?
|
| your LICENSE matters in similar ways that it mattered before
| LLMs. LICENSE adherence is part of intellectual property law
| and practice. A popular engine may be popular, but not all
| cases at all times. Do not despair!
| freedomben wrote:
| I've thought about this as well, especially for the case when
| it's a company owned product that is AGPLed. It's a really
| tough situation, because the last thing we want is competitors
| to come in and LLM wash our code to benefit their own product.
| I think this is a real risk.
|
| On the other side, I deeply believe in the values of free
| software. My general stance is that all applications I open
| source are GPL or AGPL, and any libraries I open source are
| MIT. For the libraries, obviously anyone is free to use them,
| and if they want to rewrite them with an LLM more power to
| them. For the applications though, I see that as a violation of
| the license.
|
| At the end of the day, I have competing values and needs and
| have to make a choice. The choice I've made for now is that for
| the vast majority of things, I'm still open sourcing them. The
| gift to humanity and the guarantee to the users freedom is more
| important to me than a theoretical threat. The one exception is
| anything that is truly a risk of getting lifted and used
| directly by competitors. I have not figured out an answer to
| this one yet, so for now I'm keeping it AGPL but not publicly
| distributing the code. I obviously still make the full code
| available to customers, and at least for now I've decided to
| trust my customers.
|
| I think this is an issue we have to take week by week. I don't
| want to let fear of things cause us to make suboptimal
| decisions now. When there's an actual event that causes a
| reevaluation, I'll go from there.
| luqtas wrote:
| genuine question: why you are training your model with content
| that explicitly will have requirements violated if you do?
| 1gn15 wrote:
| out of pure spite for hypocritical "hackers"
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Its why I stopped contributing to open source work. Its pretty
| clear in the age of LLMs that this breach of the license under
| which it is written will be allowed to continue and that open
| source code will be turned into commercial products.
| friendzis wrote:
| > 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 whom?
|
| Do not limit your thoughts to text only. "Draw me a cartoon
| picture of an anthropomorphic with round black ears, red shorts
| and yellow boots". Does it matter if the training set was all
| copyleft if the final output is indistinguishable from a
| copyrighted character?
| isodev wrote:
| > 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.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > That's not legal use of the material according to most
| copyleft licenses.
|
| 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.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/01/19/fypm
|
| Anything you produce will be consumed and regurgitated by the
| machine. It's a personal question for everyone whether you
| choose to keep providing grist for their mills.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| You need low level access to the AI in question, and a lot of
| compute, but for most AI types, you _can_ infer whether a given
| data fragment was in the training set.
|
| It's much easier to do that for the data that was repeated many
| times across the dataset. Many pieces of GPL software are
| likely to fall under that.
|
| Now, would that be enough to put the entire AI under GPL? I
| doubt it.
| blibble wrote:
| > Genuine question: if I train my model with copyleft material,
| how do you prove I did?
|
| discovery via lawyers
| bwfan123 wrote:
| 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
| quotemstr wrote:
| So what? I can probably produce parts of the header from
| memory. Doesn't mean my brain is GPLed.
| ikawe wrote:
| If your brain was distributed as software, I think it
| might?
| voxl wrote:
| There is a stupid presupposition that LLMs are equivalent
| to human brains which they clearly are not. Stateless token
| generators are OBVIOUSLY not like human brains even if you
| somehow contort the definition of intelligence to include
| them
| quotemstr wrote:
| Even if they are not "like" human brains in some sense,
| are they "like" brains enough to be counted similarly in
| a _legal_ environment? Can you articulate the difference
| as something other than meat parochialism, which strikes
| me as arbitrary?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| All law is arbitrary. Intellectual property law perhaps
| most of all.
|
| Famously, the output from monkey "artists" was found to
| be non-copyrightable even though a monkey's brain is much
| more similar to ours than an LLM.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright
| _disput...
| quotemstr wrote:
| If IP law is arbitrary, we get to choose between IP law
| that makes LLMs propagate the GPL and law that doesn't.
| It's a policy switch we can toggle whenever want. Why
| would anyone _want_ the propagates-GPL option when this
| setting would make LLMs much less useful for basically
| zero economic benefit? That 's the legal "policy setting"
| you choose when you basically want to stall AI progress,
| and it's not going to stall China's progress.
| furyofantares wrote:
| The question was "if I train my model with copyleft
| material, how do you prove I did?"
| em-bee wrote:
| not your brain, but the code you produce if it includes
| portions of GPL code that you remembered.
| gspr wrote:
| > So what? I can probably produce parts of the header from
| memory. Doesn't mean my brain is GPLed.
|
| Your brain is part of you. Some might say it is your very
| essence. You are human. Humans have inalienable rights that
| sometimes trump those enshrined by copyright. One such
| right is the right to remember things you've read. LLMs are
| not human, and thus don't enjoy such rights.
|
| Moreover, your brain is not distributed to other people.
| It's more like a storage medium than a distribution. There
| is a lot less furore about LLMs that are just storage
| mediums, and where they themselves or their outputs are not
| distributed. They're obviously not very useful.
|
| So your analogy is poor.
| Chris_Newton wrote:
| I once had a well-known LLM reproduce pretty much an entire
| file from a well-known React library verbatim.
|
| I was writing code in an unrelated programming language at
| the time, and the bizarre inclusion of that particular file
| in the output was presumably because the name of the library
| was very similar to a keyword I was using in my existing
| code, but this experience did not fill me with confidence
| about the abilities of contemporary AI. ;-)
|
| However, it did clearly demonstrate that LLMs with billions
| or even trillions of parameters certainly can embed enough
| information to reproduce some of the material they were
| trained on verbatim or very close to it.
| isodev wrote:
| > Genuine question: if I train my model with copyleft material,
| how do you prove I did?
|
| The burden is on you to prove that you didn't.
| palata wrote:
| No it is not. It is exactly how the burden of proof works.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(law)
| david_allison wrote:
| > Genuine question: if I train my model with copyleft material,
| how do you prove I did?
|
| It may produce it when asked
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/678e3306-c188-8002-a26c-ac1f32fee4...
| Animats wrote:
| There's the other side of this issue. The current position of
| the U.S. Copyright Office is that AI output is not
| copyrightable, because the Constitution's copyright clause only
| protects human authors. This is consistent with the US position
| that databases and lists are not copyrightable.[1]
|
| Trump is trying to fire the head of the U.S. Copyright Office,
| but they work for the Library of Congress, not the executive
| branch, so that didn't work.[2]
|
| [1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-
| Intell...
|
| [2] https://apnews.com/article/trump-supreme-court-copyright-
| off...
| Orygin wrote:
| Great article but I don't really agree with their take on GPL
| regarding this paragraph:
|
| > The spirit of the GPL is to promote the free sharing and
| development of software [...] the reality is that they are
| proceeding in a different vector from the direction of code
| sharing idealized by GPL. If only the theory of GPL propagation
| to models walks alone, in reality, only data exclusion and
| closing off to avoid litigation risks will progress, and there is
| a fear that it will not lead to the expansion of free software
| culture.
|
| The spirit of the GPL is the freedom of the user, not the code
| being freely shared. The virality is a byproduct to ensure the
| software is not stolen from their users. If you just want your
| code to be shared and used without restrictions, use MIT or some
| other license.
|
| > What is important is how to realize the "freedom of software,"
| which is the philosophy of open source
|
| Freedom of software means nothing. Freedoms are for humans not
| immaterial code. Users get the freedom to enjoy the software how
| they like. Washing the code through an AI to purge it from its
| license goes against the open source philosophy. (I know this may
| be a mistranslation, but it goes in the same direction as the
| rest of the article).
|
| I also don't agree with the arguments that since a lot of things
| are included in the model, the GPL code is only a small part of
| the whole, and that means it's okay. Well if I take 1 GPL
| function and include it in my project, no matter its size, I
| would have to license as GPL. Where is the line? Why would my
| software which only contains a single function not be fair use?
| froh wrote:
| > The spirit of the GPL is the freedom of the user, not the
| code being freely shared.
|
| who do you mean by "user"?
|
| the spirit is that the person who actually uses the software
| also has the freedom to modify it, and that the users
| recovering these modifications have the same rights.
|
| is that what you meant?
|
| and while technically that's the spirit of the GPL, the license
| is not only about users, but about a _relationship_, that of
| the user and the software and what the user is allowed to do
| with the software.
|
| it thus makes sense to talk about "software freedom".
|
| last not least, about a single GPL function --- many GPL
| _libraries_ are licensed less restrictively, LGPL.
| m463 wrote:
| I don't think you understand the GPL.
|
| > "the user is allowed to do with the software"
|
| The GPL does not restrict what the user does with the
| software.
|
| It can be USED for anything.
|
| But it does restrict how you redistribute it. You have
| responsibilities if you redistribute it. You must provide the
| source code, and pass on the same freedoms you received to
| the users you redistribute it to.
| gizajob wrote:
| Thinking on though, if the models are trained on any GPL
| code then one could consider that they contain that GPL
| code, and are constantly and continually updating and
| modifying that code, thus everything the model subsequently
| outputs and distributes should come under the GPL too. It's
| far from sufficient that, say, OpenAI have a page on their
| website to redistribute the code they consume in their
| models if such code becomes part of the model's training
| data that is resident in memory every time it produces new
| code for users. In the spirit of the GPL all that
| derivative code seems to also come under the GPL, and has
| to be made available for free, even if upon every request
| the generated code is somehow novel or unique to that user.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The GPL arose from Stallman's frustration at not having access
| to the source code for a printer driver that was causing him
| grief.
|
| In a world where he could have just said "Please create a PDP-
| whatever driver for an IBM-whatever printer," there never
| _would_ have been a GPL. In that sense AI represents the
| fulfillment of his vision, not a refutation or violation.
|
| I'd be surprised if he saw it that way, of course.
| saurik wrote:
| But that isn't the same code that you were running before.
| And like, let's not forget GPLv3: "please give me the code
| for a mobile OS that could run on an iPhone" does not in any
| way help me modify the code running on MY iPhone.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Sure it does. Just tell the model to change whatever you
| want changed. You won't need access to the high-level code,
| any more than you need access to the CPU's microcode now.
|
| We're a few years away from that, but it will happen unless
| someone powerful blocks it.
| belorn wrote:
| The safeguards will prevent the AI from reproducing the
| proprietary drivers for the IBM-whatever printer, and it will
| not provide code that breaks the DRM that exist to prevent
| third-party drivers from working with the printer. There will
| however be no such safeguards or filters to prevent IBM to
| write a proprietary driver for their next printer, using
| existing GPL drivers as a building block.
|
| Code will only ever go in one direction here.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Then we'd better stop fighting against AI, and start
| fighting against so-called "safeguards."
| belorn wrote:
| I wish you luck. The music industry basically won their
| fight in forcing safeguards against AI music. The film
| industry are gaining laws regulating AI film actors. The
| code generating AI are only training on freely accessible
| code and not proprietary code. There is multiple laws
| being made against AI porn all over the world (or
| possible already on the books).
|
| What we should fight is Rules For Thee but Not for Me.
| themafia wrote:
| > The virality is a byproduct to ensure the software is not
| stolen from their users.
|
| If Microsoft misappropriates GPL code how exactly is that
| "stealing" from me, the user, of that code? I'm not deprived in
| any way, the author is, so I can't make sense of your premise
| here.
|
| > Freedom of software means nothing.
|
| Software is information. Does "freedom of information" mean
| nothing? I think you're narrowing concepts here into something
| not particularly useful or reflective of reality.
|
| > Users get the freedom to enjoy the software how they like.
|
| The freedom is to modify the code for my own purposes. This is
| not at all required to plainly "enjoy" the software. I instead
| "enjoy a particular benefit."
|
| > Why would my software which only contains a single function
| not be fair use?
|
| Because fair use implies educational, informational, or
| transformational outputs. Your software is none of those
| things.
| inlined wrote:
| As a user I suffer from not being able to freely use or
| derive my own work from Microsoft's
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| Training is not redistribution. It's the exact same as you as a
| person learning to program from proprietary secret code, and then
| writing your own original code independently. Even if you repeat
| patterns and methods you've picked up from that proprietary
| learning material, it is by no means redistribution. The
| practical differentiator here is that you do not access the
| proprietary material during the creation of your own original
| work, similar in principle to a _clean-room design_. With AI /ML,
| it matters that training data is not accessed during inference,
| which it's not.
|
| The other factor of copyright, which is relevant, is how material
| is obtained. If the material is publicly accessible without
| protection, you have no reasonable expectation to exclusive
| control over its use. If you don't want AI training to be done on
| your work, you need to put access to it behind explicit
| authentication with a legally-binding user agreement prohibiting
| that use-case. Do note that this would lose your project's status
| as open-source.
| luqtas wrote:
| so basically we download the sources files to the training
| weight and remove the LICENSE.MD as it's exactly the same as a
| person learning to program from proprietay secret code and
| outputing code based on that for millions of peoples in matter
| of seconds /s
|
| we also treat as however we want public goods found over the
| internet. as the World Intellectual Property Organization
| Copyright Treaty and Berne Convention for the Protection of
| Literary and Artistic Works aren't real or because we can as we
| are operating in international waters, selling products for
| other sails living exclusively in international waters /s
| tpmoney wrote:
| If you download GPL source code and run `wc` on its files and
| distribute the output of that, is that a violation of
| copyright and the GPL? What if you do that for every GPL
| program on github? What if you use python and numpy and
| generate a list of every word or symbol used in those
| programs and how frequently they appear? What if you generate
| the same frequency data, but also add a weighting by what the
| previous symbol or word was? What if you did that an also
| added a weighting by what the next symbol or word was? How
| many statistical analyses of the code files do you need to
| bundle together before it becomes copyright infringement?
| sfink wrote:
| The line is somewhere between running wc on the entire
| input and running gzip on the entire input.
|
| The fact that a slippery slope is slippery doesn't make it
| not a slope.
| ndiddy wrote:
| > Training is not redistribution. It's the exact same as you as
| a person learning to program from proprietary secret code, and
| then writing your own original code independently.
|
| Well the difference is that copyright law applies to work fixed
| in a tangible medium of expression. This covers i.e. model
| weights on a hard drive but not the human brain. If the model
| is able to reproduce others' work verbatim (like the example
| the article brings up of the song lyrics) then under copyright
| law that's unauthorized reproduction. It doesn't matter that
| the data is expressed via probabilistic weights because due to
| past lobbying/lawsuits by the software industry to get compiled
| binary code covered by copyright, reproduction can include
| copies that aren't directly human readable.
|
| > If the material is publicly accessible without protection,
| you have no reasonable expectation to exclusive control over
| its use.
|
| There's over 20 years of successful GPL infringement lawsuits
| over unlicensed use of publicly available GPL code that
| disagrees with this point.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-27 23:01 UTC)