[HN Gopher] FSF statement on copyright infringement lawsuit Bart...
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FSF statement on copyright infringement lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic
Author : m463
Score : 247 points
Date : 2026-03-16 19:49 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fsf.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fsf.org)
| mjg59 wrote:
| Where's the threat? The FSF was notified that as part of the
| settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic they were potentially entitled
| to money, but in this case the works in question were released
| under a license that allowed free duplication and distribution so
| no harm was caused. There's then a note that _if_ the FSF had
| been involved in such a suit they 'd insist on any settlement
| requiring that the trained model be released under a free
| license. But they weren't, and they're not.
|
| (Edit: In the event of it being changed to match the actual
| article title, the current subject line for this thread is " FSF
| Threatens Anthropic over Infringed Copyright: Share Your LLMs
| Freel")
| lelanthran wrote:
| 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.
| mjg59 wrote:
| Is it? The FSF's description of the judgement is that the
| training was fair use, but that the actual downloading of the
| material may have been a copyright infringement. What
| software does the FSF hold copyright to that can't be
| downloaded freely? Under what circumstances would the FSF be
| in a position to influence the nature of a settlement if they
| weren't harmed?
| jfoster wrote:
| Is harm necessary to show in a copyright infringement case?
| mjg59 wrote:
| Copyright infringement causes harm, so if there's no harm
| there's no infringement. You can freely duplicate GFDLed
| material, so downloading it isn't an infringement. If
| training a model on that downloaded material is fair use
| then there's no infringement.
| teiferer wrote:
| > 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.
| jcul wrote:
| This article is talking about a book though, not software.
|
| "Sam Williams and Richard Stallman's Free as in freedom:
| Richard Stallman's crusade for free software"
|
| "GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL). This is a free
| license allowing use of the work for any purpose without
| payment."
|
| I'm not familiar with this license or how it compares to
| their software licenses, but it sounds closer to a public
| domain license.
| kennywinker wrote:
| It sounds that way a bit from the one sentence. But that's
| not the case at all.
|
| > 4. MODIFICATIONS
|
| > You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the
| Document under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above,
| provided that you release the Modified Version under
| precisely this License, with the Modified Version filling
| the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution and
| modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a
| copy of it. In addition, you must do these things in the
| Modified Version:
|
| Etc etc.
|
| In short, it is a copyleft license. You must also license
| derivative works under this license.
|
| Just fyi, the gnu fdl is (unsurprisingly) available for
| free online - so if you want to know what it says, you can
| read it!
| mjg59 wrote:
| And the judgement said that the training was fair use,
| but that the duplication might be an infringement. The
| GFDL doesn't restrict duplication, only distribution, so
| if training on GFDLed material is fair use and not the
| creation of a derivative work then there's no damage.
| leni536 wrote:
| Last time I checked online LLMs distribute parts of their
| training corpus when you prompt them.
| kennywinker wrote:
| > The GFDL doesn't restrict duplication
|
| Right. I can publish the work in whole without asking
| permission. That's unrestricted duplication.
|
| However, as i read it, an LLM spitting out snippets from
| the text is not "duplicating" the work. That would fall
| under modifications. From the license:
|
| > A "Modified Version" of the Document means any work
| containing the Document or a portion of it, either copied
| verbatim, or with modifications and/or translated into
| another language.
|
| I read that pretty clearly as any work containing text
| from a gnu fdl document is a modification not a
| duplication.
| mjg59 wrote:
| There's three steps here:
|
| 1) Obtaining the copyrighted works used for training.
| Anthropic did this without asking for the copyright
| holders' permission, which would be a copyright violation
| for any work that isn't under a license that grants
| permission to duplicate. The GFDL does, so no issue here.
| 2) Training the model. The case held that this was fair
| use, so no issue here. 3) Whether the output is a
| derivative work. If so then you get to figure out how the
| GFDL applies to the output, but to the best of my
| knowledge the case didn't ask this question so we don't
| know.
| onion2k wrote:
| For this to stand up in court you'd need to show that an
| LLM is distributing "a modified version of the document".
|
| If I took a book and cut it up into individual words (or
| partial words even), and then used some of the words with
| words from _every other book_ to write a new book, it 'd
| be hard to argue that I'm really "distributing the first
| book", even if the subject of my book is the same as the
| first one.
|
| This really just highlights how the law is a long way
| behind what's achievable with modern computing power.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Presumably, a suitable prompt could get the LLM to
| produce whole sections of the book which would
| demonstrate that the LLM contains a modified version.
| p_l wrote:
| Yes, and for practical purposes the current consensus
| (and in case of EU, the law) is that only said document
| would be converted by FDL
| kennywinker wrote:
| I am distrubting an svg file. It's a program that, when
| run, produces an image of mickey mouse.
|
| By your description of the law, this svg file is not
| infringing on disney's copyright - since it's a program
| that when run creates an infringing document (the
| rasterized pixels of mickey mouse) but it is not an
| infringing document itself.
|
| I really don't think my "i wrote a program in the svg
| language" defense would hold up in court. But i wonder
| how many levels of abstraction before it's legal? Like if
| i write the mickey-mouse-generator in python does that
| make it legal? If it generates a variety of randomized
| images of mickey mouse, is that legal? If it uses
| statistical anaylsis of many drawings of mickey to
| generate an average mickey mouse, is that legal? Does it
| have to generate different characters if asked before it
| is legal? Can that be an if statement or does it have to
| use statistical calculations to decide what character i
| want?
| kennywinker wrote:
| You're just describing transformative use. I'm not a
| lawyer, but an example from music - taking a single drum
| hit from a james brown song is apparently not
| transformative. Taking a vibe from another song is also
| maybe not transformative, e.g. robin thicke and
| pharrell's "blurred lines" was found to legally take the
| "feel" from Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give it Up"
|
| Which is all to say that the law is actually really bad
| at determining what is right and wrong, and our moral
| compasses should not defer to the law. Unfortunately,
| moral compasses are often skewed by money - like how
| normal compassess are skewed by magnets
| karel-3d wrote:
| FDL is famously annoying.
|
| wikipedia used to be under FDL and they lobbied FSF to
| allow an escape hatch to Commons for a few months, because
| FDL was so annoying.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They don't need the "do whatever" permission if everything
| they do is fair use. They only need the downloading
| permission, and it's free to download.
| mjg59 wrote:
| If what you do with a copyrighted work is covered by fair use
| it doesn't matter what the license says - you can do it
| anyway. The GFDL imposes restrictions on _distribution_ , not
| copying, so merely downloading a copy imposes no obligation
| on you and so isn't a copyright infringement either.
|
| I used to be on the FSF board of directors. I have provided
| legal testimony regarding copyleft licenses. I am
| excruciatingly aware of the difference between a copyleft
| license and the public domain.
| danlitt wrote:
| > I am excruciatingly aware of the difference between a
| copyleft license and the public domain.
|
| Then why did you say "no harm was caused"? Clearly the harm
| of "using our copylefted work to create proprietary
| software" was caused. Do you just mean economic harm? If
| so, I think that's where the parent comments confusion
| originates.
| mjg59 wrote:
| No harm under copyright law
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Models, however, can reproduce copyleft code verbatim, and
| are being redistributed. Doesn't that count?
|
| Licences like AGPL also don't have redistribution as their
| only restriction.
| shagie wrote:
| Stack Overflow has verbatim copied GPL code in some of
| its questions and answers. As presented by SO, that code
| is not under the GPL license (this also applies to
| _other_ licenses - the BSD advertising clause and the
| original json will cause similar problems).
|
| Arguably, the use of the code in the Stack Overflow
| question and answer is fair use.
|
| The problem occurs not when someone reads the Q&A with
| the improperly licensed code but rather when they then
| copy that code verbatim into their own non GPL product
| and distribute that without adherence to the GPL.
|
| It's the last step - some human distributing the
| improperly licensed software that is the violation of the
| GPL.
|
| This same chain of what is allowed and what is not is
| equally applicable to LLMs. Providing examples from GPL
| licensed material to answer a question isn't a license
| violation. The human copying that code (from any source)
| and pasting it into their own software _is_ a license
| violation.
|
| ---
|
| Some while back I had a discussion with a Swiss developer
| about the indefinite article used before "hobbit" in a
| text game. They used "an hobbit" and in the discussion of
| fixing it, I quoted the first line of The Hobbit. "In a
| hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." That cleared it
| up and my use of it in that (and this) discussion is fair
| use.
|
| If someone listening to that conversation (or reading
| this one) thought that the bit that I quoted would be
| great on a T-shirt and them printed that up and
| distributed it - that would be a copyright violation.
|
| Google's use of thumbnails for images was found to be
| fair use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._
| v._Amazon.com... The Ninth Circuit did,
| however, overturn the district court's decision that
| Google's thumbnail images were unauthorized and
| infringing copies of Perfect 10's original images. Google
| claimed that these images constituted fair use, and the
| circuit court agreed. This was because they were "highly
| transformative."
|
| If I was to then take those thumbnails from a google
| image search and distribute that as an icon library, I
| would then be guilty of copyright infringement.
|
| I believe that Stack Overflow, Google Images, and LLM
| models and their output constitutes an example of
| transformative fair use. What someone does with that
| output is where copyright infringement happens.
|
| My claim isn't that AI vendors are blameless but rather
| that in the issue of copyright and license adherence it
| is the human in the process that is the one who has
| agency and needs to follow copyright (and for AI agents
| that were unleashed without oversight, it is the human
| that spun them up or unleashed them).
| piker wrote:
| That's really interesting. I'm a lawyer, and I had always
| interpreted the license like a ToS between the developers.
| That (in my mind) meant that the license _could_ impose
| arbitrary limitations above the default common law and
| statutory rules and that once you touched the code you were
| pregnant with those limitations, but this does make sense.
| TIL. So, thanks.
| graemep wrote:
| Does the reasoning in the cases where people to whom GPL
| software was distributed could sue the distributor for
| source code, rather than relying on the copyright holder
| suing for breach of copyright strengthen the argument
| that arbitrary limitations are enforceable?
| ronsor wrote:
| Licenses != contracts, and well, the FSF's position has
| always been that the GPL isn't a contract, and contracts
| are what allow you to impose arbitrary limitations. Most
| EULAs are actually contracts.
| friendzis wrote:
| > The GFDL imposes restrictions on distribution, not
| copying, so merely downloading a copy imposes no obligation
| on you and so isn't a copyright infringement either.
|
| The restrictions fall not only on verbatim distribution,
| but _derivative_ works too. I am not aware whether model
| outputs are settled to be or not to be (hehe) derivative
| works in a court of law, but that question is at the vey
| least very much valid.
| mcherm wrote:
| It's the third sentence of the article:
|
| > the district court ruled that using the books to train
| LLMs was fair use but left for trial the question of
| whether downloading them for this purpose was legal.
| friendzis wrote:
| No, those are separate issues.
|
| The pipeline is something like: download material ->
| store material -> train models on material -> store
| models trained on material -> serve output generated from
| models.
|
| These questions focus on the inputs to the model
| training, the question I have raised focuses on the
| _outputs_ of the model. If [certain] outputs are
| considered derivative works of input material, then we
| have a cascade of questions which parts of the pipeline
| are covered by the license requirements. Even if any of
| the upstream parts of this simplified pipeline are
| considered legal, it does not imply that that the rest of
| the pipeline is compliant.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| Consider the net effect and the answer is clear. When
| these models are properly "trained", are people going to
| look for the book or a derivative of it, with proper
| attribution?
|
| Or is the LLM going to regurgitate the same content with
| zero attribution, and shift all the traffic away from the
| original work?
|
| When viewed in this frame, it is obvious that the work is
| derivative and then some.
| limagnolia wrote:
| That is your opinion, but the judge disagreed with you.
| The decision may have been overturned on appeal, but as
| it stands, in that courtroom, the training was fair use.
| integralid wrote:
| This is also, unfortunately, the only way this _can_ be
| settled. Making LLM output legally a derivative work
| would murder the AI golden rush and nobody wants that
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| I can memorize a song and it will be fair use too, but it
| won't be anymore once I start performing it publicly.
| Training itself is quite obviously fair use, what matters
| is what happens next.
| protimewaster wrote:
| I'm also skeptical that it's impossible to get an LLM to
| reproduce some code verbatim. Google had that paper a
| while back about getting diffusion models to spit out
| images that were essentially raw training data, and I
| wouldn't be surprised if the same is possible for LLMs.
| materialpoint wrote:
| This means that you can ignore any part of licenses you
| don't want to and just copy any software you want, non-free
| software included.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| This is in fact how I operate.
| mjg59 wrote:
| No. The GFDL grants you permission to copy the work.
| thayne wrote:
| But fair use is dependent on you getting the work legally.
| Is downloading a book with the intention of violating the
| GFDL a legal way of acquiring it.
| dataflow wrote:
| Unrelated question regarding this part, since you seem to
| be an expert on this:
|
| > If what you do with a copyrighted work is covered by fair
| use it doesn't matter what the license says - you can do it
| anyway.
|
| How is it that contracts can prohibit trial by jury but
| they can't ban prohibit fair use of copyrighted work? Is
| there a list of things a contract is and isn't allows to
| prohibit, and explanations/reasons for them?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The general answer is because there is a statute or court
| opinion that says so for one thing and a different one
| that says something else for the other thing.
|
| It's also relevant that copyright (and fair use) is
| federal law, contracts are state law and federal law
| preempts state law.
| ghighi7878 wrote:
| Telling mjg59 they are confused about a license is an
| audacious move. But I understand your question and I have the
| same question.
| darkwater wrote:
| 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".
| politelemon wrote:
| The title is:
|
| The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement, but when
| we do, we settle for freedom
| slopinthebag wrote:
| Good. I want to see more lawsuits going after these hyper scalers
| for blatantly disregarding copyright law while simultaneously
| benefiting from it. In a just world they would all go down and we
| would be left with just the OSS models. But we don't live in a
| fair world :(
| rvz wrote:
| > Among the works we hold copyrights over is Sam Williams and
| Richard Stallman's Free as in freedom: Richard Stallman's crusade
| for free software, which was found in datasets used by Anthropic
| as training inputs for their LLMs.
|
| This is the reason why AI companies won't let anyone inspect
| which content was in the training set. It turns out the
| suspicions from many copyright holders (including the FSF) was
| true (of course).
|
| Anthropic and others will never admit it, hence why they wanted
| to settle and not risk going to trial. AI boosters obviously will
| continue to gaslight copyright holders to believe nonsense like:
| _" It only scraped the links, so AI didn't directly train on your
| content!"_, or _" AI can't see like humans, it only see numbers,
| binary or digits"_ or _" AI didn't reproduce exactly 100% of the
| content just like humans do when tracing from memory!"_.
|
| They will not share the data-set used to train Claude, even if it
| was trained on AGPLv3 code.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| 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.
| ronsor wrote:
| Guess the solution is to not do it and simply pay fines (or
| not pay fines, if you don't have any EU operations).
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Yes, unfortunately. I don't really understand this
| obsession with regulations that involve fines. One would
| think that people would have the courage to make laws that
| either ban things or don't.
|
| I think the fines will effectively be mandatory though,
| even with no obvious EU operations.
| bobokaytop wrote:
| 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. But open
| weights don't undo the infringement -- they just make a
| potentially infringing artifact publicly available. That's not
| how copyright remedies work. What they're actually asking for is
| more like a compulsory license, which Congress would have to
| create. The demand for open weights as a copyright remedy is a
| policy argument dressed up as a legal one.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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
| simoncion wrote:
| > The framing of 'share your weights freely' as a remedy is
| interesting but underspecified. The FSF's argument is
| essentially that training on copyrighted code without
| permission is infringement, and the remedy should be open
| weights.
|
| Ignoring the fact that the statement doesn't talk about FSF
| code in the training data at all, [0] are you _sure_ about
| that? From the start of the last of three paragraph in the
| statement: Obviously, the right thing to do is
| protect computing freedom: share complete training inputs with
| every user of the LLM, together with the complete model,
| training configuration settings, and the accompanying software
| source code. Therefore, we urge Anthropic and other LLM
| developers that train models using huge datasets downloaded
| from the Internet to provide these LLMs to their users in
| freedom.
|
| This seems to me to be consistent with the FSF's stance of "You
| told the computer how to do it. The right thing to do is to
| give the humans operating that computer the software, input
| data, and instructions that they need to do it, too.".
|
| [0] In fact, it talks about the inclusion of a _book_ published
| under the terms of the GNU FDL, [1] which requires distribution
| of modified copies of a covered work to -themselves- be covered
| by the GNU FDL.
|
| [1] <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html>
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| zavec wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Are they still enforcing the old way on hip hop samples, or
| has that changed with the recent rulings? If the new way of
| doing things is applied fairly to everyone that seems like a
| win.
| kavalg wrote:
| It looks like the stance of FSF is for proliferation of the
| copyleft to trained LLMs
|
| > "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"
| mjg59 wrote:
| 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.
| Topfi wrote:
| A related topic that I have in the past thought about is, whether
| LLM derived code would necessitate the release under a copyleft
| license because of the training data. Never saw a cogent analysis
| that explained either why or why not this is the case beyond
| practicality due to models having been utilized in closed source
| codebases already...
| mjg59 wrote:
| 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.
| bragr wrote:
| The dearth of case law here still makes a negative outcome
| for FSF pretty dangerous, even if they don't appeal it and
| set precedent in higher courts. It might not be binding but
| every subsequent case will be able to site it, potentially
| even in other common law countries that lack case law on the
| topic.
|
| And then there is the chilling effect. If FSF can't enforce
| their license, who is going to sue to overturn the precedent?
| Large companies, publishers, and governments have mostly all
| done deals with the devil now. Joe Blow random developer is
| going to get a strip mall lawyer and overturn this? Seems
| unlikely
| adampunk wrote:
| 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.
| themafia wrote:
| > unless you can point to regurgitation of memorized code
|
| I have, on many occasions, gotten an LLM to do just this.
| It's not particularly hard. In the most recent case google's
| search bar LLM happily regurgitated a digital ocean article
| as if it was it's own output. Searching for some strings in
| the comments located the original page and it was a 95% match
| between origin and output.
|
| > The memorization older models showed came from problems in
| the training data,
|
| And what proof do you have that they "fixed" this? And what
| was the fix?
|
| > harry potter and people writing about harry potter
|
| I'm not sure that's how you get GPT to reproduce upwards of
| 85% of Harry Potter novels.
|
| > Second, infringement would need discovery to uncover and
| would be contingent on user input.
|
| That's not at all how copyright infringement works. That
| would be if you wanted to prove malice and get triple
| damages. Copyright infringement is an exceptionally simple
| violation of the law. You either copied, or you did not.
|
| > For copyright it very much matters if something is lifted
| verbatim vs modified.
|
| Transformation is a valid defense for _some_ uses. It is not
| for commercial uses. Using LLM generated code for commercial
| purposes is a hazard.
| adampunk wrote:
| This must be why all of these copyright plaintiffs are
| having tremendous days in court! If even half of this were
| correct, they wouldn't be losing in summary judgment.
|
| We have yet to see a single judgment come down against a
| model maker for distributing the gist of content. We have
| yet to see a single judgment come down against a model
| maker for infringement at all.
|
| Copyright is just an inapt tool here. It's not going to do
| the job. It is not as though big interests have not tried
| to use this tool. It just doesn't reflect what's actually
| happening and it's going to lose again and again.
|
| We can imagine a theoretical legal regime where what is
| done with large language models counts as copyright
| infringement, we just don't live in a world where that
| regime holds.
| Topfi wrote:
| > Modern LLMs don't memorize harry potter like GPT3 did.
| [...] You can't reliably do this with Opus or GPT5.
|
| If you try any modern LLM, you will find that you can. Easily
| [0], reliably [1], consistently [2]. All these examples are
| with models released in 2025/26.
|
| [0] https://arxiv.org/html/2601.02671?amp=&=
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12286
|
| [2] https://ai.stanford.edu/blog/verbatim-memorization/
| adampunk wrote:
| So, they have to do anything special to those models in
| order to get them to regurgitate ~ 100%? Any special
| prompts they needed to use to get sonnet to cough that up?
|
| What is the real copyright risk of there being an arcane
| procedure to sometimes recover most of a text? So far it's
| nothing. Which is what I'm saying. Pragmatically this is a
| loser of an argument in a court room. It is too easy for
| the chain of reasoning to be disrupted and even undisrupted
| the argument for model maker liability is attenuated.
| harshreality wrote:
| You can't do that without already having the contents of
| the book, in which case getting an LLM to regurgitate it
| with partial prompting shouldn't be legally relevant at
| all. What it regurgitates will have errors, and if you try
| to chain that as prompt cues without re-basing each cue to
| the actual text (which you have separately), the LLM's
| output will rapidly lose coherence with the original work.
|
| If its responses were perfect so that you could chain them,
| or if you could ask "please give me words 10-15 of chapter
| 3 paragraph 4 of HPatSS, and it did so, then you'd have a
| better case to complain. Still, the counterargument is that
| repeated prompting like that, explicitly asking for
| copyright violation, is the real crime. Are you going to
| throw someone in prison if they memorize the entirety of
| HPatSS and recite arbitrary parts of it on demand?
|
| Combining both issues: that LLMs are only regurgitating
| _mostly_ accurate continuations, and they 're only
| providing that to the person who explicitly asked... any
| meaningful copyright violation moves downstream. If you
| record someone reciting HPatSS from memory, and post it on
| youtube, you are (or should be considered) the real
| copyright violator, not them.
|
| If you ask for an identifiable short segment of writing, or
| a piece of art, and get something close enough that
| violates copyright, that should really be _your_ problem if
| you redistribute it (whether manually or because you 've
| coded something to allow 3rd parties to submit LLM prompts
| and feed answers back to them, and _they_ go on to
| redistribute it).
|
| Blaming LLMs for "copyright violation" is like persuading a
| retarded person to do something illegal and then blaming
| them for it.
| grodriguez100 wrote:
| Is the FSF threatening Anthropic? The way I read it looks like
| they are not:
|
| > 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.
|
| Sounds more like "we can't and won't sue, but this is the kind of
| compensation that we think would be appropriate"
| charcircuit wrote:
| >share complete training inputs with every user of the LLM
|
| They don't have the rights to distribute the training data.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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?
| charcircuit wrote:
| It isn't illegal as a LLM model is transformative.
| anthk wrote:
| So is awk, sed. Good luck convinving any judge/lawyer.
| raincole wrote:
| HN really needs some stricter rules for editorialized title. The
| HN title has nothing to do with the link (unless the article is
| edited?)
| latexr wrote:
| 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.
| touristtam wrote:
| flag the submission?
| khalic wrote:
| Misleading title
| latexr wrote:
| What weak, counter-productive, messaging. This is like having a
| bully punching you in the face and responding with "hey man, I'm
| not going to do anything about this, I'm not even going to tell
| an adult, but I'd urge you to consider not punching me in the
| face". Great news for the bully! You just removed one concern
| from their mind, essentially giving the permission to be as bad
| to you as they want.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| It's the FSF and their licensing is what it is. What other
| messagaging would be consistent with the foundation's mission?
| latexr wrote:
| They could not mention they usually don't sue and that they
| are small and "have to pick [their] battles", which
| effectively means "there will be no repercussions from our
| side, we won't even consider trying, so continue to do as you
| please and even worse".
|
| Saying nothing is an option. It is very possible (and the FSF
| has done it) to put yourself into a weaker position by saying
| something.
|
| You don't have to lie, but you don't have to unpromptedly
| volunteer you don't have a hand to play, either.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| Thanks for explaining, that's fair.
| psychoslave wrote:
| How dare they? Defending freedom of these filthy people and
| dignity of authors against these nice familiar corporations!
|
| The rephrased1 title "FSF Threatens Anthropic over Infringed
| Copyright: Share Your LLMs Free" certainly doesn't dramatise
| enough how odious an act it can be.
|
| 1 Original title is "The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright
| infringement, but when we do, we settle for freedom"
| jamesnorden wrote:
| The FSF seems toothless when it comes to actually enforcing
| anything regarding license violations.
| teeray wrote:
| > It is a class action lawsuit... the parties agreed to settle
| instead of waiting for the trial...
|
| It would be nice if members of the class could vote to force a
| case to trial. For the typical token settlement amount, I'm sure
| many would rather have the precedent-setting case instead.
| ksherlock wrote:
| 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.
| teeray wrote:
| You can, but then you lose the power of a collective and have
| to manage a lawsuit yourself. If you are being represented as
| part of a group, then you should have means to direct that
| representation.
| bbor wrote:
| Surely some firms choose to hold referendums already, but I
| could see that being a good law! As _Better Call Saul_
| explored in its early seasons, the interests of the large
| law firm can easily diverge significantly from the
| interests of the plaintiffs.
| ksherlock wrote:
| With some coordination, perhaps enough people could opt out
| and start a new class action lawsuit.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Maybe not with the current administration pressuring the courts
| on the matter in some deranged manner or another
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Huh, I've been waiting for the FSF to say something about the
| current big issue: mandatory Operating System age-asking. Maybe
| now that they've meddled in a copyright lawsuit that has no
| broader ramifications for the public (the people they supposedly
| fight for), they can get back to that.
| MajorArana wrote:
| Thank you FSF!
|
| The hero we need, but not the hero we deserve..
|
| The issue is that every CS masters student & AI researcher knows
| how to build a SOTA LLM.. But, only a few companies have the
| resources.
|
| The process:
|
| (1) steal as much data from the internet as possible (data is
| _everything_ ) (2) raise incomprehensible amounts of money (3)
| find a location where you can take over the energy grid for
| training (4) put a black box around it so nobody can see the
| weights (5) charge users $$$ to use (6) retrain models with user
| session data (opt in by default) (7) peek around at how users are
| using, (maybe) change policies to stop them from using that way,
| and (maybe) rapidly develop features for that use case.
|
| (Sorry that last one is jaded and not fair - just included to
| give you a picture of what could be happening with this sort of
| tech) ...
|
| The entire premise of the product is "built on the backs of any &
| everyone who has ever published a work"
| margalabargala wrote:
| > 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.
| tpxl wrote:
| > Generally speaking societies do better when knowledge is
| shared and not hoarded.
|
| These companies do even better because we're not allowed to
| share the knowledge (read, illegally copy protected works)
| and they are.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Exactly.
| briandw wrote:
| I'm really confused by the FSF statement here. The court ruled
| that the use of copyrighted information is fair use. The issue is
| that Anthropic pirated (obtained illegally) copyrighted work and
| that was the offense. FSF books are free to download and store
| etc. The license says: "This is a free license allowing use of
| the work for any purpose without payment." So how can they claim
| that their rights were infringed when the court ruled that the
| problem was the illegal downloading of copyrighted work? It's
| impossible to illegally download a FSF book.
| aaaronic wrote:
| I also found the statement bizarre. They don't seem to have any
| argument for compensation of any kind unless the books were
| under a restrictive license that required derived works to also
| be open source.
| gpm wrote:
| No, even under such a restrictive license (which I think the
| GFDL is?) there's no argument.
|
| Their copyright was not violated by anthropic downloading the
| books, because anthropic had a license to do that.
|
| And their copyright was not violated by anthropic training on
| the books, because the court found that _no ones_ copyright
| was violated by doing this. Antrhopic didn 't need a license
| to do this. So the restrictive terms of the license can't
| prevent it.
|
| I mean they might have an argument for compensation based on
| "well the settlement Anthropic agreed to didn't exclude us
| even though they didn't violate our copyright"... but just
| for the compensation outlined in the settlement.
| motbus3 wrote:
| They said that the LLM can hold the information but can't
| produce it ipsis litteris. But if it produces a plagiarized
| version then it needs be settled with those who publish it.
|
| That said, one might say it was unintentional and it would be
| impossible to verify all llm work with that premise.
| kube-system wrote:
| 1. There are some uses of the copies that were not granted
| summary judgement
|
| > And, as for any copies made from central library copies but
| not used for training, this order does not grant summary
| judgment for Anthropic. On this record in this posture, the
| central library copies were retained even when no longer
| serving as sources for training copies, "hundreds of engineers"
| could access them to make copies for other uses, and engineers
| did make other copies.
|
| Whether or not those other actions met the requirements of the
| FDL is untested and would be the subject of a trial, had this
| gone to trial, but it didn't.
|
| 2. The FDL does have requirements that must be met for the use
| of copies to be permissible -- it doesn't allow you to do
| anything you want.
| nativeit wrote:
| I interpreted this to be a class action to which they were a
| party, not something they principally launched themselves?
| kube-system wrote:
| It is. I'm just commenting on why it isn't that
| straightforward that the FSF presumably wouldn't care.
| Copyleft _is_ an exercise of copyright. The FSF doesn 't
| believe in permissive use of works - they believe in using
| copyright licensing to force others to share the way they
| believe others should share.
| gpm wrote:
| While there are requirements on making copies in the FDL, I
| think it is extraordinarily unlikely that a court would find
| that a company making internal copies would violate the
| license when those restrictions are just along the lines of
| "and you must include a copy of the license".
|
| And the FSF would be extremely foolish to ever pursue such a
| suit, because extremely ordinary non-AI related activities
| involving working with internal local documents also make
| copies in a similar way. If OpenAI violated the FDL by doing
| so then the FDL is a foot gun of a license that companies
| would be well advised to avoid.
|
| The only suit that makes any sense would be the one against
| using the FDL licensed documents to train the not-FDL
| licensed AI... and the judge already rejected that in this
| case.
| kube-system wrote:
| The requirements being easy to meet doesn't absolve someone
| from having to follow them. And the FSF clearly says they
| aren't pursuing a suit in this case. I'm not suggesting
| that filing suit here would make sense, rather, that the
| FSF does care deeply and fundamentally about requiring
| requiring copyleft restrictions -- they vehemently don't
| tolerate permissive use under their licenses.
|
| > If OpenAI violated the FDL by doing so then the FDL is a
| foot gun of a license that companies would be well advised
| to avoid.
|
| That has been said about a lot of FSFs licenses, and in
| fact, many companies do avoid them.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I think they are implying that they believe models trained on
| their copyrighted information should be open-source.
| kube-system wrote:
| Not 'open source' but 'free', of which RMS has very strong
| feelings about the difference.
| bit1993 wrote:
| Ironically RMS is to be blamed for AI coding.
|
| https://bit1993.bearblog.dev/blame-rms-for-ai-coding/
| nativeit wrote:
| That's a wild take. AI companies are to blame for AI coding.
| stavros wrote:
| In the same way that Christopher Columbus is to be blamed for
| this comment, sure.
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