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TL;DR our lawyers wrote a clause to protect open source code from being used by generative AI companies for profit. You can find it here: paytotrain.ai A legal
by evashang 4y ago
TL;DR our lawyers wrote a clause to protect open source code from being used by generative AI companies for profit. You can find it here: paytotrain.ai
A legal grey area exists as to whether publicly available creations (code or art) can be used to train datasets for generative AI projects without infringing their creators' underlying copyrights. Other types of claims, such as violation of license agreements and DMCA violations, require proof of damages to substantiate.
The legal solution we’ve identified is to add a specific damages amount to the license itself — a licensing fee. The failure to pay such a fee would cause the creator to suffer damages in the amount of the fee. By imbedding a licensing fee into a traditional open-source license, a creator can solve the proof-of-damages issue that could otherwise limit a claim under the DMCA or for breach of contract, and limit the fee to generative AI companies.
That’s why we built the Humans Only Clause. If you don’t want your code used by Copilot in this way, the Humans Only Clause can help strengthen your protections from use for training purposes. It’s a simple addition to your existing open source license to keep it free use and open source for other developers, but to prevent use without attribution by generative AI companies.
You can access the Humans Only Clause and insert it into your GitHub repo by going to PayToTrain.ai — we also built a payments form where you can set your own licensing fee depending on how valuable you believe your repo to be. If we get enough people using this clause, there’s a good chance we can assemble a separate class for a future class action, where each user gets significantly higher damages than what’s available statutorily under existing DMCA lawsuits.
On a philosophical level, we believe that the open source community is based on principles of taking and giving back to the collective. AI-based programming assistants strip away any attribution while drawing from the underlying contributions of the community. We want the open source community to continue to be open source, but we don’t want big companies to profit on our code.
If you’re interested, check it out: paytotrain.ai. We’d love to hear what you think
- bugfix-66 4y agoThank you. Could you paste the Humans Only Clause here so we can read it? Here was my attempt to write a clause prohibiting language model training/inference: https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304facc51cdacbba3f99654652bf428 https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304fa... 3. Use in source or binary form for the construction or operation of predictive software generation systems is prohibited. How does the Humans Only Clause fix the flaws in my attempt? The Humans Only Clause adds an explicit licensing fee, and what else? How is the clause worded?
- googlryas 4y agoThat wouldn't license code. That's just license text that happens to be in a string. Not sure why this bugfix site is being used instead of just pastebin with text.
- bugfix-66 4y agoI'm presenting the license text in a creative and unusual way that real hackers might enjoy. If that confused you, or you consider it "obnoxious", then you are not the target audience. That's ok. Hacker News is not 100% hackers!
- NavinF 4y agoIt's more obnoxious than creative and unusual
- googlryas 4y agoI think it is more likely you are just baldly shilling your website. Which is a shame, because I think the site isn't a bad idea - I like the minimal interface and the thought you've put into hints for many not-quite-right solutions. I've seen quality links you've posted in the past with more interesting, subtle, and relevant bugs - but this isn't one of them.
- bugfix-66 4y agoI have a different Hacker News account for every one of my projects. It happens that the No-AI 3-Clause License became part of the BUGFIX-66 project. I'm sorry that upsets you, but I'm sure you'll get over it. Happy Thanksgiving.
- oadster 4y ago"Use of the Software by any person to train, teach, prompt, populate, or otherwise further or facilitate any so-called generative artificial intelligence, generative algorithm, generative adversarial network, generative model, or similar or related activity (or to attempt to perform any of the foregoing acts or activity), whether in connection with any so-called machine learning, deep learning, neural network, or similar or related framework, system, or model or otherwise, is strictly prohibited and beyond the limited scope of this license, absent prior payment to licensor of the licensing fee of the amount of ____"
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 4y ago> AI-based programming assistants strip away any attribution while drawing from the underlying contributions of the community ... we believe that the open source community is based on principles of taking and giving back to the collective How is this behavior different than 90% of human coders? Most SW devs scream if you ask them to pay for something, whether its apps, code, TV, movies, etc. But they will happily try to build startups on top of a vast mountain of free code. I really don't care if my code gets sucked up by the AI vacuum, humans have been doing that quite well for awhile now.