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MIT No-AI License
- leobg 4y agoThat‘s like selling a cookbook with TOS that say you can‘t use it inside a commercial kitchen. Or, if you do, can‘t sell the food cooked with the methods contained in it.
- outside1234 4y agoWhat's wrong with that? And companies do this all the time with enterprise software...
- leobg 4y agoThe problem with it is that copyright was never designed to protect ideas. Society has to strike a balance. You want to protect authors, so they do publish their stuff, and get paid for it. But you also want ideas to spread, so that innovation spreads from one to many. Hence legal institutions like patents and copyright. Both carefully balance the interests of the owner with those of the public. Patents give you the right to sue people who use your idea without a valid license, but only if you publish the idea, and only for a certain amount of time. Afterwards, the idea falls into the public domain. Copyright, on the other hand, has never never protected the ideas contained in a work. Rather, copyright gives you the right to sue people who re-publish your work verbatim. However, copyright never did and never can give you the right to sue somebody because they are learning from your material. Because that would 1) be a de-facto patent without the formal requirements of a patent and 2) run counter to the goal of free speech and the circulation of ideas for the common good. Besides, copyright laws were enacted in a time where machines learning from text did not exist. So even if a society wanted to put restrictions on such a use of published content, it would require new legislation to do so. (I am a lawyer, and the above represents my personal view of the legal situation here.)
- leobg 4y agoBesides, what always gets ignored in this discussion: What about those who already did harvest publicly available information and used it to train their models? Google. Facebook. OpenAI. Now draw the curtain for everyone else, making it a legal moat for those companies‘ profits? That‘s like allowing Google to build an index of the web and then to make it illegal for everyone else to scrape publicly accessible websites.
- rognjen 4y agoIt's like a cookbook with TOS that say you can't feed it to machine learning model.
- BaculumMeumEst 4y agoWas a lawyer consulted for this?
- rognjen 4y agoNo, and IANAL. If you are one, or have access to one, email me.
- williamstein 4y agoIs this incompatible with the GPL?
- jtvjan 4y agoOf course it is. It rather plainly restricts the user from using the software in a specific way, which is against user freedom.
- 1f60c 4y agoThat reminds me of this incredibly funny anecdote told by Douglas Crockford: https://youtu.be/-hCimLnIsDA https://youtu.be/-hCimLnIsDA.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- occamrazor 4y agoMost likely yes, because it imposes additional conditions about the use of the code.
- a_t48 4y agoIt’s also either incompatible with MIT or easily worked around.
- lixtra 4y agoWhat if you reword it as copyleft-AI GPL. You may only use this code to train “open” models, that are themselves subject to the copyleft-AI GPL. In that case you would just spell out, that you consider the model a derivate of your work.
- rognjen 4y agoIt's an open source license, but not an Open Source one.
- OkayPhysicist 4y agoCouldn't you circumvent this by sub-licensing the project under the standard MIT license and then use THAT as training data? If you care what people do with your code, don't use permissive licenses. Use something with strong-copyleft like the GPL, or come up with a license that actually restricts the behavior you want.
- rognjen 4y agoIANAL so I don't know. But imagine the time investment required to do so...
- OkayPhysicist 4y agoZero? The act of licensing something to myself creates no observables, but it's something I'm legally allowed to do. So it just becomes an argument in a court case. Now, personally I would probably respect the clearly stated intent of the author, because I like to think myself basically decent. But I also try to advocate for people not undermining themselves by selecting licenses that actively permit people to do the thing they don't want them to do. If you want people to contribute back to your ecosystem in exchange for licensing your code, don't use a permissive license, use a copy-left. If you don't want someone building a business off your code, use a non-commercial license. If you want to put any meaningful restrictions at all on your codebase don't give people a carte blanche to sublicense it.
- rognjen 4y agoWouldn't you, at the very least, have to copy repo and change the license text?
- OkayPhysicist 4y agoThe license is just an agreement between the license issuer (me) and the person looking for permission to use the text (me). I don't need to publish anything to sublicense it.
- aliqot 4y agoI hate to sound glib here, but, "...And for my next trick, robots.txt!" I don't think we have any choice in opting in or out to being model fodder, the only choice is in whether or not to emit that which we seek to keep out of its view. Anything in a public space will be assumed public first. It didn't stop copilot, it's not going to stop OpenAI, and the next thing won't be stopped either. If you're carrying a phone right now, you're already feeding models aisle by aisle as you walk through retail stores. Nobody scoffs at an anti-theft camera when they're shopping for drill bits, but would you feel the same way if it said it is for advertising purposes? If you thought phones and social media were the opiate of the masses, just you wait. From top to bottom, from consumer to producer to middleman, the entire world is salivating at this opportunity and there is too much gold in them hills for any of this to stop. Any AI model that fails in this current market will be the ones who make a gentleman's agreement with the wide unaccountable internet to hobble themselves for un-spendable good-guy points. I view and reward this license as having noble intent, but limited efficacy against those who'd do the most harm to us, the unscrupulous.
- rognjen 4y agoDoes Github support robots?
- LordKeren 4y agoNothing short of sweeping legislation will matter here. And given the US’s recent track record for legislating technology, AI is going to be the Wild West for the foreseeable future. Guess we’ll just see what the EU decided
- CharlesW 4y agoThis is the "criminals^H^H^H^H^H tech companies will steal content anyway, so why bother?" argument, but that seems defeatist to me. Laws forcing tech companies to attribute sources for generated content would help.
- aliqot 4y agoIt's not "why bother", it's a critique on the specific license at hand and its efficacy against this issue.
- boothby 4y ago> ... without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use ... > ... Permission is not granted to use this software ... Is this going to hold up to legal scrutiny? It looks like it's blatantly contradicting itself. The author is calling it an "MIT" license, but does not appear to be associated with MIT -- is MIT cool with that? The author is not a lawyer. Nice concept, but I don't trust the execution.
- rognjen 4y agoWhat is the license on the MIT license?
- krono 4y ago> to any person obtaining a copy A relevant distinction, perhaps
- michaelmior 4y agoIANAL, but it sounds like what a "person" obtaining a copy means could be challenging to define. If I open my browser, navigate to a page containing the code, and click some type of download button, I think it would be hard to argue that I was not a person obtaining a copy. What if I write a crawler and my crawler downloads a copy of the code for me? Am I still a person obtaining a copy?
- krono 4y ago
- xiphias2 4y agoI flagged it as it has nothing to do with MIT
- EamonnMR 4y agoWell the name 'expat license' didn't stick and MIT likes the free advertising.
- Findecanor 4y agoWhat I would like, is rather a well-written[1] license that forbids the distribution or sale of machine learning models created from my source code. I would be perfectly fine with higher-degree statistical models created from my source code, for personal use only when editing the source code. That would only be a good tool. That is something that this MIT NO AI license also disallows. [1] Written by someone more knowledgeable in legalese than I am, so that it becomes water-tight. BTW, personally, I prefer copyleft.
- rognjen 4y agoI'm not more knowledgeable in legalese than you.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- EamonnMR 4y agoWay I see it, either companies will comply with your existing copy left license (and we don't need a new one) or they're going to ignore your license, and adding a 'please don't ignore my license' clause won't do any good.
- carom 4y agoI need to write something like this. Basically open source data for non-commercial uses. Have the non-commercial aspect extend to models trained on the data. The idea being to enable academics and hobbyist but collect from people making money.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- EnigmaCurry 4y agowell you also removed the attribution clause.
- rognjen 4y agoDidn't know MIT had an attribution clause tbh. I only added the second paragraph.
- EnigmaCurry 4y agothe original has `The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.`
- oakwhiz 4y agoAre all machine learning models bad? Surely there could be some machine learning models that are so simplistic in nature that they could be considered "harmless." It seems like the purpose and scope of the model is not considered by most people when they are debating over AI.
- paxys 4y agoThis is the perfect example of why developers should not write their own licenses. - The first two paragraphs contradict each other. "deal in the Software without restriction", "Permission is not granted to use this software..." etc. Which one is it? Remember that ambiguity in contracts work against the side that drafted it. - What is "machine learning models"? Is there an objective definition of it that a judge/jury/court can understand? Why doesn't the license include that definition? - Where is the attribution clause? - "MIT" in the title is a copyrighted term, so the license is itself likely illegal to publish.
- torstenvl 4y agoMIT is a trademark; even assuming it was original enough to warrant copyright protection, it was founded in 1861 (by someone who died in 1882). Even under today's expansive copyright duration scheme, any copyright would have fallen into the public domain half a century ago. Agree on your other points.
- fsckboy 4y agonames of things are not copyrightable, even the title of books and films are not part of the copyright (that's why we see different movies come out with the same title). The reason is, there is not enough space in a title to exhibit the type of creative expression that copyright is meant to protect.
- torstenvl 4y ago> even assuming it was original enough to warrant copyright protection > not enough space in a title to exhibit the type of creative expression I think we're saying the same thing. See 37 CFR § 202.1(a). However, even if that weren't the case, it still wouldn't be subject to copyright.
- perbu 4y agoTrademarks and copyright are different things. As long as the owner of a trademarks keeps defending it, the trademarks will remain valid. This implies that unless MIT wants to lose their trademark, they must defend it, ie going after things like this. And MIT is pretty clear on their willingness to defend their trademarks; https://policies.mit.edu/policies-procedures/120-relations-public-use-mit-name-and-facilities-use/123-use-institute-name https://policies.mit.edu/policies-procedures/120-relations-p...
- EMIRELADERO 4y agoDepending on the outcome of the recent court cases related to AIs like Copilot and Stable Diffusion, this might not be of use at all. If courts rule that training, distributing and using models without regard for the data author's consent is a fair use (which has a high chance of happening) then the license is is worthless.
- rognjen 4y agoI hope not...
- OkayPhysicist 4y agoI suspect it's likely. It's really hard to argue that there's nothing "sufficiently transformative" about turning some source code for a web api into a machine learning model capable of presenting code suggestions for a wide variety of different types of problems. The actual issue isn't the training of the models, but the use of the resulting output: Just because training the models was fair use, doesn't mean that a case where you use some code the model regurgitates from its training data verbatim is.
- eru 4y agoIf the model never leaves the company's servers, and you strap a simple filter on its output that removes verbatim regurgitates, then this should be moot?
- kweingar 4y agoIt seems irresponsible to use the “MIT License” brand for a license that isn’t open source by most commonly understood definitions. If you want to limit how people use your software, fine, but don’t trick users by naming your license similarly to an open source one.
- rognjen 4y ago@dang is the flag necessary?
- torstenvl 4y agoIAAL but IANAIPL I appreciate you trying to prompt discussion of the issue and how it might be resolved within the legal system, but I think this misses the mark, for a few reasons: (1) As others have pointed out, you've left open a sub licensing loophole, especially because the license does not require as a condition that the sublicensed version retain the notice of your copyright and license. (2) The terms you use are vague. What is "machine learning"? Is it machine learning to use an organic neural network (i.e., for a flesh-and-blood person to train their mind on it)? Why or why not? Do you intend to make it illegal to view the code in an editor with adaptive autocorrect? What about just syntax highlighting? Surely when the editor "learns" your defined types and function prototypes, that could reasonably fall within the definition of "machine learning," couldn't it? (3) Have you considered the interplay of copyright law and contract law here? You call this a license but it's more like a license agreement because you aren't just limiting your grant of copying permissions, you're limiting how it's used by the end user. Such an EULA falls well outside the domain of international copyright law and would be governed by individual jurisdictions' contract law. What constitutes a user's acceptance of your EULA? What jurisdiction governs? Again, I don't practice in the area of IP; my take is only possibly (and if so, only slightly) more informed than the average HN user when it comes to this topic. Hopefully someone like kemitchell will weigh in.