16 ms·

Facebook is going after LLaMA repos with DMCA's

320 points by nothrowaways 4y ago

polygamous_bat 4y ago
The claim is slightly misleading since it seems that they are going after repos that distribute Llama weights without going through the official channels. However, that could be an unfortunate corrolary of the fact that in the US if you do not enforce your IP you give up your rights over it. Overall, giant lose-lose, and I wish there was a truly open source model to build on top of.
- orra 4y ago
  > that could be an unfortunate corrolary of the fact that in the US if you do not enforce your IP you give up your rights over it. That's the case with trademarks but I have never heard of it being the case with copyright.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    Copyright (in the US, at least) is a “natural” right. It exists, as soon as the work exists, and registration is not required. It needs to be explicitly transferred and/or assigned. There is no need to "defend" it. There have been a lot of challenges, based on “derivative copies,” but these generally seem to be from where someone uses a photo done by someone else, in their own creative work (like the Obama "Change" poster). Some of these challenges succeed, some do not. I would assume someone extending these weights might be considered a “derivative.” Copyright law is odd, and there’s a lot of “fuzziness,” especially with creative works. I’ve always been a bit skeptical of applying copyright to compiled and opaque binaries, but I guess I’m in the minority.
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      >I’ve always been a bit skeptical of applying copyright to compiled and opaque binaries, but I guess I’m in the minority. You're not in the minority - copyright requiring human authorship and creativity is standing law. A compiled binary cannot be copyrighted on it's own[0]; the copyright flows from the source to the binaries via derivative works. We just don't normally think about this because until very recently all binaries were derivatives of copyrightable human creative expression. Applying a mechanical process to a creative work doesn't make it non-creative, after all. [0] Hand-assembled binaries would be considered "source code" in this case.
- ealexhudson 4y ago
  You only lose rights with respect to trademarks. Copyrights do not need to be consistently enforced in order to be enforceable (although if you're not consistent you'll likely have a tough time arguing significant damages)
  - lupire 4y ago
    The real problem, which plagues open source, is the US is extremely financialized, so courts are loathe to grant actual damages for cultural loss due to free stuff getting pirated. There are still statutory damages, though.
- deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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counttheforks 4y ago
Funny how these bigcorps want to protect the copyright of their copyright infringement machines. Can't wait for someone to train a new model off of theirs and challenge them in court over it. Everything you can slurp off of the internet is fair game, right?
- Riverheart 4y ago
  Of course, it’s no different than you browsing and reading the sum total of the Internet yourself which is a natural thing we are all capable of and then copying your brain and giving it to anyone who would like to query your headspace. Little known fact, that’s why the brain has a USB port. /s
- sharemywin 4y ago
  This. someone needs to do this. although don't they use terms of service to stop you not copyright?
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    If you acquired the model from the torrent you never agreed with their terms of service.
greyface- 4y ago
Meanwhile, the pull request on the official repo linking to a torrent of the weights is still up. https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/73/files https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/73/files
- practice9 4y ago
  As well as the super-upvoted PR to change the model license to Apache 2.0: https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/184 https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/184
  - archontes 4y ago
    I wonder what basis they think they have to claim copyright on AI weights at all, as the weights are not the result of a creative process.
    - randyrand 4y ago
      Eh. A lot of creative thinking goes into creating the weights. Photography is just taking a photo, but you still own the rights to it because you clicked the button.
      - archontes 4y ago
        A lot of creative thinking goes into the curation of the training set.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      Is that a battle you want to have in court against metas lawyers? If not, then whatever they say is effectively law.
yread 4y ago
Wouldn't opensourcing the weights and trying to commoditize LLMs be a smarter move? That seems to be the only chance to catch up with OpenAI.
- nordsieck 4y ago
  > Wouldn't opensourcing the weights and trying to commoditize LLMs be a smarter move? That seems to be the only chance to catch up with OpenAI. Depends on what they're afraid of. If they want to commoditize the space, then I think you're right. If they think they can catch OpenAI, and they want to charge for AI services, then what they're doing makes sense.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > If they think they can catch OpenAI, and they want to charge for AI services, then what they're doing makes sense. Then they wouldn't release anything to the researchers. Reason LLaMA weights are spreading in the first place is because they let a big group of people get access, someone is bound to upload it as a torrent. Seems they gave people with .edu emails access relatively quickly too, researcher or not.
    - nordsieck 4y ago
      > Then they wouldn't release anything to the researchers. I'm sure FB has shared enormous amounts of data with researchers in the past. And they've probably had very little trouble with said researchers uploading data to the internet. I think it's a pretty bad take that FB sharing data with researchers means that they wanted it spread freely. Even if that data is LLM weights.
      - flangola7 4y ago
        They were sharing it with everyone. I applied through their google form and put "zero" for previous research papers and NA for my organization. They still sent me a link
      - deleted 4y ago
reset-password 4y ago
Trying to stop the spread of LLaMA with DMCAs is an interesting technique. Like the internet version of trying to put out a grease fire with water.
- creshal 4y ago
  Every day, another company re-discovers the Streisand effect.
unnah 4y ago
Is there precedent on model weights being copyrightable in the first place? I suppose the recipients of the DMCA notices are unlikely to be willing to contest it in court, though.
- bottled_poe 4y ago
  Doesn’t matter. The weights wouldn’t exist without many tens of millions (at least) in investment. The outcome seems very clear.
  - papercrane 4y ago
    US copyright law cares about originality and expressiveness, not labour and cost. It can be very expensive to collect and print a list of every business and their phone number in a book, but the result is not copyrightable in the US.
    - evandale 4y ago
      This is a pretty compelling argument to me that the weights shouldn't be able to be copyrighted. In essence, aren't they a list of numbers you can search through to get a result? Would it makes sense to say a "give me a rowboat on the water" prompt (search) is the same as a "give me the phone number of company XYZ" search in a phonebook? What exactly is a prompt anyway? Can you copyright the assembly that a compiler spits out? Is an AI prompt the same as source code and its output is the assembly a compiler would generate? Does that mean the model is a compiler? I assume a compiler can be copyrighted, so then maybe the weights can be copyrighted? Or would it make more sense that the combination of (weights + prompt + seed + output) is copyrightable? I don't have answers to any of these or know if they're reasonable questions but I'm starting to find this all very fascinating.
  - postalrat 4y ago
    If you are mining Bitcoin can you copyright a block you discover? You probably payed a lot of money for it.
  - 4y ago
htwrand 4y ago
Isn't llama-dl just like a human reading information on the Internet and learning from it, only faster? That is what we have been told when they stole our open source software.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  no, machines are not humans. And nobody stole your software, but they may have been in breach of the license. But because there's no financial damage, you probably don't have the financial standing to sue over it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - feanaro 4y ago
    How is there no financial damage? If models start replacing existing business cases but are only able to do so because they were trained on copyrighted data relating to those business cases, then the financial damage should be very obvious.
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      Damage isn't enough, you also need liability. If I make a better search engine than Google and take away their ads business, I have damaged them, but I am not liable. The argument here is that Facebook does not actually own LLaMA, because they don't own the training data, they didn't have humans curate the training data in a creative way, and the actual training process is purely mechanical. If LLaMA is not copyrightable then you cannot be liable for copying it.
      - LegitShady 4y ago
        I think liability is easier to prove because they breached license to use the source code against license. Thats clearly their action. But financial damage on programs distributed for free is...nothing. So even if you sue, what are you going to get out of them? I wonder if you can sue for some form of specific performance and cause them to remove your and all other equally licensed code from their training
sillysaurusx 4y ago
Hi all. I'm the author of the tweet. My goal was merely to warn everyone in the LLaMA community that Facebook appears to be trying to shut down the ecosystem that sprang up around LLaMA since the beginning of March. For a bit of background, I created llama-dl on March 5. Show HN: Llama-dl - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026902 Announcement tweet - https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1632238214529400832 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1632238214529400832 Since the repo is now offline, you can find an archived version of the README here: https://archive.is/7t3it https://archive.is/7t3it The intent with llama-dl was to kickstart an open source movement related to LLaMA. If you're curious about my personal motivations for this, I did an interview with The Verge about that: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1633456289639542789 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1633456289639542789 Over the next two weeks, llama-dl grew to 3k stars, and (according to my bucket metrics) distributed 4M files. Thanks to the availability of a reliable, high-speed download link to LLaMA, other hackers were able to launch projects such as Dalai: Dalai: Automatically install, run, and play with LLaMA on your computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35127020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35127020 Dalai has been making headlines all over the place, and especially on ML tiktok. (ML tiktok is surprisingly interesting.) When Facebook knocked llama-dl offline via DMCA on the 20th, my primary concern was to ensure that Dalai stayed up. After all, the whole point of llama-dl was to encourage the creation of a "killer app" such as Dalai. After a quick huddle with Dalai's author @cocktailpeanut via Twitter DM, they launched a decentralized distribution mechanism for LLaMA, powered by bittorrent: https://twitter.com/cocktailpeanut/status/1639036133047783424 https://twitter.com/cocktailpeanut/status/163903613304778342... This ensures the availability of LLaMA in the short term. However, there's a broader issue at stake. The question is whether model weights themselves can be copyrighted. It might seem obvious that since compiled binaries can be copyrighted, ML models should also be able to be. But the U.S. Copyright Office recently denied copyright to AI generated outputs: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-office-rules-ai-art-cant-be-copyrighted-180979808/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-offic... > Both in its 2019 decision and its decision this February, the USCO found the “human authorship” element was lacking and was wholly necessary to obtain a copyright, Engadget’s K. Holt wrote. Current copyright law only provides protections to “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the [human] mind,” the USCO states. If the model output isn't copyrightable, is the model itself copyrightable? It's an interesting and important question, and answering it in court is a necessary step. The outcome will determine how models are treated over the next decade. Now, all that said, Facebook is proceeding under the (untested) assumption that LLaMA is copyright Meta. If that assumption is correct, then they're well within their legal rights to issue these DMCAs. Llama-dl was little more than a bash script pointing to a download link, yet that's sufficient grounds for DMCA, since the whole point of llama-dl was to circumvent a copyright protection mechanism. My overall goal here is to simply bring awareness to all of these issues. We're entering an era of closed-source ML. I think the history of computing shows that open source is generally a better bet. Facebook, if you're reading this, I urge you to reconsider your approach. You had the opportunity to gain an incredible amount of momentum. By killing it off, you're sacrificing your foothold into the hearts and minds of ML hackers. Wouldn't it be a better idea to harness the ecosystem rather than stomp it out of existence? There are so many ways this can facilitate your business in a positive way. Are you sure that being an adversary to your own community is the best way forward?
bunnyswipe_com 4y ago
Why would I pay for LLAMA ???
- oreoftw 4y ago
  Because it’s good? I wouldn’t mind paying for a commercial license to self host it.
  - r0b05 4y ago
    What kind of server would you need to self host it?
olalonde 4y ago
For context, Facebook's LLaMa weights were leaked a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35007978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35007978
rvnx 4y ago
As the weights have leaked anyway; one great move that FB could have done would be to ride the wave of positive PR + get all investors hyped: ---> "Meta is a credible alternative to OpenAI, the company is switching from "Meta"-bullshit to an "IA"-first company", and get the investors to pump the Meta stock, and then dilute some of the shares to raise some cash (or issue new shares to newly specialized IA hires). But no, FB is still going after the VR gimmicks and NFTs. 4 billion USD per quarter wasted on Oculus (!), while they could use this money to fund and support a whole ecosystem around LLaMA.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Is IA something different from AI? Or maybe just the French version ("intelligence artificielle" I imagine...) My feeling is that a lot of Meta's AI/ML work actually ties into the AR/VR long-term dream. How do you make the so-called metaverse alive? By having people design it themselves. They're not going to do that in Maya, that's for sure. But if they could create virtual spaces and virtual people with Holodeck-style natural language instructions...
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    Could just be a small typo too
  - vanilla_nut 4y ago
    Maybe they mean "information architecture." Facebook does produce Docusaurus, after all, one of the best documentation platforms out there today :)
  - erikstarck 4y ago
    Intelligence Augmentation?
  - LtdJorge 4y ago
    Latin languages use IA
  - rvnx 4y ago
    I apologize, my French accent broke into the wild. Yes, it's totally AI, and IA is the French version :)
chatmasta 4y ago
This seems like a big misstep by Meta. I had assumed they were intentionally allowing that torrent to float around, and tacitly encouraging open source to build on their models. It seemed like a way to differentiate themselves from "Open"AI, and I was actually feeling some good will toward them for a second!
- bitshiftfaced 4y ago
  Isn't this just to protect them from liability? If someone claims that their LLM hurt them in some way, they can say that they had nothing to do with it and that they tried to prevent its spread. Also, it could be a maneuver to prevent the genericization of the word LLaMa, which they may want to continue using.
  - chatmasta 4y ago
    Good question. Is there a copy of the actual DMCA notice available? I'd like to read their specific phrasing. (Also: great username!) EDIT: DMCA here [0]. It does sound like they're asserting copyright on the "content," i.e. presumably the weights themselves. [0] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2023/03/2023-03-21-meta.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2023/03/2023-03-2...
    - thfuran 4y ago
      Is that a defensible claim in the US? No human designed those weights; they're the output of some algorithm run on a bunch of data.
      - chatmasta 4y ago
        There are definitely some good arguments why it wouldn't be defensible (e.g. the phone book argument), but of course this is all new and remains to be seen. The other interesting aspect of this is that they're classifying it as unauthorized content distribution. Meta was already distributing the weights, but limited their distribution to "researchers" with approved credentials. It was one of those researchers who leaked the weights originally. So it's not like they were reverse engineered from a binary or exfiltrated out of FB HQ. That might be an important bit of nuance.
wslh 4y ago
BitTorrent is the answer for these cases. This is just an observation.
- hiccuphippo 4y ago
  Here is the list of torrents at the bottom https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYyucgBQVfs9JXZ2MtmkGPAhgUjNgyGE6rcJT1KybQHhp/index.html https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYyucgBQVfs9JXZ2MtmkGPAhgUjNgyGE6rcJT1... That page itself is for storing the magnet URLs in a bitcoin transaction to make them live forever.
inparen 4y ago
Might be scared of more negative press, if the model generates something controversial ?
nperez 4y ago
I was thinking about this the other day and assumed they would just relicense it. Guess I was wrong. What's the point? Streisand effect ensures it will be the most sought-after model while they're making a big deal out of it, and its value is going to depreciate quickly due to the overall pace of AI
the88doctor 4y ago
And here I thought FB was going to try a more open approach than OpenAI. Silly me.
rvcdbn 4y ago
This is a good thing. Many people are of the opinion that model weights don’t have copyright independent of the source code used to generate them. The source code and training data are all open. The model weights are a deterministic function of those. Claiming they have independent copyright is essentially the same as claiming copyright in a binary you compiled from open source code. Seems like a pretty good chance to get a court to agree with this.
- terafo 4y ago
  Model weights aren't deterministic due to FP math. But I think your argument still stands.
  - brucethemoose2 4y ago
    If they had to be exact, you could randomize them just a bit and evade the copyright. That doesn't hold up for video/audio, and I think it wouldn't hold up for weights.
martythemaniak 4y ago
It kind of doesn't matter. Llama is great because it lets everyone experiment, optimize and learn with LLMs locally. Once Stability releases their model everyone will just drop llama and quickly apply all their new tools and learnings to that model.
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  There is a risk of the community getting "entrenched" in an old model/architecture. In stable diffusion land, for instance, the community is pretty much stuck on the "old" architecture. Newer innovations, like Huggingface diffusers and various optimizations derived from that like PEFT, torch.compile support, AITemplate/TensorRT compilation and various other bits are largely unused. They are also pretty much stuck on SD 1.5, even though 2.1 is a good base for finetuning. This has happened in the past too, with ESRGAN.
Zuiii 4y ago
Carious timing given that the US copyright office itself does not consider these weights to be copyrightable per its statements just a few days ago. I hope someone takes Facebook to court.
classified 4y ago
Insert Sun Tzu quote from the CEO here. This is war, after all.
yieldcrv 4y ago
clone repos to your computer, dont just fork them the fork disappears when the parent repository is taken down, clones stay on your machine upload to IPFS. you can pin on IPFS for free with filecoin. Use filecoin nodes to pin on ipfs at https://web3.storage https://web3.storage
not2b 4y ago
People are arguing about whether model weights can be copyrighted, and who knows how courts will eventually rule. But if a site gets a DMCA takedown notice, they are taking a huge gamble if they don't comply: if courts do decide that Meta's copyright is valid, the monetary damages for an infringer could be huge. So I would expect the demands to be honored by anyone who can't afford to be wiped out in court.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Similarly, if they get a properly-written DMCA counter-notification, they are also taking a huge risk if they do comply with the DMCA request. The only difference is that the notification is coming from Facebook and the counter-notification is coming from random programmers.
paxys 4y ago
Pretty interesting that everyone here is overwhelmingly against Meta for trying to keep their models private, but the other company (the one with "open" in their name) is applauded for doing exactly this.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  I think you are mistaking two different groups of people: the people praising OpenAI aren’t the onea criticizing Meta.
  - saurik 4y ago
    While true, I also believe OpenAI at least has a chance of their model being proprietary. So, while I am angered by OpenAI, I am unsure I could make the same to-me-slamdunk argument for why they have no standing for a DMCA on their weights (were such leaked)... whereas, for Facebook, either the weights can't be copywritten at all, they can be copywritten but the copyright is owned by the people who made the training data, or--and this is key--the model is a derivative work of the code they released under GPL.
- bestbuyer__ 4y ago
  What are you talking about? I hear people criticizing OpenAI for being so closed all the time.
saurik 4y ago
So, to me, there are three cases, and none of them give Facebook the standing for this to stick (but, of course, they can throw around a DMCA takedown and then require someone to file a counter-claim and maybe a lawsuit or whatever and that is going to be kind of pointless and likely quite expensive for sillysaurusx to do here; I think this takedown noticing law sucks in no small part because of that power differential). 1) You can't copyright weights. A lot of people believe this. I am not sure this is true. I think it might be that there is a fair use argument that the weights are transformative, but having fair use on your infringement doesn't imply a lack of the original copyright being owned by someone. But like, this might be true, and it is not an unreasonable stance. 2) The model weights are a derived work of the training data. This feels right to me, frankly, as much as it irks a lot of people on Hacker News who are excited to use Copilot (or owns shares of Microsoft ;P). In this case, Facebook does not own the copyright as they purposefully used an open training set from third parties (including Wikipedia and OpenCrawl) as a counter to OpenAI's proprietary one. 3) The model weights are a derived work of the training code, in the same way a binary is a derived work of its source code (vs. #2 where the code is a compiler and the source code is the training set). In this case, Facebook would own the copyright... but the resulting binary program--as distributed in the machine interpretable (and executable) format of the model weights--must be GPL as Facebook amazingly used that as the license for their training code. The interpretation of events that would allow Facebook to have some hope of arguing that the model weights are their own work--that maybe the code is more of a tool like Photoshop and they have a fair use claim on the training data--would imply something that simply is not true: that they are adding some (hopefully extensive) form of expressive input above and beyond those two inputs, in the way someone using Photoshop does when they remix someone else's art into a transformative work. However, Facebook definitely isn't doing that: they have provided absolutely no expressive input or intent on top of those two inputs, one of which they do not own and the other of which they chose to license for us under GPL! To make this a bit clearer, separate Facebook into two parties for a moment--one which developed the tooling and the other of which ran it--to determine which of the various parties you think owns this result: if you download a program someone else wrote and click a button to run it on some data someone else owns, you simply do not own the copyright on the result. (edit: I wrote some more on this argument in the following linked comment.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35293068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35293068 The only thing I can come up with, if I try really really hard to steelman Facebook here, is: maybe, if I were to release a binary to the world that is a compiled copy of code that I also simultaneously released under GPL, the binary might technically have been compiled from an internal pre-licensed (but identical) copy of said code; and so, while if you compile the same binary from the licensed code you get an identical output that is a derived work with GPL rights, when I do that I don't... but this feels like a perilous argument to make as you are going to have such a hard time showing that this was a reasonable way to infer your intent with the simultaneous release. (Of course, the person who originally agreed to the terms of service attached to the download they got is a totally different matter, but that doesn't mean there are none. There are a lot of limitations to what people can extract out of you if you violate a contract. So like, by having explicitly agreed to those terms with Facebook that person should not have given the world the weights--not because they are copyrighted but merely because they were secret--and there might be some kind of ramification... but, I do not believe that would possibly apply downstream to sillysaurusx.) (Note: I am not a lawyer. I spend a ridiculous amount of my time vs. a normal engineer working with copyright and both hearing and making arguments about copyright, including directly to the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress as part of my work on Cydia and my efforts to push back on parts of the DMCA alongside lawyers from the EFF... but like, it would be foolish to read my comment here and then embark on a project to do something that might massively infringe on someone's copyrights without running it past a real lawyer. I, certainly, have actual lawyers.)
spullara 4y ago
I think it remains to be seen if weights can be copyrighted at all.
fwlr 4y ago
My first thought was “I wonder if Alpaca 7B could generate a plausible counter-notice”. Probably not, but I bet if GPT-4’s weights were leaked it could defend itself against DMCA claims.
randyrand 4y ago
If someone put in more work to fine tune LLaMA, it may qualify for fair use.
throwaway1851 4y ago
Any news on whether they're pursuing downstream weights? That's a really interesting question for me - if you started at the LLaMA weights and arrived somewhere else by supplying additional training data and computation, any infringement claim would be very, very murky. I also think it would be practically difficult to prosecute such a claim because it would necessarily involve comparative questions about the consumption of unlicensed training data to generate the original weights. It would certainly make for interesting law.
danShumway 4y ago
There is a decent chance that model weights are not copyrightable (and I think that's the clearest definition of the law, I don't think they're a compiled work, at most they might be patentable. Particularly in situations where multiple models might converge towards the same weights, that seems more like a discovery than a creative act? That being said, I don't feel like I know for certain how a court would rule. And I wouldn't like to fight Facebook about it in court regardless, that sounds like a pretty bad time even if the court sides with you. But on the other hand, Facebook might not be keen to test this either.

320 points by nothrowaways 4y ago

The claim is slightly misleading since it seems that they are going after repos that distribute Llama weights without going through the official channels. However, that could be an unfortunate corrolary of the fact that in the US if you do not enforce your IP you give up your rights over it. Overall, giant lose-lose, and I wish there was a truly open source model to build on top of.

orra 4y ago
> that could be an unfortunate corrolary of the fact that in the US if you do not enforce your IP you give up your rights over it. That's the case with trademarks but I have never heard of it being the case with copyright.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Copyright (in the US, at least) is a “natural” right. It exists, as soon as the work exists, and registration is not required. It needs to be explicitly transferred and/or assigned. There is no need to "defend" it. There have been a lot of challenges, based on “derivative copies,” but these generally seem to be from where someone uses a photo done by someone else, in their own creative work (like the Obama "Change" poster). Some of these challenges succeed, some do not. I would assume someone extending these weights might be considered a “derivative.” Copyright law is odd, and there’s a lot of “fuzziness,” especially with creative works. I’ve always been a bit skeptical of applying copyright to compiled and opaque binaries, but I guess I’m in the minority.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    >I’ve always been a bit skeptical of applying copyright to compiled and opaque binaries, but I guess I’m in the minority. You're not in the minority - copyright requiring human authorship and creativity is standing law. A compiled binary cannot be copyrighted on it's own[0]; the copyright flows from the source to the binaries via derivative works. We just don't normally think about this because until very recently all binaries were derivatives of copyrightable human creative expression. Applying a mechanical process to a creative work doesn't make it non-creative, after all. [0] Hand-assembled binaries would be considered "source code" in this case.
ealexhudson 4y ago
You only lose rights with respect to trademarks. Copyrights do not need to be consistently enforced in order to be enforceable (although if you're not consistent you'll likely have a tough time arguing significant damages)
- lupire 4y ago
  The real problem, which plagues open source, is the US is extremely financialized, so courts are loathe to grant actual damages for cultural loss due to free stuff getting pirated. There are still statutory damages, though.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

counttheforks 4y ago

Funny how these bigcorps want to protect the copyright of their copyright infringement machines. Can't wait for someone to train a new model off of theirs and challenge them in court over it. Everything you can slurp off of the internet is fair game, right?

Riverheart 4y ago
Of course, it’s no different than you browsing and reading the sum total of the Internet yourself which is a natural thing we are all capable of and then copying your brain and giving it to anyone who would like to query your headspace. Little known fact, that’s why the brain has a USB port. /s
sharemywin 4y ago
This. someone needs to do this. although don't they use terms of service to stop you not copyright?
- counttheforks 4y ago
  If you acquired the model from the torrent you never agreed with their terms of service.

greyface- 4y ago

Meanwhile, the pull request on the official repo linking to a torrent of the weights is still up. https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/73/files https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/73/files

practice9 4y ago
As well as the super-upvoted PR to change the model license to Apache 2.0: https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/184 https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/184
- archontes 4y ago
  I wonder what basis they think they have to claim copyright on AI weights at all, as the weights are not the result of a creative process.
  - randyrand 4y ago
    Eh. A lot of creative thinking goes into creating the weights. Photography is just taking a photo, but you still own the rights to it because you clicked the button.
    - archontes 4y ago
      A lot of creative thinking goes into the curation of the training set.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Is that a battle you want to have in court against metas lawyers? If not, then whatever they say is effectively law.

yread 4y ago

Wouldn't opensourcing the weights and trying to commoditize LLMs be a smarter move? That seems to be the only chance to catch up with OpenAI.

nordsieck 4y ago
> Wouldn't opensourcing the weights and trying to commoditize LLMs be a smarter move? That seems to be the only chance to catch up with OpenAI. Depends on what they're afraid of. If they want to commoditize the space, then I think you're right. If they think they can catch OpenAI, and they want to charge for AI services, then what they're doing makes sense.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > If they think they can catch OpenAI, and they want to charge for AI services, then what they're doing makes sense. Then they wouldn't release anything to the researchers. Reason LLaMA weights are spreading in the first place is because they let a big group of people get access, someone is bound to upload it as a torrent. Seems they gave people with .edu emails access relatively quickly too, researcher or not.
  - nordsieck 4y ago
    > Then they wouldn't release anything to the researchers. I'm sure FB has shared enormous amounts of data with researchers in the past. And they've probably had very little trouble with said researchers uploading data to the internet. I think it's a pretty bad take that FB sharing data with researchers means that they wanted it spread freely. Even if that data is LLM weights.
    - flangola7 4y ago
      They were sharing it with everyone. I applied through their google form and put "zero" for previous research papers and NA for my organization. They still sent me a link
    - deleted 4y ago

reset-password 4y ago

Trying to stop the spread of LLaMA with DMCAs is an interesting technique. Like the internet version of trying to put out a grease fire with water.

creshal 4y ago
Every day, another company re-discovers the Streisand effect.

unnah 4y ago

Is there precedent on model weights being copyrightable in the first place? I suppose the recipients of the DMCA notices are unlikely to be willing to contest it in court, though.

bottled_poe 4y ago
Doesn’t matter. The weights wouldn’t exist without many tens of millions (at least) in investment. The outcome seems very clear.
- papercrane 4y ago
  US copyright law cares about originality and expressiveness, not labour and cost. It can be very expensive to collect and print a list of every business and their phone number in a book, but the result is not copyrightable in the US.
  - evandale 4y ago
    This is a pretty compelling argument to me that the weights shouldn't be able to be copyrighted. In essence, aren't they a list of numbers you can search through to get a result? Would it makes sense to say a "give me a rowboat on the water" prompt (search) is the same as a "give me the phone number of company XYZ" search in a phonebook? What exactly is a prompt anyway? Can you copyright the assembly that a compiler spits out? Is an AI prompt the same as source code and its output is the assembly a compiler would generate? Does that mean the model is a compiler? I assume a compiler can be copyrighted, so then maybe the weights can be copyrighted? Or would it make more sense that the combination of (weights + prompt + seed + output) is copyrightable? I don't have answers to any of these or know if they're reasonable questions but I'm starting to find this all very fascinating.
- postalrat 4y ago
  If you are mining Bitcoin can you copyright a block you discover? You probably payed a lot of money for it.
- 4y ago

htwrand 4y ago

Isn't llama-dl just like a human reading information on the Internet and learning from it, only faster? That is what we have been told when they stole our open source software.

LegitShady 4y ago
no, machines are not humans. And nobody stole your software, but they may have been in breach of the license. But because there's no financial damage, you probably don't have the financial standing to sue over it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- feanaro 4y ago
  How is there no financial damage? If models start replacing existing business cases but are only able to do so because they were trained on copyrighted data relating to those business cases, then the financial damage should be very obvious.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Damage isn't enough, you also need liability. If I make a better search engine than Google and take away their ads business, I have damaged them, but I am not liable. The argument here is that Facebook does not actually own LLaMA, because they don't own the training data, they didn't have humans curate the training data in a creative way, and the actual training process is purely mechanical. If LLaMA is not copyrightable then you cannot be liable for copying it.
    - LegitShady 4y ago
      I think liability is easier to prove because they breached license to use the source code against license. Thats clearly their action. But financial damage on programs distributed for free is...nothing. So even if you sue, what are you going to get out of them? I wonder if you can sue for some form of specific performance and cause them to remove your and all other equally licensed code from their training

sillysaurusx 4y ago

Hi all. I'm the author of the tweet. My goal was merely to warn everyone in the LLaMA community that Facebook appears to be trying to shut down the ecosystem that sprang up around LLaMA since the beginning of March. For a bit of background, I created llama-dl on March 5. Show HN: Llama-dl - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026902 Announcement tweet - https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1632238214529400832 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1632238214529400832 Since the repo is now offline, you can find an archived version of the README here: https://archive.is/7t3it https://archive.is/7t3it The intent with llama-dl was to kickstart an open source movement related to LLaMA. If you're curious about my personal motivations for this, I did an interview with The Verge about that: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1633456289639542789 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1633456289639542789 Over the next two weeks, llama-dl grew to 3k stars, and (according to my bucket metrics) distributed 4M files. Thanks to the availability of a reliable, high-speed download link to LLaMA, other hackers were able to launch projects such as Dalai: Dalai: Automatically install, run, and play with LLaMA on your computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35127020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35127020 Dalai has been making headlines all over the place, and especially on ML tiktok. (ML tiktok is surprisingly interesting.) When Facebook knocked llama-dl offline via DMCA on the 20th, my primary concern was to ensure that Dalai stayed up. After all, the whole point of llama-dl was to encourage the creation of a "killer app" such as Dalai. After a quick huddle with Dalai's author @cocktailpeanut via Twitter DM, they launched a decentralized distribution mechanism for LLaMA, powered by bittorrent: https://twitter.com/cocktailpeanut/status/1639036133047783424 https://twitter.com/cocktailpeanut/status/163903613304778342... This ensures the availability of LLaMA in the short term. However, there's a broader issue at stake. The question is whether model weights themselves can be copyrighted. It might seem obvious that since compiled binaries can be copyrighted, ML models should also be able to be. But the U.S. Copyright Office recently denied copyright to AI generated outputs: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-office-rules-ai-art-cant-be-copyrighted-180979808/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-offic... > Both in its 2019 decision and its decision this February, the USCO found the “human authorship” element was lacking and was wholly necessary to obtain a copyright, Engadget’s K. Holt wrote. Current copyright law only provides protections to “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the [human] mind,” the USCO states. If the model output isn't copyrightable, is the model itself copyrightable? It's an interesting and important question, and answering it in court is a necessary step. The outcome will determine how models are treated over the next decade. Now, all that said, Facebook is proceeding under the (untested) assumption that LLaMA is copyright Meta. If that assumption is correct, then they're well within their legal rights to issue these DMCAs. Llama-dl was little more than a bash script pointing to a download link, yet that's sufficient grounds for DMCA, since the whole point of llama-dl was to circumvent a copyright protection mechanism. My overall goal here is to simply bring awareness to all of these issues. We're entering an era of closed-source ML. I think the history of computing shows that open source is generally a better bet. Facebook, if you're reading this, I urge you to reconsider your approach. You had the opportunity to gain an incredible amount of momentum. By killing it off, you're sacrificing your foothold into the hearts and minds of ML hackers. Wouldn't it be a better idea to harness the ecosystem rather than stomp it out of existence? There are so many ways this can facilitate your business in a positive way. Are you sure that being an adversary to your own community is the best way forward?

bunnyswipe_com 4y ago

Why would I pay for LLAMA ???

oreoftw 4y ago
Because it’s good? I wouldn’t mind paying for a commercial license to self host it.
- r0b05 4y ago
  What kind of server would you need to self host it?

olalonde 4y ago

For context, Facebook's LLaMa weights were leaked a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35007978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35007978

rvnx 4y ago

As the weights have leaked anyway; one great move that FB could have done would be to ride the wave of positive PR + get all investors hyped: ---> "Meta is a credible alternative to OpenAI, the company is switching from "Meta"-bullshit to an "IA"-first company", and get the investors to pump the Meta stock, and then dilute some of the shares to raise some cash (or issue new shares to newly specialized IA hires). But no, FB is still going after the VR gimmicks and NFTs. 4 billion USD per quarter wasted on Oculus (!), while they could use this money to fund and support a whole ecosystem around LLaMA.

pavlov 4y ago
Is IA something different from AI? Or maybe just the French version ("intelligence artificielle" I imagine...) My feeling is that a lot of Meta's AI/ML work actually ties into the AR/VR long-term dream. How do you make the so-called metaverse alive? By having people design it themselves. They're not going to do that in Maya, that's for sure. But if they could create virtual spaces and virtual people with Holodeck-style natural language instructions...
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  Could just be a small typo too
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  Maybe they mean "information architecture." Facebook does produce Docusaurus, after all, one of the best documentation platforms out there today :)
- erikstarck 4y ago
  Intelligence Augmentation?
- LtdJorge 4y ago
  Latin languages use IA
- rvnx 4y ago
  I apologize, my French accent broke into the wild. Yes, it's totally AI, and IA is the French version :)

chatmasta 4y ago

This seems like a big misstep by Meta. I had assumed they were intentionally allowing that torrent to float around, and tacitly encouraging open source to build on their models. It seemed like a way to differentiate themselves from "Open"AI, and I was actually feeling some good will toward them for a second!

bitshiftfaced 4y ago
Isn't this just to protect them from liability? If someone claims that their LLM hurt them in some way, they can say that they had nothing to do with it and that they tried to prevent its spread. Also, it could be a maneuver to prevent the genericization of the word LLaMa, which they may want to continue using.
- chatmasta 4y ago
  Good question. Is there a copy of the actual DMCA notice available? I'd like to read their specific phrasing. (Also: great username!) EDIT: DMCA here [0]. It does sound like they're asserting copyright on the "content," i.e. presumably the weights themselves. [0] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2023/03/2023-03-21-meta.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2023/03/2023-03-2...
  - thfuran 4y ago
    Is that a defensible claim in the US? No human designed those weights; they're the output of some algorithm run on a bunch of data.
    - chatmasta 4y ago
      There are definitely some good arguments why it wouldn't be defensible (e.g. the phone book argument), but of course this is all new and remains to be seen. The other interesting aspect of this is that they're classifying it as unauthorized content distribution. Meta was already distributing the weights, but limited their distribution to "researchers" with approved credentials. It was one of those researchers who leaked the weights originally. So it's not like they were reverse engineered from a binary or exfiltrated out of FB HQ. That might be an important bit of nuance.

wslh 4y ago

BitTorrent is the answer for these cases. This is just an observation.

hiccuphippo 4y ago
Here is the list of torrents at the bottom https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYyucgBQVfs9JXZ2MtmkGPAhgUjNgyGE6rcJT1KybQHhp/index.html https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYyucgBQVfs9JXZ2MtmkGPAhgUjNgyGE6rcJT1... That page itself is for storing the magnet URLs in a bitcoin transaction to make them live forever.

inparen 4y ago

Might be scared of more negative press, if the model generates something controversial ?

nperez 4y ago

I was thinking about this the other day and assumed they would just relicense it. Guess I was wrong. What's the point? Streisand effect ensures it will be the most sought-after model while they're making a big deal out of it, and its value is going to depreciate quickly due to the overall pace of AI

the88doctor 4y ago

And here I thought FB was going to try a more open approach than OpenAI. Silly me.

rvcdbn 4y ago

This is a good thing. Many people are of the opinion that model weights don’t have copyright independent of the source code used to generate them. The source code and training data are all open. The model weights are a deterministic function of those. Claiming they have independent copyright is essentially the same as claiming copyright in a binary you compiled from open source code. Seems like a pretty good chance to get a court to agree with this.

terafo 4y ago
Model weights aren't deterministic due to FP math. But I think your argument still stands.
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  If they had to be exact, you could randomize them just a bit and evade the copyright. That doesn't hold up for video/audio, and I think it wouldn't hold up for weights.

martythemaniak 4y ago

It kind of doesn't matter. Llama is great because it lets everyone experiment, optimize and learn with LLMs locally. Once Stability releases their model everyone will just drop llama and quickly apply all their new tools and learnings to that model.

brucethemoose2 4y ago
There is a risk of the community getting "entrenched" in an old model/architecture. In stable diffusion land, for instance, the community is pretty much stuck on the "old" architecture. Newer innovations, like Huggingface diffusers and various optimizations derived from that like PEFT, torch.compile support, AITemplate/TensorRT compilation and various other bits are largely unused. They are also pretty much stuck on SD 1.5, even though 2.1 is a good base for finetuning. This has happened in the past too, with ESRGAN.

Zuiii 4y ago

Carious timing given that the US copyright office itself does not consider these weights to be copyrightable per its statements just a few days ago. I hope someone takes Facebook to court.

classified 4y ago

Insert Sun Tzu quote from the CEO here. This is war, after all.

yieldcrv 4y ago

clone repos to your computer, dont just fork them the fork disappears when the parent repository is taken down, clones stay on your machine upload to IPFS. you can pin on IPFS for free with filecoin. Use filecoin nodes to pin on ipfs at https://web3.storage https://web3.storage

not2b 4y ago

People are arguing about whether model weights can be copyrighted, and who knows how courts will eventually rule. But if a site gets a DMCA takedown notice, they are taking a huge gamble if they don't comply: if courts do decide that Meta's copyright is valid, the monetary damages for an infringer could be huge. So I would expect the demands to be honored by anyone who can't afford to be wiped out in court.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
Similarly, if they get a properly-written DMCA counter-notification, they are also taking a huge risk if they do comply with the DMCA request. The only difference is that the notification is coming from Facebook and the counter-notification is coming from random programmers.

paxys 4y ago

Pretty interesting that everyone here is overwhelmingly against Meta for trying to keep their models private, but the other company (the one with "open" in their name) is applauded for doing exactly this.

dragonwriter 4y ago
I think you are mistaking two different groups of people: the people praising OpenAI aren’t the onea criticizing Meta.
- saurik 4y ago
  While true, I also believe OpenAI at least has a chance of their model being proprietary. So, while I am angered by OpenAI, I am unsure I could make the same to-me-slamdunk argument for why they have no standing for a DMCA on their weights (were such leaked)... whereas, for Facebook, either the weights can't be copywritten at all, they can be copywritten but the copyright is owned by the people who made the training data, or--and this is key--the model is a derivative work of the code they released under GPL.
bestbuyer__ 4y ago
What are you talking about? I hear people criticizing OpenAI for being so closed all the time.

saurik 4y ago

So, to me, there are three cases, and none of them give Facebook the standing for this to stick (but, of course, they can throw around a DMCA takedown and then require someone to file a counter-claim and maybe a lawsuit or whatever and that is going to be kind of pointless and likely quite expensive for sillysaurusx to do here; I think this takedown noticing law sucks in no small part because of that power differential). 1) You can't copyright weights. A lot of people believe this. I am not sure this is true. I think it might be that there is a fair use argument that the weights are transformative, but having fair use on your infringement doesn't imply a lack of the original copyright being owned by someone. But like, this might be true, and it is not an unreasonable stance. 2) The model weights are a derived work of the training data. This feels right to me, frankly, as much as it irks a lot of people on Hacker News who are excited to use Copilot (or owns shares of Microsoft ;P). In this case, Facebook does not own the copyright as they purposefully used an open training set from third parties (including Wikipedia and OpenCrawl) as a counter to OpenAI's proprietary one. 3) The model weights are a derived work of the training code, in the same way a binary is a derived work of its source code (vs. #2 where the code is a compiler and the source code is the training set). In this case, Facebook would own the copyright... but the resulting binary program--as distributed in the machine interpretable (and executable) format of the model weights--must be GPL as Facebook amazingly used that as the license for their training code. The interpretation of events that would allow Facebook to have some hope of arguing that the model weights are their own work--that maybe the code is more of a tool like Photoshop and they have a fair use claim on the training data--would imply something that simply is not true: that they are adding some (hopefully extensive) form of expressive input above and beyond those two inputs, in the way someone using Photoshop does when they remix someone else's art into a transformative work. However, Facebook definitely isn't doing that: they have provided absolutely no expressive input or intent on top of those two inputs, one of which they do not own and the other of which they chose to license for us under GPL! To make this a bit clearer, separate Facebook into two parties for a moment--one which developed the tooling and the other of which ran it--to determine which of the various parties you think owns this result: if you download a program someone else wrote and click a button to run it on some data someone else owns, you simply do not own the copyright on the result. (edit: I wrote some more on this argument in the following linked comment.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35293068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35293068 The only thing I can come up with, if I try really really hard to steelman Facebook here, is: maybe, if I were to release a binary to the world that is a compiled copy of code that I also simultaneously released under GPL, the binary might technically have been compiled from an internal pre-licensed (but identical) copy of said code; and so, while if you compile the same binary from the licensed code you get an identical output that is a derived work with GPL rights, when I do that I don't... but this feels like a perilous argument to make as you are going to have such a hard time showing that this was a reasonable way to infer your intent with the simultaneous release. (Of course, the person who originally agreed to the terms of service attached to the download they got is a totally different matter, but that doesn't mean there are none. There are a lot of limitations to what people can extract out of you if you violate a contract. So like, by having explicitly agreed to those terms with Facebook that person should not have given the world the weights--not because they are copyrighted but merely because they were secret--and there might be some kind of ramification... but, I do not believe that would possibly apply downstream to sillysaurusx.) (Note: I am not a lawyer. I spend a ridiculous amount of my time vs. a normal engineer working with copyright and both hearing and making arguments about copyright, including directly to the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress as part of my work on Cydia and my efforts to push back on parts of the DMCA alongside lawyers from the EFF... but like, it would be foolish to read my comment here and then embark on a project to do something that might massively infringe on someone's copyrights without running it past a real lawyer. I, certainly, have actual lawyers.)

spullara 4y ago

I think it remains to be seen if weights can be copyrighted at all.

fwlr 4y ago

My first thought was “I wonder if Alpaca 7B could generate a plausible counter-notice”. Probably not, but I bet if GPT-4’s weights were leaked it could defend itself against DMCA claims.

randyrand 4y ago

If someone put in more work to fine tune LLaMA, it may qualify for fair use.

throwaway1851 4y ago

Any news on whether they're pursuing downstream weights? That's a really interesting question for me - if you started at the LLaMA weights and arrived somewhere else by supplying additional training data and computation, any infringement claim would be very, very murky. I also think it would be practically difficult to prosecute such a claim because it would necessarily involve comparative questions about the consumption of unlicensed training data to generate the original weights. It would certainly make for interesting law.

danShumway 4y ago

There is a decent chance that model weights are not copyrightable (and I think that's the clearest definition of the law, I don't think they're a compiled work, at most they might be patentable. Particularly in situations where multiple models might converge towards the same weights, that seems more like a discovery than a creative act? That being said, I don't feel like I know for certain how a court would rule. And I wouldn't like to fight Facebook about it in court regardless, that sounds like a pretty bad time even if the court sides with you. But on the other hand, Facebook might not be keen to test this either.