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On the legal front, I’ve been working with counsel to draft a counterclaim to Meta’s DMCA against llama-dl. (GPT-4 is surprisingly capable, but I’m talking to a

On the legal front, I’ve been working with counsel to draft a counterclaim to Meta’s DMCA against llama-dl. (GPT-4 is surprisingly capable, but I’m talking to a few attorneys: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1641841064800600070?s=61&t=jQbmCk1JqL7depzFWJNuPA https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1641841064800600070?s=6...) An anonymous HN user named L pledged $200k for llama-dl’s legal defense: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1641804013791215619?s=61&t=jQbmCk1JqL7depzFWJNuPA https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1641804013791215619?s=6... This may not seem like much vs Meta, but it’s enough to get the issue into the court system where it can be settled. The tweet chain has the details. The takeaway for you is that you’ll soon be able to use LLaMA without worrying that Facebook will knock you offline for it. (I wouldn’t push your luck by trying to use it for commercial purposes though.) Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35288415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35288415 I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank all of the researchers at MetaAI for their tremendous work. It’s because of them that we have access to such a wonderful model in the first place. They have no say over the legal side of things. One day we’ll all come together again, and this will just be a small speedbump in the rear view mirror. EDIT: Please do me a favor and skip ahead to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35393615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35393615 It's from jart, the author of the PR the submission points to. I really had no idea that this was a de facto Show HN, and it's terribly rude to post my comment in that context. I only meant to reassure everyone that they can freely hack on llama, not make a huge splash and detract from their moment on HN. (I feel awful about that; it's wonderful to be featured on HN, and no one should have to share their spotlight when it's a Show HN. Apologies.)

terafo 4y ago
Wish you all luck in the world. We need much more clarity in legal status of these models.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Thanks! HN is pretty magical. I think they saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35288534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35288534 and decided to fund it. I’m grateful for the opportunity to help protect open source projects such as this one. It will at least give Huggingface a basis to resist DMCAs in the short term.
  - deleted 4y ago
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sheeshkebab 4y ago
All models trained on public data need to be made public. As it is their outputs are not copyrightable, it’s not a stretch to say models are public domain.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  I’m honestly not sure. RLHF seems particularly tricky —- if someone is shaping a model by hand, it seems reasonable to extend copyright protection to them. For the moment, I’m just happy to disarm corporations from using DMCAs against open source projects. The long term implications will be interesting.
- xoa 4y ago
  You seem to be mixing a few different things together here. There's a huge leap from something not being copyrightable to saying there is grounds for it to be made public. No copyright would greatly limit the ability of model makers to legally restrict distribution if they made it to the public, but they'd be fully within their rights to keep them as trade secrets to the best of their ability. Trade secret law and practice is its own thing separate from copyright, lots of places have private data that isn't copyrightable (pure facts) but that's not the same as it being made public. Indeed part of the historic idea of certain areas of IP like patents was to encourage more stuff to be made public vs kept secret. >As it is their outputs are not copyrightable, it’s not a stretch to say models are public domain. With all respect this is kind of nonsensical. "Public domain" only applies to stuff that is copyrightable, if they simply aren't then it just never enters into the picture. And it not being patentable or copyrightable doesn't mean there is any requirement to share it. If it does get out though then that's mostly their own problem is all (though depending on jurisdiction and contract whoever did the leaking might get in trouble), and anyone else is free to figure it out on their own and share that and they can't do anything.
  - sheeshkebab 4y ago
    Public domain applies to uncopyrightable works, among other things (including previously copyrighted works). In this case models are uncopyrightable, and I think FB (or any of these newfangled ai cos) would have interesting time proving otherwise, if they ever try. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain
cubefox 4y ago
Even if using LLaMA turns out to be legal, I very much doubt it is ethical. The model got leaked while it was only intended for research purposes. Meta engineered and paid for the training of this model. It's theirs.
- Uupis 4y ago
  I feel like most-everything about these models gets really ethically-grey — at worst — very quickly.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  What did they train it on?
  - cubefox 4y ago
    On partly copyrighted text. Same as you and me.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  Did Meta ask permission from every user they trained their model on? Did all those users consent, and when I say consent I'm saying was there a meeting of minds not something buried in page 89 of a EULA, to Meta building an AI with their data? Turnabout is fair play. I don't feel the least bit sorry for Meta.
  - cubefox 4y ago
    But it doesn't copy any text one to one. The largest one was trained on 1.4 trillion tokens, if I recall correctly, but the model size is just 65 billion parameters. (I believe they use 16 bit per token and parameter.) It seems to be more like a human who has read large parts of the internet, but doesn't remember anything word by word. Learning from reading stuff was never considered a copyright violation.
    - Avicebron 4y ago
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electricmonk 4y ago
IANYL - This is not legal advice. As you may be aware, a counter-notice that meets the statutory requirements will result in reinstatement unless Meta sues over it. So the question isn't so much whether your counter-notice covers all the potential defenses as whether Meta is willing to sue. The primary hurdle you're going to face is your argument that weights are not creative works, and not copyrightable. That argument is unlikely to succeed for the the following reasons (just off the top of my head): (i) The act of selecting training data is more akin to an encyclopedia than the white pages example you used on Twitter, and encyclopedias are copyrightable as to the arrangement and specific descriptions of facts, even though the underlying facts are not; and (ii) LLaMA, GPT-N, Bard, etc, all have different weights, different numbers of parameters, different amounts of training data, and different tuning, which puts paid to the idea that there is only one way to express the underlying ideas, or that all of it is necessarily controlled by the specific math involved. In addition, Meta has the financial wherewithal to crush you even were you legally on sound footing. The upshot of all of this is that you may win for now if Meta doesn't want to file a rush lawsuit, but in the long run, you likely lose.
- 8note 4y ago
  I think the counter on those arguments is that LLM owners want to avoid arguing that the model is a derivative work of the training data. If the LLM is a specific arrangement of the copyrighted works, it's very clearly a derivative work of them
  - electricmonk 4y ago
    I was not suggesting that an LLM itself consists of an arrangement of the copyrighted works comprising the training data, but that the specific selection of the copyrighted works comprising the training data is part of what differentiates one LLM from another. A strained but useful analogy might be to think of the styles of painting an artist is trained in and/or exposed to prior to creating their own art. Obvious or subtle, the art style an artist has studied would likely impact the style they develop for themself. However, to address your point about derivative works directly, the consensus among copyright law experts appears to be that whether a particular model output is infringing depends on the standard copyright infringement analysis (and that’s regardless of the minor and correctable issue represented by memorization/overfitting of duplicate data in training sets). Only in the most unserious legal complaint (the class action filed against Midjourney, Stability AI, etc.) is the argument being made and that the models actually contain copies of the training data.
sva_ 4y ago
Thank you for putting your ass on the line and deciding to challenge $megacorp on their claims of owning the copyright on NN weights that have been trained on public (and probably, to some degree, also copyrighted) data. This seems to very much be uncharted territory in the legal space, so there are a lot of unknowns. I don't consider it ethical to compress the corpus of human knowledge into some NN weights and then closing those weights behind proprietary doors, and I hope that legislators will see this similarly. My only worry is that they'll get you on some technicality, like that (some version of) your program used their servers afaik.

terafo 4y ago

Wish you all luck in the world. We need much more clarity in legal status of these models.

sillysaurusx 4y ago
Thanks! HN is pretty magical. I think they saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35288534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35288534 and decided to fund it. I’m grateful for the opportunity to help protect open source projects such as this one. It will at least give Huggingface a basis to resist DMCAs in the short term.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

sheeshkebab 4y ago

All models trained on public data need to be made public. As it is their outputs are not copyrightable, it’s not a stretch to say models are public domain.

sillysaurusx 4y ago
I’m honestly not sure. RLHF seems particularly tricky —- if someone is shaping a model by hand, it seems reasonable to extend copyright protection to them. For the moment, I’m just happy to disarm corporations from using DMCAs against open source projects. The long term implications will be interesting.
xoa 4y ago
You seem to be mixing a few different things together here. There's a huge leap from something not being copyrightable to saying there is grounds for it to be made public. No copyright would greatly limit the ability of model makers to legally restrict distribution if they made it to the public, but they'd be fully within their rights to keep them as trade secrets to the best of their ability. Trade secret law and practice is its own thing separate from copyright, lots of places have private data that isn't copyrightable (pure facts) but that's not the same as it being made public. Indeed part of the historic idea of certain areas of IP like patents was to encourage more stuff to be made public vs kept secret. >As it is their outputs are not copyrightable, it’s not a stretch to say models are public domain. With all respect this is kind of nonsensical. "Public domain" only applies to stuff that is copyrightable, if they simply aren't then it just never enters into the picture. And it not being patentable or copyrightable doesn't mean there is any requirement to share it. If it does get out though then that's mostly their own problem is all (though depending on jurisdiction and contract whoever did the leaking might get in trouble), and anyone else is free to figure it out on their own and share that and they can't do anything.
- sheeshkebab 4y ago
  Public domain applies to uncopyrightable works, among other things (including previously copyrighted works). In this case models are uncopyrightable, and I think FB (or any of these newfangled ai cos) would have interesting time proving otherwise, if they ever try. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain

cubefox 4y ago

Even if using LLaMA turns out to be legal, I very much doubt it is ethical. The model got leaked while it was only intended for research purposes. Meta engineered and paid for the training of this model. It's theirs.

Uupis 4y ago
I feel like most-everything about these models gets really ethically-grey — at worst — very quickly.
willcipriano 4y ago
What did they train it on?
- cubefox 4y ago
  On partly copyrighted text. Same as you and me.
faeriechangling 4y ago
Did Meta ask permission from every user they trained their model on? Did all those users consent, and when I say consent I'm saying was there a meeting of minds not something buried in page 89 of a EULA, to Meta building an AI with their data? Turnabout is fair play. I don't feel the least bit sorry for Meta.
- cubefox 4y ago
  But it doesn't copy any text one to one. The largest one was trained on 1.4 trillion tokens, if I recall correctly, but the model size is just 65 billion parameters. (I believe they use 16 bit per token and parameter.) It seems to be more like a human who has read large parts of the internet, but doesn't remember anything word by word. Learning from reading stuff was never considered a copyright violation.
  - Avicebron 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

electricmonk 4y ago

IANYL - This is not legal advice. As you may be aware, a counter-notice that meets the statutory requirements will result in reinstatement unless Meta sues over it. So the question isn't so much whether your counter-notice covers all the potential defenses as whether Meta is willing to sue. The primary hurdle you're going to face is your argument that weights are not creative works, and not copyrightable. That argument is unlikely to succeed for the the following reasons (just off the top of my head): (i) The act of selecting training data is more akin to an encyclopedia than the white pages example you used on Twitter, and encyclopedias are copyrightable as to the arrangement and specific descriptions of facts, even though the underlying facts are not; and (ii) LLaMA, GPT-N, Bard, etc, all have different weights, different numbers of parameters, different amounts of training data, and different tuning, which puts paid to the idea that there is only one way to express the underlying ideas, or that all of it is necessarily controlled by the specific math involved. In addition, Meta has the financial wherewithal to crush you even were you legally on sound footing. The upshot of all of this is that you may win for now if Meta doesn't want to file a rush lawsuit, but in the long run, you likely lose.

8note 4y ago
I think the counter on those arguments is that LLM owners want to avoid arguing that the model is a derivative work of the training data. If the LLM is a specific arrangement of the copyrighted works, it's very clearly a derivative work of them
- electricmonk 4y ago
  I was not suggesting that an LLM itself consists of an arrangement of the copyrighted works comprising the training data, but that the specific selection of the copyrighted works comprising the training data is part of what differentiates one LLM from another. A strained but useful analogy might be to think of the styles of painting an artist is trained in and/or exposed to prior to creating their own art. Obvious or subtle, the art style an artist has studied would likely impact the style they develop for themself. However, to address your point about derivative works directly, the consensus among copyright law experts appears to be that whether a particular model output is infringing depends on the standard copyright infringement analysis (and that’s regardless of the minor and correctable issue represented by memorization/overfitting of duplicate data in training sets). Only in the most unserious legal complaint (the class action filed against Midjourney, Stability AI, etc.) is the argument being made and that the models actually contain copies of the training data.

sva_ 4y ago

Thank you for putting your ass on the line and deciding to challenge $megacorp on their claims of owning the copyright on NN weights that have been trained on public (and probably, to some degree, also copyrighted) data. This seems to very much be uncharted territory in the legal space, so there are a lot of unknowns. I don't consider it ethical to compress the corpus of human knowledge into some NN weights and then closing those weights behind proprietary doors, and I hope that legislators will see this similarly. My only worry is that they'll get you on some technicality, like that (some version of) your program used their servers afaik.