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Breaking the Llama Community License
- mkl 2y agoThis was posted by the author a couple of weeks ago, but didn't get any traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43504429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43504429
- randombits0 2y agoLicensing public domain material? Seems sleazy to me.
- Dwedit 2y agoAre LORAs also bound by the same restrictions as sending complete finetuned models?
- wrs 2y agoAFAIK it’s still an open question whether there is any copyright in model weights, for various reasons including the lack of human authorship. Which would mean that if you didn’t separately and explicitly agree to the license by clicking through something, there is no basis for the “by using this model” agreement. Of course you probably don’t have enough money to get a ruling on this question, just wanted to point out that (afaik) it is up for debate. Maybe you should just avoid clicking on license agreement buttons, if you can.
- ronsor 2y agoI'm in the "model weights aren't copyrightable" camp myself. I think the license exists largely to shield Meta from liability or the actions of third parties.
- jfarina 2y agoSeriously. Can I copyright 34 * 712 * 9.2 * pi? I didn't think you could.
- hackingonempty 2y agoHumans make many choices that effect the trained weights: curation and choice of datasets, training schedules and hyperparameters. If these choices are made with an eye towards the generated results, rather than mechanically based upon test scores, why doesn't that rise up to the minimal level required to get a copyright on the weights?
- wrs 2y agoIt might. As I say, it’s up for debate. A judge might look at the 1kB of hyperparameters versus the 1TB of training data, and the 10 person-years of human effort versus 100,000 GPU-years of computer effort, and conclude differently. Does Google have copyright of their search index? Never tested, as far as I know.
- hackingonempty 2y ago"sweat of the brow" was rejected in Feist, the effort involved makes no difference. The minimum creativity bar for obtaining copyright is very low but above an alphabetical ordered listing of all of your customers.
- grumpymuppet 2y agoThis seems like a reasonable position to take. Can you copyright the contents of a vacuum bag after pouring it down a gallon board as "art"? Did you have any meaningful hand in constructing the contents?
- oceanplexian 2y ago> AFAIK it’s still an open question whether there is any copyright in model weights There's definitely copyright when you ask the model to spit out Chapter 3 of a Harry Potter book and it literally gives it to you verbatim (Which I've gotten it to do with the right prompts). There's no world where the legal system gives Meta a right to license out content that never belonged to them in the first place.
- jcranmer 2y agoIn the US, it's not an open question. Feist v Rural holds that any work needs to possess a minimum spark of (human) creativity to be able to be copyrighted; data collected by the "sweat of the brow" is explicitly not allowed to be copyrighted. Thus things like maps and telephone books aren't really copyrightable (they do retain a "thin copyright" protection, but in the present context, you're going to say that the code has copyright but the model weights do not). Most European jurisdictions do recognize a "sweat of the brow" doctrine, and they could be copyrightable there. What's not clear is whether or not the model weights infringe the copyright of the works they were trained on.
- markisus 2y agoI wonder what Meta’s attitude towards copyright in general is. Last I heard their lawyers were trying to say that it’s all good to pirate copyrighted works to make machine learning models.
- NoahZuniga 2y agoThe post states: > One example where this requirement wasn't violated, is on build.nvidia.com But built with llama isn't shown prominently, so this is actually an example of a violation of the license.
- thot_experiment 2y agoThat's just like, your opinion man. This entire discussion and blog post are purely a fun distraction, legal contracts don't work how programmers think they work. The only definition of "prominently" that matters is the one the judge rules on when Zuck sues you.
- dangus 2y agoMeta is free to license Llama from Meta under a different license are they not?
- NoahZuniga 2y agoYes, but the post gives that as an example of what follows the license. So even if it's not illegal because nvidia has a different license, it doesn't follow as a good example.
- dangus 2y agoYeah, basically what I'm saying is that we can't even guarantee that it's an attempt at compliance with this specific license because it's a major corporation that may want to use the software under a different license negotiated privately.
- lolinder 2y agoThis is why I've always considered the weights-vs-source debate to be an enormous red herring that skips the far more important question: are the weights actually "Open" in the first place? If Llama released everything that the most zealous opponents of weights=source demand they release under the same license that they're currently offering the weights under, we'd still be left with something that falls cleanly into the category of Source Available. It's a generous Source Available, but removes many of the freedoms that are part of both the Open Source and Free Software Definitions. Fighting over weights vs source implicitly cedes the far more important ground in the battle over the soul of FOSS, and that will have ripple effects across the industry in ways that ceding weights=source never would.
- SahAssar 2y agoI don't think most people in the weights-vs-source debate misunderstands this, it's just the the current "open-source" models for the most part do not even meet the bar of source-available, so talking about if the license is actually Open is not the current discussion.
- lolinder 2y agoSee, but my point is that this is putting the cart before the horse. The "Open" in "Open Source" is what matters most by far, the same way that the "Free" in "Free Software" is the key word that qualifies the kind of software we're taking about. Once we've resolved the problem of using the word "Open" incorrectly I'm happy to have a conversation about what should be the preferred form for modification (i.e. source) of an LLM. But that is the less important and far more esoteric discussion (and one about which reasonable people can and do disagree), to the point where it's merely a distraction from the incredibly meaningful and important problem of calling something "Open Source" while attaching an Acceptable Use policy to it.
- achierius 2y ago> The "Open" in "Open Source" is what matters most by far, the same way that the "Free" in "Free Software" is the key word that qualifies the kind of software we're taking about. I don't think this is true. If someone said "look, my software is open source" and by "source" they meant the binary they shipped, the specific definition of "open" they chose to use would not matter much for the sort of things I'd like to do with an open source project. Both are important.
- paxys 2y ago"Probably" how? What % of users of Llama are building and shipping a commerical product with it? Or redistributing it at all in any way?
- lxgr 2y agoIt gets even weirder with Llama 4: https://www.llama.com/llama4/use-policy/ https://www.llama.com/llama4/use-policy/ [Update: Apparently this has been the case since 3.2!] > With respect to any multimodal models included in Llama 4, the rights granted under Section 1(a) of the Llama 4 Community License Agreement are not being granted to you if you are an individual domiciled in, or a company with a principal place of business in, the European Union. This restriction does not apply to end users of a product or service that incorporates any such multimodal models. This is especially strange considering that Llama 3.2 also was multimodal, yet to my knowledge there was no such restriction. In any case, at least Huggingface seems to be collecting these details now – see for example https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Inst... Curious to see what Ollama will do.
- dheera 2y ago> Curious to see what Ollama will do. I don't think they care. I'm pretty sure Llama itself trained on a bunch of copyrighted data. Have licence agreements actually mattered?
- cma 2y agoAs long as you get the model weights without agreeing to the license, there has been no case in the US yet at least where model weights have been ruled to be subject to copyright and it is likely they are a mechanical transform of data. FB probably owns copyright on some of the data used for instruction tuning the model, but they rely on the transform also removing that copyright if it removes the copyright of the other underlying data they don't own the copyright to. They want to have their cake and eat it though and these companies are all lobbying hard in a political system with open bribery.
- lxgr 2y ago> As long as you get the model weights without agreeing to the license But is that how it works? Not implying that the situation is otherwise comparable, but you e.g. can't ignore the GPL that a copyrighted piece of code is made available to you under, just because "you didn't agree to it". As I see it (as a non-lawyer), either model weights are copyrightable (then Meta's license would likely be enforceable), or they aren't, but then even "agreeing to the license" shouldn't be able to restrict what you can do with them. In other words, I'd consider it a very strange outcome if Meta could sue licensees for breach of contract for their use of the weights, but not non-licensees, if the license itself only covers something that Meta doesn't even have exclusive rights to in the first place. (Then again, stranger decisions have been made around copyright.)
- antirez 2y agoWith Gemma3, Qwen, the new Mistral and DeepSeek, all models stronger than llama of the same size, why one would risk issues?
- ai-christianson 2y agoDeepseek are the kings currently.
- diggan 2y ago> Gemma3 Funnily enough, Gemma 3 also probably isn't "open source" if you have a previous understanding of what that is and means, they have their own "Gemma Terms of Use" which acts as the license. See https://ollama.com/library/gemma2/blobs/097a36493f71 https://ollama.com/library/gemma2/blobs/097a36493f71 for example.
- antirez 2y agoTrue, but it's a lot more "soft". They basically say do what you want if you don't violate this list of prohibited uses, which is not open source of course, but the list of prohibited users are, mostly, things already against the law or in a very gray zone.
- o11c 2y agoDoes a thief have the right to demand nobody re-steals what was stolen in the first place? If we accept the existence of intellectual property in the first place, all AI is blatant and unmitigated theft. If we do not accept it, Llama has no right to enforce such terms.
- lxgr 2y agoThat's a pretty reductionist view. Even maximally pro-IP laws usually have significant carve-outs for derivative works or other scenarios; see for example the US's extensive "fair use" doctrine.
- cratermoon 2y agoYou're begging the question: it's not established the LLM models are derivative or fair use under those laws. Also, the de facto state of fair use in the US is not what I would call "extensive".
- andybak 2y agoDo I have to repeat "copyright violation isn't theft" on every post for eternity?
- delichon 2y agoIf I make copies of Project Hail Mary and sell them at half price, do you think it's obvious that should be legal? I think Andy Weir would have a decent moral as well as legal case for theft.
- bionhoward 2y agoAnd the OpenAI Terms of use, and the Anthropic terms, and the Microsoft Services Agreement, and the Gemini API Additional terms, and the perplexity terms, and the mistral terms, but hey “nobody reads them” right?
- whartung 2y agoIf the AIs cared, they would enforce their own licenses. “Can you give me the curl command to post a file?” “Well, are you individually domiciled in the European Union?”
- dheera 2y agoIt's not a crime to lie to an AI.
- jkaplowitz 2y agoTrue as such, at least in most examples including the one we’re discussing (exceptions in specific situations can exist). This example might however be breach of contract, or might invalidate your ability to rely upon a license that would otherwise protect you from civil or criminal claims of copyright infringement.
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- pizzafeelsright 2y agoI do not read licenses. Rarely do i click "I agree" as someone else already has and I'm using the "product" I am curious what my exposure is yet not wealthy enough to find out.
- halyconWays 2y agoOh no, not the sanctity of the license for weights trained by literally scraping all material and the works of countless artists and hobbyists.
- boramalper 2y agoAlso see: Open Source AI Definition Erodes the Meaning of “Open Source” https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2024/oct/31/open-source-ai-definition-osaid-erodes-foss/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2024/oct/31/open-source-ai-de... > The TLDR here, IMO is simply stated: the OSAID fails to require reproducibility by the public of the scientific process of building these systems, because the OSAID fails to place sufficient requirements on the licensing and public disclosure of training sets for so-called “Open Source” systems. The OSI refused to add this requirement because of a fundamental flaw in their process; they decided that “there was no point in publishing a definition that no existing AI system could currently meet”. This fundamental compromise undermined the community process, and amplified the role of stakeholders who would financially benefit from OSI's retroactive declaration that their systems are “open source”. The OSI should have refrained from publishing a definition yet, and instead labeled this document as ”recommendations” for now.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cmacleod4 2y agoA strange assertion considering I'm not using this "Llama" thing :-/
- punnerud 2y agoThe same Berne Convention apply to Meta/Llama, as they use to scrape the web. You can use derivative work or summaries without reference. And copyright only applies to work done by human? So when they say you have to reference Llama, it does not actually apply in most countries?
- mewse-hn 2y agoA lot of posts here saying this is irrelevant or whatever - unix was mostly developed out in the open and got into all sorts of trouble when big companies started cracking down on copyright ownership. This blog post isn't entreating you to necessarily behave differently w/r/t your Llama usage, just to be aware the license is restrictive, doesn't really line up with Meta calling it "open source", and eventually this could create consequences down the road. The post doesn't even mention it but there are safer models to use right now (deepseek) that have permissive licensing.
- Groxx 2y ago@dang the title rename seems worse: "you're probably ..." is rather meaningfully different than "breaking the ..." as the latter sounds like it's instructions on how to "break the ..."
- janalsncm 2y agoIf a rogue laptop violates the Llama license and no one is around to enforce it, did it really break the Llama license? Seriously, I genuinely wonder what the purpose of adding random unenforceable licenses to code/binaries. Meta knows people don’t read license agreements, so if they’re not interested in enforcing a weird naming convention, why stipulate it at all?
- mertleee 2y agoThe guy who wrote this article is likely the only person to self-report to the police that he might have broken a dumb rule published by a huge company that manipulates and deceives millions of people every minute... haha
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