11 ms·
The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models
- graemep 1y agoThe article repeatedly treats license and contract as though they are the same, even though the sidebar links to a post that discusses the difference. A lot of it boils down to whether training an LLM is a breach of copyright of the training materials which is not specific to GPL or open source.
- xgulfie 1y agoAnd the current norm that the trillion dollar companies have lobbied for is that you can train on copyrighted material all you want so that's the reality we are living in. Everything ever published is all theirs.
- exasperaited 1y agoIn practice it wouldn't matter a whit if they lobbied for it or not. Lobbying is for people trying to stop them; externalities are for the little people.
- graemep 1y agoI am really surprised that media businesses, which are extremely influential around the world, have not pushed back against this more. I wonder whether they are looking at cost savings that will get from the technology as a worthwhile trade-off.
- gorbachev 1y agoThey're busy trying to profit from it rushing to enter into licensing agreements with the LLM vendors.
- xgulfie 1y agoYeah, the short term win is to enter a licensing agreement so you get some cash for a couple years, meanwhile pray someone else with more money fights the legal battle to try and set a precedent for you
- mr_toad 1y agoSeveral media companies have sued OpenAI already. So far, none have been successful.
- rileymat2 1y agoAll theirs, if they properly obtained the copy. This is a big difference that already has bit them.
- gruez 1y ago>And the current norm that the trillion dollar companies have lobbied for is that you can train on copyrighted material all you want so that's the reality we are living in. Everything ever published is all theirs. What "lobbied"? Copyright law hasn't materially changed since AI got popular, so I'm not sure where these lobbying efforts are showing up in. If anything the companies that have lobbied hard in the past (eg. media companies) are opposed to the current status quo, which seems to favor AI companies.
- maxloh 1y agoTo my understanding, if the material is publicly available or obtained legally (i.e., not pirated), then training a model with it falls under fair use. Once training is established as fair use, it doesn't really matter if the license is MIT, GPL, or a proprietary one.
- blibble 1y agofair use only applies in the united states (and Poland, and a very limited set of others) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#/media/File:Fair_use_laws.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#/media/File:Fair_use_... and it is certainly not part of the Berne Convention in almost every country in the world even timeshifting using your VCR and ripping your own CDs is copyright infringement
- jcelerier 1y agoFrance and most of europe has fair use (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copie_priv%C3%A9e https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copie_priv%C3%A9e) but also has a mandatory tax on every sold medium that can do storage to recover the "lost fees" due to fair use
- graemep 1y agoIs that not just an exemption for copying for private use? My french is not up to much but this: > L'exception de copie privée autorise une personne à reproduire une œuvre de l'esprit pour son usage privé, ce qui implique l'utilisation personnelle, mais également dans le cercle privé incluant le cadre familial. seems to be only for personal use? Fair dealing in the UK and other countries is broader, and US fair use broader still.
- RobotToaster 1y agoMost commonwealth countries have fair dealing, which is similar although slightly different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y agoIt's not specific to open source but it's most clearly enforceable with open source as there will be many contributors from many jurisdictions with the one unifying factor being they all made their copyright available under the same license terms. With proprietary or more importantly single-owner code, it's far easier for this to end up in a settlement rather than being drug out into an actual ruling, enforcement action, and establishment of precedence. That's the key detail. It's not specific to GPL or open source but if you want to see these orgs held to account and some precedence established, focusing on GPL and FOSS licensed code is the clearest path to that.
- kronicum2025 1y agoA GPL license is a contract in most other countries. Just not US probably.
- graemep 1y agoThat part of the article is about US cases, so its US law that applies. > A GPL license is a contract in most other countries. Just not US probably. Not just the US. It may vary with version of the GPL too. Wikipedia claims its a civil law vs common law country difference - not sure the citation shows that though.
- rvnx 1y agoGPL and copyright in general don't apply to billionaires, so pretty much a non-topic. It's just a side cost of doing business, because asking for forgiveness is cheaper and faster than asking for permission.
- throwaway198846 1y ago"Information wants to be free"? Many individuals pirated movies and games and got away with it. Of course two wrongs don't make a right and all that. Nonetheless one should be compensated for creating material that ai trained on for the same reasons copyright is compensated - to incentives people to produce it.
- rando77 1y agoWith an attitude like that they don't
- pclmulqdq 1y agoI thought the whole concept of a viral license was legally questionable to begin with. There haven't been cases about this, as far as I know, and GPL virality enforcement has just been done by the community.
- omnicognate 1y agoThe GPL was tested in court as early as 2006 [1] and plenty of times since. There are no serious doubts about its enforceability. [1] https://www.fsf.org/news/wallace-vs-fsf https://www.fsf.org/news/wallace-vs-fsf
- zamadatix 1y agoI know it's not popular on HN to have anything but supportive statements around GPL, and I'm a big GPL supporter myself, but there is nuance in what is being said here. That case was important, but it's not abojt the virality. There have been no concluded court cases involving the virality portion causing the rest of the code to also be GPL'd, but there are plenty involving enforcement of GPL on the GPL code itself. The distinction is important because the article is about the virality causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd, not just about the GPL'd code itself. I'd like to think it wouldn't be a problem to enforce, but I've also never seen a court ruling truly about the virality portion to back that up either - which is all GP is saying.
- omnicognate 1y agoThere is no "virality", and the article's use of "propagation" to mean the same thing is wrong. The GPL doesn't "cause" anything to be GPLed that hasn't been explicitly licensed under the GPL by the owner of its copyright. The GPL grants a license to use the copyright material to which it applies. To satisfy the terms of that license for a particular use may require that you license other code under the GPL, but if you don't the GPL can't magically make that code GPLed. You will, however, not be covered by the license so unless your use is permitted for some other reason (eg. fair use or a different license you have been granted) your use of the the original code will be a violation of copyright. All of this has been repeatedly tested in court. It's sad to see Microsoft's FUD still festering 20 years later.
- zamadatix 1y agoThe article goes deep into these two cases deemed most relevant but really there are a wide swath of similar cases all focused around defining sharper borders than ever around what is essentially the question "exactly when does it become copyright violation" with plenty of seemingly "obvious" answers which quickly conflict with each other. I also have the feeling it will be much like Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., much of this won't really be clearly resolved until the end if the decade. I'd also not ve surprised if seemingly very different answers ended up bubbling up in the different cases, driven by the specifics of the domain. Not a lawyer, just excited to see the outcomes :).
- twoodfin 1y agoIdeally, Congress would just settle this basket of copyright concerns, as they explicitly have the power to do—and have done so repeatedly in the specific context of computers and software.
- jeremyjh 1y agoWhat is ideal about getting more shitty laws written at the behest of massive tech companies? Do you think the DMCA is a good thing?
- twoodfin 1y agoAs opposed to waiting for uncertain court cases (based on the existing shitty laws) to play out for years, ultimately decided by unelected judges? Democracy is the worst system we’ve tried, except for all the others. (Also: The GPL can only be enforced because of laws passed by Congress in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s. And believe you me, people said all the same kinds of things about those clowns in Congress. Plus ça change…)
- jeremyjh 1y agoCourts applying legal analysis to existing law and precedent is also an operation of democracy in action and lately they've been a lot better at it than legislators. I don't know if you've noticed, but the quality of our legislators has substantially deteriorated since the 80s, when 24-hour news networks became a thing. It got even worse after the Citizens United decision and social media became a thing. "No new laws" is really the safest path these days.
- simgt 1y agoWhat triggers me is how insistant Claude Code is on adding "co-authored by Claude" in commits, in spite of my settings and an instruction in CLAUDE.md. I wish all these tech bros were as willing to credit the human shoulders on which their products are built. But they'd be much less successful in our current system if they were that kind of people.
- euazOn 1y agoTry changing the system prompt or switch to opencode [0] - they allegedly reverse engineered Claude Code, and so the performance you get with Claude models should be very similar to Claude Code. [0] https://github.com/sst/opencode https://github.com/sst/opencode
- ljlolel 1y agoAnd then also to all code made from the GPL’d ai model?
- maxloh 1y agoA program's output is likely not owned by the program's authors. For example, if you create a document with Microsoft Word, you are the one who owns it, not Microsoft.
- pessimizer 1y agoUnless the license says otherwise. The fact that Word doesn't (I wouldn't even be sure if that was true, honestly, especially for the online versions) doesn't mean anything. They could start selling a version of Word tomorrow that gives them the right to train from everything you type on your entire computer into any program. Or that requires you to relinquish your rights to your writing and to license it back from Microsoft, and to only be able to dispute this through arbitration. They could add a morals clause.
- chii 1y ago> They could start selling a version of Word tomorrow ... they could, but would anyone agree to this new eula? If they did, then what's the problem?
- javcasas 1y agoYou sure about that? Have you checked the 400-page EULA?
- LtWorf 1y agoIf I take a song and convert it from .mp3 to .ogg, the resulting file has no copyright since it's the output of a program?
- dmezzetti 1y ago[flagged]
- cdelsolar 1y agoI disagree as someone who has also spent a huge amount of time on open source software. It’s all GPL or AGPL :)
- dmezzetti 1y agoThat's your prerogative. It's just not for me and GPL is basically something I avoid when possible.
- amenhotep 1y agoIt's not dictating how you use what you build? It's dictating how you redistribute what you build on top of other people's work.
- dmezzetti 1y agoOk but I just have no interest in imposing restrictions on how people distribute what I build in such a manner either. That's just me.
- pessimizer 1y agoAs somebody who thinks that people currently own the code that they write, I wonder why you're in people's business who want to write GPL'd software. Are you complaining about proprietary software? I hear the restrictions are a lot tighter for Photoshop's source code, or iOS's, but for some reason you are one of the people who hate GPL as a hobby. Please don't show up whining about "spirits" when Amazon puts you out of business.
- phplovesong 1y agoWe need a new license that forbids all training. That is the only way to stop big corporations from doing this.
- WithinReason 1y agoWouldn't it be still legal to train on the data due to fair use?
- gus_massa 1y agoI don't think it's fair use, but everyone on Earth disagree with me. So even with the standard default licence that prohibits absolutely everything, the humanity-1 consider it fair use.
- justin_murray 1y agoHonest question: why don’t you think it is fair use? I can see how it pushes the boundary, but I can’t lay out logic that it’s not. The code has been publish for the public to see. I’m always allowed to read it, remember it, tell my friends about it. Certainly, this is what the author hoped I would do. Otherwise, wouldn’t they have kept it to themselves? These agents are just doing a more sophisticated, faster version of that same act.
- mixedbit 1y agoBefore LLMs programmers had pretty good intuition what GPL license allowed for. It is of course clear that you cannot release a closed source program with GPL code integrated into it. I think it was also quite clear, that you cannot legally incorporate GPL code into such a program, by making changes here and there, renaming some stuff, and moving things around, but this is pretty much what LLMs are doing. When humans do it intentionally, it is violation of the license, when it is automated and done on a huge scale, is it really fair use?
- 1y ago
- myrmidon 1y agoI honestly think that the most extreme take that "any output of an LLM falls under all the copyright of all its training data" is not really defensible, especially when contrasted with human learning, and would be curious to hear conflicting opinions. My view is that copyright in general is a pretty abstract and artificial concept; thus corresponding regulation needs to justifiy itself by being useful, i.e. encouraging and rewarding content creation. /sidenote: Copyright as-is barely holds up there; I would argue that nobody (not even old established companies) is significantly encouraged or incentivised by potential revenue more than 20 years in the future (much less current copyright durations). The system also leads to bad ressource allocation, with almost all the rewards ending up at a small handful of most successful producers-- this effectively externalizes large portions of the cost of "raising" artists. I view AI overlap under the same lense-- if current copyright rules would lead to undesirable outcomes (by making all AI training or use illegal/infeasible) then law/interpretation simply has to be changed.
- jeremyjh 1y agoAnyone can very easily avoid training on GPL code. Yes, the model might be not be as strong as one that is trained that way and released under terms of the GPL, but to me that sounds like quite a good outcome if the best models are open source/open weight. Its all about whose outcomes are optimized. Of course, the law generally favors consideration of the outcomes for the massive corporations donating hundreds of millions of dollars to legislature campaigns.
- myrmidon 1y agoWould it even actually help to go down that road though? IMO the expected outcome would simply be that AI training stalls for a bit while "unencumbered" training material is being collected/built up and you achieve basically nothing in the end, except creating a big ongoing logistical/administrative hassle to keep lawyers/bureaucrats fed. I think the redistribution effect (towards training material providers) from such an scenario would be marginal at best, especially long-term, and event that might be over-optimistic. I also dislike that stance because it seems obviously inconsistent to me-- if humans are allowed to train on copyrighted material without their output being generally affected, why not machines?
- pessimizer 1y agoI might be crazy, and I'd love to hear from somebody who knows about this, but I've been assuming that AI companies have been pulling GPL code out of the training material specifically to avoid this. Corporations have always talked about the virality of GPL, sometimes but not always to the point of exaggeration, you'd think that after getting the proof of concept done the AI companies would be running away at full speed from setting a bomb like that in their goldmine. Putting in tons of commonly read books and scientific papers is safer, they can just eventually cross-license with the massive conglomerates that own everything. But the GPL is by nature hostile, and has been openly and specifically hostile from the beginning. MIT and Apache, etc. you can just include a fistful of licenses to download, or even come up with architectures that track names to add for attribution-ware. But the GPL will obviously (and legitimately) claim to have relicensed the entire model and maybe all its output (unless they restricted it to LGPL.) Wouldn't you just pull it out?
- NateEag 1y agoIf you were a thoughtful, careful, law-abiding business, yes. I submit the evidence suggests the genAI companies have none of those attributes.
- NiloCK 1y agoNot crazy - there's a rational self-interest in doing this. But I'm not certain that the relevant players have the same consequence-fearing mindset that you do, and to be honest they're probably right. The theft is too great to calculate the consequences, and by the time it's settled, what are you gonna do - turn off Forster's machine? I hope you're right in at least some cases!
- pessimizer 1y ago> by the time it's settled Why would the GPL settle? Even more, who is authorized to settle for every author who used the GPL? If the courts decided in favor of the GPL, which I think would be likely just because of the age and pervasiveness of the GPL, they'd actually have to lobby Congress to write an exception to copyright rules for AI. A large part of the infrastructure of the world is built on the GPL, and the people who wrote it were clearly motivated by the protection that they thought that the GPL would give to what was often a charitable act, or even an act that would allow companies to share code without having to compete with themselves. I can't imagine too many judges just going "nope."
- palata 1y agoGenuine question: if I train my model with copyleft material, how do you prove I did? Like if there is no way to trace it back to the original material, does it make sense to regulate it? Not that I like the idea, just wondering. I have been thinking for a while that LLMs are copyright-laundering machines, and I am not sure if there is anything we can do about it other than accepting that it fundamentally changes what copyright is. Should I keep open sourcing my code now that the licence doesn't matter anymore? Is it worth writing blog posts now that it will just feed the LLMs that people use? etc.
- basilgohar 1y agoMaybe we should requiring training data be published or at least referenced.
- mistrial9 1y ago> Should I keep open sourcing my code now that the licence doesn't matter anymore? your LICENSE matters in similar ways that it mattered before LLMs. LICENSE adherence is part of intellectual property law and practice. A popular engine may be popular, but not all cases at all times. Do not despair!
- freedomben 1y agoI've thought about this as well, especially for the case when it's a company owned product that is AGPLed. It's a really tough situation, because the last thing we want is competitors to come in and LLM wash our code to benefit their own product. I think this is a real risk. On the other side, I deeply believe in the values of free software. My general stance is that all applications I open source are GPL or AGPL, and any libraries I open source are MIT. For the libraries, obviously anyone is free to use them, and if they want to rewrite them with an LLM more power to them. For the applications though, I see that as a violation of the license. At the end of the day, I have competing values and needs and have to make a choice. The choice I've made for now is that for the vast majority of things, I'm still open sourcing them. The gift to humanity and the guarantee to the users freedom is more important to me than a theoretical threat. The one exception is anything that is truly a risk of getting lifted and used directly by competitors. I have not figured out an answer to this one yet, so for now I'm keeping it AGPL but not publicly distributing the code. I obviously still make the full code available to customers, and at least for now I've decided to trust my customers. I think this is an issue we have to take week by week. I don't want to let fear of things cause us to make suboptimal decisions now. When there's an actual event that causes a reevaluation, I'll go from there.
- Orygin 1y agoGreat article but I don't really agree with their take on GPL regarding this paragraph: > The spirit of the GPL is to promote the free sharing and development of software [...] the reality is that they are proceeding in a different vector from the direction of code sharing idealized by GPL. If only the theory of GPL propagation to models walks alone, in reality, only data exclusion and closing off to avoid litigation risks will progress, and there is a fear that it will not lead to the expansion of free software culture. The spirit of the GPL is the freedom of the user, not the code being freely shared. The virality is a byproduct to ensure the software is not stolen from their users. If you just want your code to be shared and used without restrictions, use MIT or some other license. > What is important is how to realize the “freedom of software,” which is the philosophy of open source Freedom of software means nothing. Freedoms are for humans not immaterial code. Users get the freedom to enjoy the software how they like. Washing the code through an AI to purge it from its license goes against the open source philosophy. (I know this may be a mistranslation, but it goes in the same direction as the rest of the article). I also don't agree with the arguments that since a lot of things are included in the model, the GPL code is only a small part of the whole, and that means it's okay. Well if I take 1 GPL function and include it in my project, no matter its size, I would have to license as GPL. Where is the line? Why would my software which only contains a single function not be fair use?
- froh 1y ago> The spirit of the GPL is the freedom of the user, not the code being freely shared. who do you mean by "user"? the spirit is that the person who actually uses the software also has the freedom to modify it, and that the users recovering these modifications have the same rights. is that what you meant? and while technically that's the spirit of the GPL, the license is not only about users, but about a _relationship_, that of the user and the software and what the user is allowed to do with the software. it thus makes sense to talk about "software freedom". last not least, about a single GPL function --- many GPL _libraries_ are licensed less restrictively, LGPL.
- m463 1y agoI don't think you understand the GPL. > "the user is allowed to do with the software" The GPL does not restrict what the user does with the software. It can be USED for anything. But it does restrict how you redistribute it. You have responsibilities if you redistribute it. You must provide the source code, and pass on the same freedoms you received to the users you redistribute it to.
- uyzstvqs 1y agoTraining is not redistribution. It's the exact same as you as a person learning to program from proprietary secret code, and then writing your own original code independently. Even if you repeat patterns and methods you've picked up from that proprietary learning material, it is by no means redistribution. The practical differentiator here is that you do not access the proprietary material during the creation of your own original work, similar in principle to a clean-room design. With AI/ML, it matters that training data is not accessed during inference, which it's not. The other factor of copyright, which is relevant, is how material is obtained. If the material is publicly accessible without protection, you have no reasonable expectation to exclusive control over its use. If you don't want AI training to be done on your work, you need to put access to it behind explicit authentication with a legally-binding user agreement prohibiting that use-case. Do note that this would lose your project's status as open-source.
- luqtas 1y agoso basically we download the sources files to the training weight and remove the LICENSE.MD as it's exactly the same as a person learning to program from proprietay secret code and outputing code based on that for millions of peoples in matter of seconds /s we also treat as however we want public goods found over the internet. as the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty and Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works aren't real or because we can as we are operating in international waters, selling products for other sails living exclusively in international waters /s
- tpmoney 1y agoIf you download GPL source code and run `wc` on its files and distribute the output of that, is that a violation of copyright and the GPL? What if you do that for every GPL program on github? What if you use python and numpy and generate a list of every word or symbol used in those programs and how frequently they appear? What if you generate the same frequency data, but also add a weighting by what the previous symbol or word was? What if you did that an also added a weighting by what the next symbol or word was? How many statistical analyses of the code files do you need to bundle together before it becomes copyright infringement?
- worthless-trash 1y agoIf its perfectly fine to 'learn from gpl code' This should mean that its perfectly fine to have a llm assist in clean room implementation/reverse engineering.
- naveen99 1y agoTime limit on patents is supportive of GPL in the limit. Public trading of most trade secrets along with their owner corporations is also GPLish.