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In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation
by drivebyhooting 9mo ago
In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP.
All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.
- johnpaulkiser 9mo ago> if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published. This feels like the simplest & best single regulation that can be applied in this industry.
- Dilettante_ 9mo agoIt'd substantially reduce the incentive for the training of new models.
- blibble 9mo agoburglary as a business has an extremely high margin for the burglar
- Forgeties79 9mo agoSo what? Figure it out. They have billions in investor funding and we’re supposed to just let them keep behaving this way at our expense? Facebook was busted torrenting all sorts of things in violation of laws/regulations that would lead to my internet being cut off by my ISP. They did it at scale and faced no consequences. Scraping sites, taking down public libraries, torrenting, they just do whatever they want with impunity. You should be angry!
- drivebyhooting 9mo agoMeanwhile look at what happened to Aaron Schwartz. There’s no justice until corporations are held accountable.
- Forgeties79 9mo agoI almost referenced him as well
- mrgoldenbrown 9mo agoThat's a good thing if it means it would reduce the incentive for mega corps to steal other people's work.
- kimixa 9mo agoI feel to be consistent the output of that model will also be under that same open license. I can see this being extremely limiting in training data, as only "compatible" licensed data would be possible to package together to train each model.
- danaris 9mo agoWell, yes. That's part of the point.
- only-one1701 9mo agoB-b-but what if someone uses the weights and training code to train their own models!!
- qsera 9mo ago>This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. Not all, but some kind of IP. Some of those that is created for sake of creating it and nothing else.
- kimixa 9mo agoThe psychology behind "creating it for the sake of creating it" can also be significantly changed by seeing someone then take it and monetize it without so much as a "thank you". It's come up quite often even before AI when people released things under significantly looser licenses than they really intended and imagined them being used.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- tazjin 9mo agoDoes anyone know of active work happening on such a license?
- jsheard 9mo agoWriting the license is the easy part, the challenge is in making it legally actionable. If AI companies are allowed to get away with "nuh uh we ran it through the copyright-b-gone machine so your license doesn't count" then licenses alone are futile, it'll take lobbying to actually achieve anything.
- tazjin 9mo agoHuh? Clearly writing it is not easy, as per your own comment
- jsheard 9mo agoMy point is that you could write the most theoretically bulletproof license in the world and it would count for nothing under the precedent that AI training is fair use, and can legally ignore your license terms. That's just not a problem that can be solved with better licenses.
- hoppp 9mo agoI got an "LLM Inference Compensation MIT License (LLM-ICMIT)" A license that is MIT compatible but requires LLM providers to pay after inference, but only restricts online providers, not self-hosted models
- HumanOstrich 9mo agoThat's not MIT-compatible, it's the opposite. MIT-compatible would mean that code under your license could be relicensed to MIT. Similar to how the GPL is not MIT-compatible because you cannot relicense GPL code under MIT.
- 9mo ago
- cogman10 9mo ago> if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published. The problem here is enforcement. It's well known that AI companies simply pirated content in order to train their models. No amount of license really helps in that scenario.
- themanmaran 9mo agoThe problem here is the "so what?" Imagine OpenAI is required by law to list their weights on huggingface. The occasional nerd with enough GPUs can now self host. How does this solve any tangible problems with LLMs regurgitating someone else's work?
- hackyhacky 9mo ago> How does this solve any tangible problems with LLMs regurgitating someone else's work? I'm not the OP, but here's my from-the-hip answer: if weights are public, building and operating an LLM is no longer a business plan in and of itself, as anyone could operate the same LLM. Therefore companies like OpenAI will be disincentivized from simply redirecting web traffic to their own site.
- cogman10 9mo agoI didn't really put out the GPL push. The best I could say is that at least that information would be available to everyone rather than being tightly controlled by the company that stole the source material to create it in the first place. It might also dissuade LLM creators from mass piracy as a competitor could take their models and start hosting them.
- delfinom 9mo agoThe problem here is "money". The AI goldrush has proven that intellectual property laws are null and void. Money is all that matters.
- ronsor 9mo ago> The AI goldrush has proven that intellectual property laws are null and void. Money is all that matters. Indeed they never really mattered. They were a tool for large corporations to make money and they will go away if they can no longer serve such purpose. Anyone that thought there was a real moral or ethical basis to "intellectual property" laws fell for propaganda and got scammed as a result.
- hk__2 9mo agoDo I have to publish my book for free because I got inspiration from 100's of other books I read during my life?
- blibble 9mo agofalse equivalence because machines are not human beings a lossy compression algorithm is not "inspired" when it is fed copyrighted input
- eddd-ddde 9mo ago> lossy compression algorithm is not "inspired" when it is fed copyrighted input That's exactly what happens when you read. Copyrighted input fed straight into your brain, a lossy storage and processing machine.
- LPisGood 9mo agoI think it’s a pretty easy principle that machines are not people and people learning should be treated differently than machines learning
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Terr_ 9mo agoYou see this principle in privacy laws too. I can be in a room looking at something with my eyeballs and listening with my ears perfectly legally... But it would not be legal if I replaced myself with a humanoid mannequin with a video camera for a head.
- zephen 9mo agoYou can even write down what you are looking at and listening to, although in some cases, dissemination of, e.g. verbatim copies in your writing could be considered copying. But it is automatically copying if you use a copier.
- theropost 9mo agoI think there is a real issue here, but I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books. The bigger problem is incentives. We built a system where writing docs, tutorials, and open technical content paid off indirectly through traffic, subscriptions, or services. LLMs get a lot of value from that work, but they also break the loop that used to send value back to the people and companies who created it. The Tailwind CSS situation is a good example. They built something genuinely useful, adoption exploded, and in the past that would have meant more traffic, more visibility, and more revenue. Now the usage still explodes, but the traffic disappears because people get answers directly from LLMs. The value is clearly there, but the money never reaches the source. That is less a moral problem and more an economic one. Ideas like GPL-style licensing point at the right tension, but they are hard to apply after the fact. These models were built during a massive spending phase, financed by huge amounts of capital and debt, and they are not even profitable yet. Figuring out royalties on top of that, while the infrastructure is already in place and rolling out at scale, is extremely hard. That is why this feels like a much bigger governance problem. We have a system that clearly creates value, but no longer distributes it in a sustainable way. I am not sure our policies or institutions are ready to catch up to that reality yet.
- Brybry 9mo ago> We have a system that clearly creates value, but no longer distributes it in a sustainable way The same thing happened (and is still happening) with news media and aggregation/embedding like Google News or Facebook. I don't know if anyone has found a working solution yet. There have been some laws passed and licensing deals [1]. But they don't really seem to be working out [2]. [1] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/canada_australia_platforms_news_law.php https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/canada_australia_platfor... [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-02/media-bargaining-code-tariffs-trump/105124278 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-02/media-bargaining-code...
- ViscountPenguin 9mo agoI'm not sure that I'd call [2] it not working out, just like I wouldn't call the equivalent pressure from the USA to dismantle medicare our public health system not working out. The biggest issue with the scheme is the fact that it was structured to explicitly favour media incumbents, and is therefore politically unpopular.
- mrcwinn 9mo agoCommercialization may be a net good for open source, in that it helps sustain the project’s investment, but I don’t think that means that you’re somehow entitled to a commercial business just because you contributed something to the community. The moment Tailwind becomes a for-profit, commercial business, they have to duke it out just like anyone else. If the thing you sell is not defensible, it means you have a brittle business model. If I’m allowed to take Tailwind, the open source project, and build something commercial around it, I don’t see why OpenAI or Anthropic cannot.
- hoppp 9mo agoThe difference is that they are reselling it directly. They charge for inference that outputs tailwind. It's fine to have a project that generates html-css as long as the users can find the docs for the dependencies, but when you take away the docs and stop giving real credit to the creators it starts feeling more like plagiarism and that is what's costing tailwind here.
- what 9mo agoWouldn’t that mean any freelancer that uses tail wind is reselling it?
- hoppp 9mo agoThe freelancer does navigate to the documentation page and might propose the client to buy the templates to speed up work. Thats a big difference. Freelancers using it can bring compounding value as they can sell templates to every client AI using it bring no value as the AI won't recommend buying the templates
- iterateoften 9mo agoI stopped writing open source projects on github because why put a bunch of work into something for others to train off of without any regard for the original projects
- wnjenrbr 9mo agoGood, we don’t want code that people are possessive of, in the software commons. The attitude that you are concerned about what people do with your output means that nobody should touch your output, too big a risk of drama. We don’t own anything we release to the world.
- __MatrixMan__ 9mo ago"Good riddance" is a pretty lousy position to take re: volunteer work. It should be: "how can we fix this?"
- AshamedCaptain 9mo agohttps://www.softwareheritage.org/ https://www.softwareheritage.org/ will index it anyway. Also, if you publish your code in your own server, it will be DDoSed to death by the many robots that will try to scrape it simultaneously.
- __MatrixMan__ 9mo agoI don't understand this mindset. I solve problems on stackoverflow and github because I want those problems to stay solved. If the fixes are more convenient for people to access as weights in an LLM... who cares? I'd be all for forcing these companies to open source their models. I'm game to hear other proposals. But "just stop contributing to the commons" strikes me as a very negative result here. We desperately need better legal abstractions for data-about-me and data-I-created so that we can stop using my-data as a one-size-fits-all square peg. Property is just out of place here.
- ajjahs 9mo ago[dead]
- wnjenrbr 9mo agoIn my opinion, IP is dead. Strong IP died in 2022, along with the Marxist labor theory of value; of which IP derives its (hypothetical) value. It no longer matters who did what when and how. The only thing that matters is that exists, and it can be consumed, for no cost, forever. IP is the final delusion of 19th century thinking. It was crushed when we could synthesize anything, at little cost, little effort. Turns out, the hard work had to be done once, and we could automate to infinity forever. Hold on to 19th century delusions if you wish, the future is accelerating, and you are going to be left behind.
- mrtesthah 9mo agoThis is a tone deaf take that ignores the massive imbalance in how IP law is wielded by large corporations vs individuals or small firms.
- wnjenrbr 9mo agoNo, it’s the most empowering thing humanity has ever constructed to wrestle the beast of IP and make it an irrelevant footnote in the human story. Deckchairs on the titanic. If one wastes their life in court, arguing 19th century myths, that’s on the players.
- mrtesthah 9mo agoIP law is not going away for “little people” like us until we collectively overturn the existing political regime which grants more rights to corporations than people.
- Altern4tiveAcc 9mo agoIP being used by small firms instead of large corporations does not make it a good thing. It's the same disgusting concept to deny freedom for end users to give control to who "owns" the IP. IP as a concept needs to die.
- mrtesthah 9mo ago
- bwfan123 9mo ago> This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP And as a result of this, the models will start consuming their own output for training. This will create new incentives to promote human generated code.
- kubanczyk 9mo ago> imbued with a GPL style license GPL died. Licenses died. Exnation: LLMs were trained also on GPL code. The fact that all the previously-paranoid businesses that used to warn SWEs not to touch GPL code with a ten foot pole are now fearlessly embracing LLMs' outputs, means that de facto they consider an LLM their license-washing machine. Courts are going to rubber stamp it because billions of dollars, etc.
- ralph84 9mo agoWe already have more IP than any human could ever consume. Why do we need to incentivize anything? Those who are motivated by the creation itself will continue to create. Those who are motivated by the possibility of extracting rent may create less. Not sure that's a bad thing for humanity as a whole.
- baxtr 9mo agoThis is one way to look at it. The other way is to argue that LLMs democratize access to knowledge. Anyone has access to all ever written by humanity. Crazy impressive if you ask me.
- zephen 9mo agoYes, it seems that way now. The first one's free. After you're hooked, and don't know how to think any more for yourself, and all the primary sources have folded, the deal will be altered.
- antihipocrat 9mo agoIf the entities democratizing access weren't companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars with a requirement to prioritize substantial returns for their investors, I'd agree with you!
- Difwif 9mo agoThis is temporary. AI models have their own Moore's law. Yes the mega corps will have the best models but soon enough what is currently SOTA will be open source and run on your own local machine if you want. the mega corps are getting all of us and the investors to fund the RnD.
- aszen 9mo agoHow? You don't know what the llm was trained on and don't know if it has any bias. Imo llms are a disaster for knowledge work because they act like a black box.
- catlifeonmars 9mo agoThe internet already democratized access to knowledge. (Hosted) LLMs put that free knowledge behind a paywall. Taken by itself this seems fine —- how you access the knowledge (via internet or chat bot) is still up to you. However, the argument is that the knowledge producers aren’t incentivized to publish in a model where everything is fetched through agents. Couple that with closed weight models and you will (eventually) have overall worse access to less knowledge and higher personal cost.
- venndeezl 9mo agoIn my opinion information wants to be free. It's wild to me seeing the tech world veer into hyper-capitalism and IP protectionism. Complete 180 from the 00s. IMO copyright laws should be rewritten to bring copyright inline with the rest of the economy. Plumbers are not claiming use fees from the pipes they installed a decade ago. Doctor isn't getting paid by a 70 year old for saving the 70 year old when they were in a car accident at age 50. Why should intellectual property authors be given extreme ownership over behavior then? In the Constitution Congress is allowed to protect with copyright "for a limited time". The status quo of life of author + 99 years means works can be copyrighted for many peoples entire lives. In effect unlimited protection. Why is society on the hook to preserve a political norm that materially benefits so few? Because the screen tells us the end is nigh! and giant foot will crush us! if we move on from old America. Sad and pathetic acquiescence to propaganda. My fellow Americans; must we be such unserious people all the time? This hypernormalized finance engineered, "I am my job! We make line go up here!" culture is a joke.
- jen729w 9mo ago> In my opinion information wants to be free. But I still need to pay rent.
- venndeezl 9mo agoWell like a plumber then you should string together one paid job after another. Not do a job once and collect forever. Rent is a political problem. Perhaps invest in the courage to confront some droopy faced Boomers in Congress.
- Animats 9mo agoEducation can be viewed as intellectual property theft. There have been periods in history when it was. "How to take an elevation from a plan" was a trade secret of medieval builders and only revealed to guild members. How a power loom works was export-controlled information in the 1800s, and people who knew how a loom works were not allowed to emigrate from England. The problem is that LLMs are better than people at this stuff. They can read a huge quantity of publicly available information and organize it into a form where the LLM can do things with it. That's what education does, more slowly and at greater expense.
- blitz_skull 9mo agoThe idea of being able to “steal” ideas is absolutely silly. Yeah we’ve got a legal system for it, but it always has been and always will be silly.
- AlienRobot 9mo agoIt's already imbued with copyright infringement if you copy it without a license.
- GrowingSideways 9mo agoIntellectual property was kind of a gimmick to begin with, though. Let's not pretend like copyright and patents made any sense to begin with
- martin_drapeau 9mo agoThey exist to protect the creator/inventor and allows them to get an ROI on their invested time/effort. But honestly today, the abundance of content, especially that can be generated by LLM, completely breaks this. We're overwhelmed with choice. Content has been comodotized. People will need to come to grasp with that and find other ways to get an ROI. The article does provide a hint: "Operate". One needs to get paid for what LLMs cannot do. A good example is Laravel. They built services like Forge, Cloud, Nightwatch around open source.
- GrowingSideways 9mo ago> They exist to protect the creator/inventor and allows them to get an ROI on their invested time/effort. Yes, this betrayed the entire concept of the us as a pro-human market.
- journal 9mo agoIf I was able to memorize every pixel value to reconstruct a movie from memory, would that be theft?
- simion314 9mo ago>If I was able to memorize every pixel value to reconstruct a movie from memory, would that be theft? Don an experiment, memorize a popular small poem, then publish it under your name (though I suggest to check the laws in your rtegion for this and also consider it might affect your reputation). IMO is the same if ChatGPT memorizes my poem and then you ask it for a poem , you copy paste my poem from ChatGPT and publish it as your own.
- timcobb 9mo ago> This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. You say that like it's a bad thing...
- paradite 9mo agoBy your analogy human brains as also IP thefts, because they ingest what's available in the world, mix and match them, and synthesize slightly different IPs based on them.
- CrimsonRain 9mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 9mo ago> Your opinion is shit. WTF? This is a completely unacceptable comment on HN. I don't know why you would think that is acceptable after being registered here for so long. The entire reason HN exists is to be better than that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- senko 9mo agoI support your right to have an opinion, but in my opinion, thank God this is just your opinion. Copyright, as practiced in late 20 and this century, is a tool for big corps to extract profits from actual artists, creators, and consumers of this art[0] equally. Starving artists do not actually benefit. Look at Spotify (owned and squeezed by record labels) giving 70% of the revenue to the record labels, while artists get peanuts. Look at Disney deciding it doesn't need to pay royalties to book writers. Hell, look at Disney's hits from Snow White onwards, and then apply your "LLMs are IP theft" logic to that. Here's what Cory Doctorow, a book author and critic of AI, has to say about it in [1]: > So what is the alternative? A lot of artists and their allies think they have an answer: they say we should extend copyright to cover the activities associated with training a model. > And I'm here to tell you they are wrong: wrong because this would inflict terrible collateral damage on socially beneficial activities, and it would represent a massive expansion of copyright over activities that are currently permitted – for good reason!. --- > All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license GPL-style license has been long known not to work well for artifacts other than code. That's the whole reason for existence of Creative Commons, GNU Free Documentation License, and others. [0] "consumers of art" sounds abhorrent, yet that's exactly what we are [1] https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/
- testing22321 9mo agoSo you don’t like big corps getting ever richer by hiding behind copyright. How about my books? I’ve published a few, make maybe $500 a month from them. Is it fine for the LLMs to rip them off?
- senko 9mo ago1. Will people stop buying your books if LLMs have the information from them? 2. Will people stop buying your books if they can get them from the library? Is a library ripping you off? 3. Assuming your books are non-fiction (otherwise the answer to (1) would be a clear "no"), am I ripping you off if I read your books, create a course that teaches the same things (that you tought me through your book) and earn mega-money because I'm mega-skilled at marketing? 4. How about if I lend my copy to dozens of my friends, who are all very interested in the stuff you write but don't want to pay themselves? 5. Did OpenAI go to the bookstore, buy your book and scan it? Or did Amazon or any other ebook retailer just gave them the book PDF when they asked nicely? How did the rip off happen? 6. If an Anthropic employee buys your book in a bookstore, scans it and destroys the physical copy, and the digital equivalent is only used to train Claude, is that a ripoff? This stuff is complex and as a society we're just starting to grapple with the consequences. Cory's making the case against copyright being used as a tool much more eloquently than I am - I encourage you to read it if you haven't already. BTW in your particular case, I'd say you're pretty safe. Nobody stops buying books because they can get the same info from LLMs. If that's your concern, you might as well be mad at the Internet at large.
- dangoodmanUT 9mo agoBut it’s not theft, because you’re not redistributing. It’s allowed, just like humans are allowed to learn from copyrighted content.
- amelius 9mo ago> just like humans are allowed to learn from copyrighted content humans learning : machines learning == whale swimming : submarine swimming It's not the exact 100% same thing. Therefore you cannot base any rights on it. If you still don't buy it, consider this analogy: killing a human vs. destroying a machine Thank god that we're not using your line of thinking here.
- Agentus 9mo ago[dead]
- TrackerFF 9mo agoSure. But if I see listen to some song, and copy it, and release it, I could get sued. Even if I claim that I'm merely inspired by the original content - the court doesn't care. You don't need to redistribute the original material, it's enough that you just copied it.
- Altern4tiveAcc 9mo ago> But if I see listen to some song, and copy it, and release it, I could get sued. This is what should be fixed in the first place, then. You shouldn't get sued from what you do with your copy of a song.
- dangus 9mo agoI both agree and disagree with you. The thing is, copyright law is not really on your side. Viewing copyrighted material without paying for it is not generally something people get fined for. A lot of training falls under fair use that overrides whatever license you come up with. Disney can’t stop me from uploading clips of their movies alongside commentary and review because fair use allows that. LLMs generally aren’t redistributing code, which is the thing that copyright protects. If I inspect some GPL code and get inspired by it and write something similar, the GPL license doesn’t apply to me. It has always been the case that if you don’t want other people to apply fair use to your works, your only recourse is to keep those works private. I suspect that now individuals and companies that don’t want their code to be trained on will simply keep the code private. Now, there have been times where LLMs have reproduced verbatim copyright material. The NYTimes sued OpenAI over this issue. I believe they’ve settled and come up with a licensing scheme unless I’m mixing up my news stories. Second thing, your issue becomes moot if there exists a model that only trains off of MIT-licensed code, and there is a TON of that code out there. Third thing, your issue becomes moot if users have agreed to submit their code for training, like what the GitHub ToS does for users who don’t change their settings, or if giant companies with giant code bases just use their own code to train LLMs. Where I agree with you is that perhaps copyright law should evolve. Still, I think there’s a practical “cat is out of the bag” issue.
- michaf 9mo agoIs there such a license? Or any license with special clauses for LLMs? Is it enforcable? Could someone 'poison' an LLM training run with injecting just one such licensed document? I am genuinely curious about what levers exist (or are conceivable) to protect your own IP from becoming LLM training data, if regular copyright does not qualify.
- jefftk 9mo agoThis isn't the kind of thing you can do with a license, as long as training a model doesn't require a license. Now, that's an open question legally in the US, and there are active lawsuits, but that does seem like the way it's most likely to play out.