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I find it distasteful and disturbing that copyright infringement by the people training the LLM in violation of a license is considered contamination by the lic
by cestith 5mo ago
I find it distasteful and disturbing that copyright infringement by the people training the LLM in violation of a license is considered contamination by the licensed code. It’s not contamination. The code didn’t seep into your codebase. If the LLM was trained in such a way that portions of code long enough to be protectable then the license was violated by humans. The liability for the problem doesn’t lie on the shoulders of the contributors to the originally licensed code. It lies on the people inserting it into your codebase without following the terms of the license.
The article also singles out the GPL repeatedly as a source of contamination. It doesn’t mention source-available proprietary licenses. It doesn’t mention code put online with no clear license, which according to the Bern Convention and the laws in at least the United States is automatically copyright protected with no license for use by others at all. It doesn’t talk about attribution for BSD-style or CC-SA-Attribution licenses. There’s no mention of leaked proprietary code. It just singles out GPL as some sort of unique problem.
This seems quite shoddy and biased for an article by someone who’s writing about the law.
- vablings 5mo agoIt is probably fair that a huge share of code that is Foss is licensed under GPL, much larger than the share of source available proprietary licensed code
- numbsafari 5mo agoI would have assumed the opposite is true. Do you have any data to back that up?
- pessimizer 5mo agoYou would assume that there is more proprietary code available to read on the internet than GPL code? Do you have any rationale for that assumption? Basically all GPL code is available on the web and there is a vast amount of it. I barely see any current non-FOSS code on the internet, although I think it would be fair to count the big projects who have been using pseudo-OSS licenses lately as proprietary. Wouldn't a safer assumption be a ratio of 10:1 or 100:1 for lines of GPL vs. lines of "shared source?"
- numbsafari 5mo agoAre you aware of non-GPL FOSS licenses?
- type0 5mo ago> Basically all GPL code is available on the web Basically true if you add "to paying customers", there's no obligation to publish it otherwise. You can even sell your GPL software on DVD if you like.
- kube-system 5mo agoThere is a lot of code on the internet that isn't accompanied by a FOSS license or any license that permits reuse, or any license at all.
- cestith 5mo agoIs GPL a larger share of source out there than BSD, MIT, ISC, CC, BSL, Apache, and source available combined? Enough bigger that it is repeatedly mentioned as a singular issue without so much as the words “or other licenses”?
- d0mine 5mo agoHere's github statistics from 2015 https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on-github-com/ https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on... MIT is used by more projects than GPL.
- akazantsev 5mo agoThat's the wrong metric, however. Thousands of small pet repos are unlikely to have more code than a single Chromium repo (mostly LGPL), Linux, Qt, etc.
- dehrmann 5mo ago> training the LLM in violation of a license Bartz v. Anthropic found that this is fair use, so the license doesn't play into it.
- vbarrielle 5mo agoI thought fair use was decided on a case by case basis, and could not be guaranteed? If true, wouldn't that mean that in other cases it could be ruled differently?
- superfrank 5mo agoI don't have the exact ruling in front of me, but IIRC the judge pretty clearly said that training a model was fair use. IIRC, he declared it "quintessentially transformative". The case by case basis was about acquisition and possession of the copyrighted material. Anthropic pirated a large number of books and illegally stored digital copies of many that they did purchase legally. The training being protected doesn't give them the right to violate copyright in that way. Google, for example, purchased print versions of their training material and had a small army of employees digitize them and then delete the digital copies when they were done. That hasn't been challenged AFAIK, but would likely have been found to be not a violation. That's I think what was meant by case by case basis. It's like if someone breaks into my house and I shoot them with my gun, that's very likely self defense, but if I'm not allowed to own a gun, I may still end up in trouble with the law.
- cestith 5mo agoWhether or not you’re pirating and making illegal copies of something depends greatly on the terms under which you’re allowed to make those copies. You can copy GPL-licensed code all day every day so long as you abide by the license. The same is true of the BSD licenses, MIT, ISC, Apache, et cetera. If you’re copying or making substantially derivative works of them outside the terms of the license, you’re violating the copyright.
- 5mo ago
- charonn0 5mo agoThey probably focused on the GPL because of its viral copyleft features.
- cestith 5mo agoDo you suspect that an LLM that would recreate a substantial portion of a licensed work would honor any license? Even a 2-clause BSD one?
- charonn0 5mo agoRather, I suspect viral copyleft is why this lawyer is focusing on the the GPL. It's the only(?) FOSS license that can force a proprietary codebase into the open.
- panzi 5mo agoOther than putting something into the public domain I don't really know any open source licence that doesn't require at least attribution. One can assume that 99.9% of training data had some sort of license requirements, so just blindly using it is a copyright violation. People just don't seem to care.
- changyou 5mo ago[dead]