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If the trained LLM spits out large, recognizable portions of licensed code and you use it in your product don’t count on that case to keep you from defending yo
by cestith 5mo ago
If the trained LLM spits out large, recognizable portions of licensed code and you use it in your product don’t count on that case to keep you from defending yourself in court. The court found in Bartz v. Anthropic that training was fair use. They also found that pirating content to train against was not fair use, and Anthropic paid $1,500,000,000 in a settlement.
There are licenses on most software source code. If you redistribute works derived from that code, you must abide by those licenses or you are violating the copyright. That’s what’s meant by “piracy" here.
Now if you have an LLM that has trained on code and learned to actually write new software, only small snippets too short to be protected by copyright should be identical between the training material and the output. However, if you’re getting output that is substantial in size and recognizably derivative from the original that’s an issue that hasn’t yet as far as I’m aware been settled in court. One would hope the major player LLMs don’t copy and paste large functional chunks of existing programs.
It would certainly seem to me that the code you sell after using an LLM should meet the same standards for difference in implementation as if it was written by a human. That should apply to both copyright protection and patent protection.
- BobbyTables2 5mo agoI find it pretty horrible that a company can pay a mere fine that is a small percentage of its total funding in exchange from materially benefiting from a conspiracy to commit a series of criminal acts. If Anthropic hadn’t pirated training materials would they even exist? Would they still have been as competitive ? Would they still have gotten every bit of VC funding in anticipation of future successes derived in part from past crimes? What’s next ? Armed bank robbery when VC funding dries up?
- panzi 5mo agoAlso fair use is much more limited in the EU. Don't know how it applies here or if there where any rulings. Are you going to stop doing business with the EU (and Japan etc.)?
- make3 5mo agoThe seller of the code has no visibility on the training set of the LLM. If the situation you're describing ends up being illegal, responsibility should fall on the LLM provider to provide tools to detect such overlap with their training sets, and on the clients to run the tools. The provider of the LLM should want to enable this and to take on that responsibility (I mean take it from the clients), otherwise no one will want to use the tool. Maybe there could be AI tool-use lawsuit insurance, but I feel like that's worse than the copyright infringement detection tool for everyone involved. I can see the tool happening in the EU, but nowhere else basically, especially in the US, the government sees "AI dominance" as a national priority and a national security priority.