Posted by m463 4 days ago
The rephrased¹ title "FSF Threatens Anthropic over Infringed Copyright: Share Your LLMs Free" certainly doesn’t dramatise enough how odious an act it can be.
¹ Original title is "The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement, but when we do, we settle for freedom"
This is the reason why AI companies won't let anyone inspect which content was in the training set. It turns out the suspicions from many copyright holders (including the FSF) was true (of course).
Anthropic and others will never admit it, hence why they wanted to settle and not risk going to trial. AI boosters obviously will continue to gaslight copyright holders to believe nonsense like: "It only scraped the links, so AI didn't directly train on your content!", or "AI can't see like humans, it only see numbers, binary or digits" or "AI didn't reproduce exactly 100% of the content just like humans do when tracing from memory!".
They will not share the data-set used to train Claude, even if it was trained on AGPLv3 code.
I think the fines will effectively be mandatory though, even with no obvious EU operations.
(Edit: In the event of it being changed to match the actual article title, the current subject line for this thread is " FSF Threatens Anthropic over Infringed Copyright: Share Your LLMs Freel")
FSF licenses contain attribution and copyleft clauses. It's "do whatever you want with it provided that you X, Y and Z". Just taking the first part without the second part is a breach of the license.
It's like renting a car without paying and then claiming "well you said I can drive around with it for the rest of the day, so where is the harm?" while conveniently ignoring the payment clause.
You maybe confusing this with a "public domain" license.
I used to be on the FSF board of directors. I have provided legal testimony regarding copyleft licenses. I am excruciatingly aware of the difference between a copyleft license and the public domain.
Then why did you say "no harm was caused"? Clearly the harm of "using our copylefted work to create proprietary software" was caused. Do you just mean economic harm? If so, I think that's where the parent comments confusion originates.
The restrictions fall not only on verbatim distribution, but derivative works too. I am not aware whether model outputs are settled to be or not to be (hehe) derivative works in a court of law, but that question is at the vey least very much valid.
> the district court ruled that using the books to train LLMs was fair use but left for trial the question of whether downloading them for this purpose was legal.
The pipeline is something like: download material -> store material -> train models on material -> store models trained on material -> serve output generated from models.
These questions focus on the inputs to the model training, the question I have raised focuses on the outputs of the model. If [certain] outputs are considered derivative works of input material, then we have a cascade of questions which parts of the pipeline are covered by the license requirements. Even if any of the upstream parts of this simplified pipeline are considered legal, it does not imply that that the rest of the pipeline is compliant.
Or is the LLM going to regurgitate the same content with zero attribution, and shift all the traffic away from the original work?
When viewed in this frame, it is obvious that the work is derivative and then some.
Licences like AGPL also don't have redistribution as their only restriction.
Arguably, the use of the code in the Stack Overflow question and answer is fair use.
The problem occurs not when someone reads the Q&A with the improperly licensed code but rather when they then copy that code verbatim into their own non GPL product and distribute that without adherence to the GPL.
It's the last step - some human distributing the improperly licensed software that is the violation of the GPL.
This same chain of what is allowed and what is not is equally applicable to LLMs. Providing examples from GPL licensed material to answer a question isn't a license violation. The human copying that code (from any source) and pasting it into their own software is a license violation.
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Some while back I had a discussion with a Swiss developer about the indefinite article used before "hobbit" in a text game. They used "an hobbit" and in the discussion of fixing it, I quoted the first line of The Hobbit. "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." That cleared it up and my use of it in that (and this) discussion is fair use.
If someone listening to that conversation (or reading this one) thought that the bit that I quoted would be great on a T-shirt and them printed that up and distributed it - that would be a copyright violation.
Google's use of thumbnails for images was found to be fair use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Amazon.com...
The Ninth Circuit did, however, overturn the district court's decision that Google's thumbnail images were unauthorized and infringing copies of Perfect 10's original images. Google claimed that these images constituted fair use, and the circuit court agreed. This was because they were "highly transformative."
I believe that Stack Overflow, Google Images, and LLM models and their output constitutes an example of transformative fair use. What someone does with that output is where copyright infringement happens.
My claim isn't that AI vendors are blameless but rather that in the issue of copyright and license adherence it is the human in the process that is the one who has agency and needs to follow copyright (and for AI agents that were unleashed without oversight, it is the human that spun them up or unleashed them).
> If what you do with a copyrighted work is covered by fair use it doesn't matter what the license says - you can do it anyway.
How is it that contracts can prohibit trial by jury but they can't ban prohibit fair use of copyrighted work? Is there a list of things a contract is and isn't allows to prohibit, and explanations/reasons for them?
It's also relevant that copyright (and fair use) is federal law, contracts are state law and federal law preempts state law.
"Sam Williams and Richard Stallman's Free as in freedom: Richard Stallman's crusade for free software"
"GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL). This is a free license allowing use of the work for any purpose without payment."
I'm not familiar with this license or how it compares to their software licenses, but it sounds closer to a public domain license.
> 4. MODIFICATIONS
> You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified Version filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of it. In addition, you must do these things in the Modified Version:
Etc etc.
In short, it is a copyleft license. You must also license derivative works under this license.
Just fyi, the gnu fdl is (unsurprisingly) available for free online - so if you want to know what it says, you can read it!
Right. I can publish the work in whole without asking permission. That’s unrestricted duplication.
However, as i read it, an LLM spitting out snippets from the text is not “duplicating” the work. That would fall under modifications. From the license:
> A "Modified Version" of the Document means any work containing the Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with modifications and/or translated into another language.
I read that pretty clearly as any work containing text from a gnu fdl document is a modification not a duplication.
1) Obtaining the copyrighted works used for training. Anthropic did this without asking for the copyright holders' permission, which would be a copyright violation for any work that isn't under a license that grants permission to duplicate. The GFDL does, so no issue here. 2) Training the model. The case held that this was fair use, so no issue here. 3) Whether the output is a derivative work. If so then you get to figure out how the GFDL applies to the output, but to the best of my knowledge the case didn't ask this question so we don't know.
If I took a book and cut it up into individual words (or partial words even), and then used some of the words with words from every other book to write a new book, it'd be hard to argue that I'm really "distributing the first book", even if the subject of my book is the same as the first one.
This really just highlights how the law is a long way behind what's achievable with modern computing power.
Which is all to say that the law is actually really bad at determining what is right and wrong, and our moral compasses should not defer to the law. Unfortunately, moral compasses are often skewed by money - like how normal compassess are skewed by magnets
By your description of the law, this svg file is not infringing on disney’s copyright - since it’s a program that when run creates an infringing document (the rasterized pixels of mickey mouse) but it is not an infringing document itself.
I really don’t think my “i wrote a program in the svg language” defense would hold up in court. But i wonder how many levels of abstraction before it’s legal? Like if i write the mickey-mouse-generator in python does that make it legal? If it generates a variety of randomized images of mickey mouse, is that legal? If it uses statistical anaylsis of many drawings of mickey to generate an average mickey mouse, is that legal? Does it have to generate different characters if asked before it is legal? Can that be an if statement or does it have to use statistical calculations to decide what character i want?
wikipedia used to be under FDL and they lobbied FSF to allow an escape hatch to Commons for a few months, because FDL was so annoying.
"The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement, but when we do, we settle for freedom"
and this sentence at the end
" We are a small organization with limited resources and we have to pick our battles, but if the FSF were to participate in a lawsuit such as Bartz v. Anthropic and find our copyright and license violated, we would certainly request user freedom as compensation."
could be seen as "threatening".
Not a nothing burger, but not totally insignificant either.
> We are a small organization with limited resources and we have to pick our battles, but if the FSF were to participate in a lawsuit such as Bartz v. Anthropic and find our copyright and license violated, we would certainly request user freedom as compensation.
Sounds more like “we can’t and won’t sue, but this is the kind of compensation that we think would be appropriate”
The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement, but when we do, we settle for freedom
"Yeah we can't prosecute this person for stealing your car, because you haven't considered how they're going to get to work"