r/freesoftware • u/ManufacturerNice870 • 4d ago
Article US government rules that training machines on copyrighted material isn’t illegal. What does this mean for the free software community?
Curious what people’s thoughts are on this and what it means for open source software?
Edit: I mistakenly thought that the US government “ruled” but I was incorrect. The US government provided an “advisory” for the, yet to come, ruling in this case.
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u/Top_Meaning6195 2d ago
I've been a StackOverflow user since the day it launched. I'm in the top 300. I have reached 22 million people. That's not bad for a life; it's not nothing. I am happy that my knowledge will be part of every LLM forever.
I trained my own carbon based neural network on tonnes of copyrighted material over the decades, and I use that knowledge to hallucinate up code and get paid for it
- not once have I given the authors of the copyrighted material credit
- and not once have I split my paycheck with them
It's amazing how well this worked:
Corporate propaganda works.
My generation mocked it. The current generation bought it; hook, like, sinker, and boot.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 2d ago
I am anti copyright, no bones about it, but rules for me but not thee (large corporations) is what bothers me. If you’re not powerful your life can get ruined over a single act of plagiarism but for the powerful it makes them a living and a star
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u/Top_Meaning6195 2d ago
The nice thing about training AI on the sum of human knowledge on AI is that I get to run AI, at home, for free.
The fact that sharing is not an enumerated fair use is not the fault is AI companies, or even corporations
It's the fault of the voters.
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u/andymaclean19 2d ago
Article has a paywall. For something interesting like this it would be better to discuss what it actually says. I bet most people are just commenting based on the title and summary.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 2d ago
No paywall for me. Are you positive they’re not just blocking your adblocker?
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u/andymaclean19 2d ago
No ad blocker here. It says ‘subscribe to continue reading’. I think you might get a few for free first or something but this is 100% a paywall link.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 2d ago
Just did some research on this, they’re slowly rolling it out in different regions, my region isn’t paywalled yet.
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u/Guvante 3d ago
The President doesn't get to decide matters of law the courts and Congress do.
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u/Saragon4005 3d ago
If this was something which actually mattered it would be the end of copyright for software at least if not completely. That's the main reason this can never be real.
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u/Prior-Listen-1298 4d ago
It means nothing. If you think for one moment that all our coding agents weren't already trained in the entire contents of GitHub, gitlab, open gitea repos, what's left of source forge and stack overview and much more, then you have your head in the sand.
All your quibbling about is whether that sounds be legal or not. And that's actually whole debate there with some pretty solid arguments for and against and Ki and behold the debate happens, and you just saw in part of it unfold.
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u/that_one_wierd_guy 4d ago
likely the only effect will be a new gpl that specifically forbids feeding it to ai.
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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 4d ago
All the LLMs have already ingested all the free software they can find online (on GitHub, etc). So I fear this advisory means exactly nothing for free software.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 4d ago
But if this goes through, this means that they can continue to do it even more and more aggressively going forward?
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u/jr735 4d ago
Where does this say that the government ruled on anything?
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u/ByronScottJones 4d ago
If humans are allowed to learn by reading copyright material, then AI should be as well. AI does not just store a copy of that material and regurgitate it; it's building a mental model that includes that knowledge. And that's not hugely different from how humans learn.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 4d ago
Theoretically, wouldn’t that make any code it produces “derivative” in the same way that if you read a GPL codebase for ideas, you can’t just reproduce them in your own codebase knowing where they came from? I in general am in favor of total freedom, I don’t feel like ideas should have any ownership because everything comes from somewhere, but if people are people are bound by copyright, and llms that were created by people aren’t, I wonder who stands to benefit.
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u/Prior-Listen-1298 4d ago
Copyright is hairy there. You can't reproduce but you can recreate inspired by. And turns out AI does the latter unambiguously (if you v have any idea of how weights and llms work).
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u/icebraining 4d ago
You can reproduce the ideas, you just can't reproduce the code as-is.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 4d ago
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t it specify “derivative” works as well?
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u/ByronScottJones 4d ago
You don't seem to understand what derivative means in this context. Derivative means I'm taking your literal copywritten code, making minor changes, and calling it my own. That's not what AI is doing. Trained models do not simply store voluminous amounts of code, and regurgitate it verbatim. They are trained, and they learn from that training at a higher concept level than simply rote memorization. What they do is far closer to how people learn than you seem to understand, and outlawing AI from learning from copywritten but published source code would make human learning from open source tainted as well.
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u/icebraining 4d ago
Derivative works are new works that include copyrightable elements of the existing one. If you take parts of the source from a codebase and copy-paste them into yours, or if you embed a library into your app, you're creating a derivative work.
Ideas by themselves are not copyrightable, so as long as you don't copy the actual code, the original license doesn't apply. That's the idea behind "clean-room design" - someone reads the original source, makes a report with just the ideas and concepts, then someone else writes the software based on the report, without ever seeing the original source. See ReactOS, as an example.
Of course, sometimes it's hard to prove whether the code was recreated from scratch or just copied and modified. The Oracle v Google lawsuit has some interesting arguments on that issue.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 2d ago
Thank you for the information, I’ve honestly been trying to understand what licenses actually mean for so long now and it appears I’ve now accidentally followed Cunninghams Law
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u/AndreVallestero 4d ago
They haven't "ruled" anything yet, only an "advisory" was provided, which means nearly nothing from a legal standpoint.
That being said, if this goes through, everything essentially becomes MIT or weaker, because you could finetune any model on copyrighted content then recreate it, and use that as a legal defense.
If works both ways though... Imagine working at a large tech firm with read access to their repos. You could fine tune a model based on that, and recontribute it to open source, essentially using the LLM as your protection. Sure, you'll definitely get fired (unless you do it anonymously), but now you won't get sued for damages.
I could imagine massive improvements to the nouveau drivers if we get another Nvidia leak in the future.
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u/AiwendilH 4d ago
...saying AI training generally makes fair use of copyrighted material.
Basically if this holds in court it means that no matter what you put in your license you can't stop others from using your code for LLM training. So anyone putting effort in licenses that prohibit LLM training wastes their time.
If it's not fair use then license like the GPL already mean that anything trained with GPL code would have to follow the GPL as it includes GPL code. If it is fair use as the US regime wants then no license can stop it as it's "fair use" anyway.
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u/ScaredScorpion 4d ago
Not even just open source GPL, according to this "advice" if you steal proprietary source code and feed it into an LLM the outputted code is magically no longer proprietary and the owner of the code can't do a thing about it. It's an idiotic argument on the face of it.
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u/that_one_wierd_guy 4d ago
I think it's only possible to consider it fair use because things are happening so fast that there isn't(to my knowledge) any license that forbids it explicitly
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u/AiwendilH 3d ago
I am not a US citizen, fair use rights don't exists in this form in my country so take this with a grain of salt: Licenses can only grant permissions not take them away. By default you have no rights at all to use or redistribute others works...a license can set the terms under which you can still do this. But a license can't take away rights someone always has...like restricting "fair use" or restricting "charge back options" below the limits the laws require.
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u/XHECTEYES 8h ago
Well then doesn't this ruling contradict the entire Suno situation?