Where's the threat? The FSF was notified that as part of the settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic they were potentially entitled to money, but in this case the works in question were released under a license that allowed free duplication and distribution so no harm was caused. There's then a note that if the FSF had been involved in such a suit they'd insist on any settlement requiring that the trained model be released under a free license. But they weren't, and they're not.
(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")
> but in this case the works in question were released under a license that allowed free duplication and distribution so no harm was caused.
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.
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. The GFDL imposes restrictions on distribution, not copying, so merely downloading a copy imposes no obligation on you and so isn't a copyright infringement either.
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.
> 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.
It sounds that way a bit from the one sentence. But that’s not the case at all.
> 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!
And the judgement said that the training was fair use, but that the duplication might be an infringement. The GFDL doesn't restrict duplication, only distribution, so if training on GFDLed material is fair use and not the creation of a derivative work then there's no damage.
For this to stand up in court you'd need to show that an LLM is distributing "a modified version of the document".
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.
Presumably, a suitable prompt could get the LLM to produce whole sections of the book which would demonstrate that the LLM contains a modified version.
I don't like the editorialized title either but I would say that the actual post title
"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."
Is it? The FSF's description of the judgement is that the training was fair use, but that the actual downloading of the material may have been a copyright infringement. What software does the FSF hold copyright to that can't be downloaded freely? Under what circumstances would the FSF be in a position to influence the nature of a settlement if they weren't harmed?
Copyright infringement causes harm, so if there's no harm there's no infringement. You can freely duplicate GFDLed material, so downloading it isn't an infringement. If training a model on that downloaded material is fair use then there's no infringement.
If it's pretty fucking simple, can you point to the statement in the linked post that supports this assertion? What it says is "According to the notice, the district court ruled that using the books to train LLMs was fair use", and while I accept that this doesn't mean the same would be true for software, I don't see anything in the FSF's post that contradicts the idea that training on GPLed software would also be fair use. I'm not passing a value judgement here, I'm a former board member of the FSF and I strongly believe in the value and effectiveness of copyleft licenses, I'm just asking how you get from what's in the post to such an absolute assertion.
what I keep wondering is what kind of laws will be rendered useless with the precedent they'll cause. Can this be beginning of the end of copyright and intellectual property?
Doubt it. I'm sure it will have an exclusion where for example using genAI to train on or replicate leaked or reverse-engineered Windows code will constitute copyright infringement, but doing the same for copyleft will be allowed. Always in favor of corporate interests.
Copyright, possibly. Intellectual property more broadly, no. AI has 0 impact on trademark law, quite clearly (which is anchored in consumer protection, in principle). Patent law is perhaps more related, but it's still pretty far.
Is the FSF threatening Anthropic? The way I read it looks like they are not:
> 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 rule is fine and clear, it just wasn’t followed here. There’s no reason to have a stricter rule, what you’re complaining about is its enforcement. Two moderators can’t read everything, if you have a complaint, email them (contact link at the bottom of the page), they are quite responsive.
What weak, counter-productive, messaging. This is like having a bully punching you in the face and responding with “hey man, I’m not going to do anything about this, I’m not even going to tell an adult, but I’d urge you to consider not punching me in the face”. Great news for the bully! You just removed one concern from their mind, essentially giving the permission to be as bad to you as they want.
A related topic that I have in the past thought about is, whether LLM derived code would necessitate the release under a copyleft license because of the training data. Never saw a cogent analysis that explained either why or why not this is the case beyond practicality due to models having been utilized in closed source codebases already…
The short answer is that we don't know. The longer answer based purely on this case is that there's an argument that training is fair use and so copyleft doesn't have any impact on the model, but this is one case in California and doesn't inherently set precedent in the US in general and has no impact at all on legal interpretations in other countries.
The dearth of case law here still makes a negative outcome for FSF pretty dangerous, even if they don't appeal it and set precedent in higher courts. It might not be binding but every subsequent case will be able to site it, potentially even in other common law countries that lack case law on the topic.
And then there is the chilling effect. If FSF can't enforce their license, who is going to sue to overturn the precedent? Large companies, publishers, and governments have mostly all done deals with the devil now. Joe Blow random developer is going to get a strip mall lawyer and overturn this? Seems unlikely
It looks like the stance of FSF is for proliferation of the copyleft to trained LLMs
> "Therefore, we urge Anthropic and other LLM developers that train models using huge datasets downloaded from the Internet to provide these LLMs to their users in freedom"
No, it looks like the stance of the FSF is that models should be free as a matter of principle, the same as their stance when it comes to software. Nothing in the linked post contradicts the description that the judgement was that the training was fair use.
The framing of 'share your weights freely' as a remedy is interesting but underspecified. The FSF's argument is essentially that training on copyrighted code without permission is infringement, and the remedy should be open weights. But open weights don't undo the infringement -- they just make a potentially infringing artifact publicly available. That's not how copyright remedies work. What they're actually asking for is more like a compulsory license, which Congress would have to create. The demand for open weights as a copyright remedy is a policy argument dressed up as a legal one.
In GPL cases for software, making the offending proprietary code publicly available under the GPL has been the usu outcome.
But whether you can actually be compelled to do that isn't well tested in court. Challenging that the GPL is enforcable in that way leads you down the path that you had no valid license at all, and for past GPL offenders that would have been the worse outcome. AI companies could change that
Good. I want to see more lawsuits going after these hyper scalers for blatantly disregarding copyright law while simultaneously benefiting from it. In a just world they would all go down and we would be left with just the OSS models. But we don't live in a fair world :(
> Among the works we hold copyrights over is Sam Williams and Richard Stallman's Free as in freedom: Richard Stallman's crusade for free software, which was found in datasets used by Anthropic as training inputs for their LLMs.
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.
They simply have way too much incentive to train on anything they can get their hands on. They are driving businesses, that are billions in losses so far. Someone somewhere is probably being told to feed the monster anything they can get, and not to document it, threatened with an NDA and personal financial ruin, if the proof of it ever came out. Opaque processes acting as a shield, like they do in so many other businesses.
Classic FSF, completely detached from reality. Did they propose any way for Anthropic to continue earning any revenue, paying its employees, and developing new models, if they give away their current models for free?
It's not the FSF's job to provide Anthropic with a business model. If it turns out that their business model depends entirely on copyright violation, they might not have a business model. That's true regardless of whether you think the case has any merit.
> Classic Hollywood, completely detached from reality. Did they propose any way for The Pirate Bay to continue earning any revenue, paying for its hosting, and developing new features, if they aren't allowed to redistribute movies for free?
Although it might not satisfy FSF there is a very simple way to do it - commit to release your models for free X months after they're first made available.
Where's the threat? The FSF was notified that as part of the settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic they were potentially entitled to money, but in this case the works in question were released under a license that allowed free duplication and distribution so no harm was caused. There's then a note that if the FSF had been involved in such a suit they'd insist on any settlement requiring that the trained model be released under a free license. But they weren't, and they're not.
(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")
> but in this case the works in question were released under a license that allowed free duplication and distribution so no harm was caused.
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.
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. The GFDL imposes restrictions on distribution, not copying, so merely downloading a copy imposes no obligation on you and so isn't a copyright infringement either.
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.
Models, however, can reproduce copyleft code verbatim, and are being redistributed. Doesn't that count?
Licences like AGPL also don't have redistribution as their only restriction.
> 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.
This article is talking about a book though, not software.
"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.
It sounds that way a bit from the one sentence. But that’s not the case at all.
> 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!
And the judgement said that the training was fair use, but that the duplication might be an infringement. The GFDL doesn't restrict duplication, only distribution, so if training on GFDLed material is fair use and not the creation of a derivative work then there's no damage.
For this to stand up in court you'd need to show that an LLM is distributing "a modified version of the document".
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.
Presumably, a suitable prompt could get the LLM to produce whole sections of the book which would demonstrate that the LLM contains a modified version.
Yes, and for practical purposes the current consensus (and in case of EU, the law) is that only said document would be converted by FDL
FDL is famously annoying.
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.
They don't need the "do whatever" permission if everything they do is fair use. They only need the downloading permission, and it's free to download.
I don't like the editorialized title either but I would say that the actual post title
"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".
It's just an indication to model trainers that they should take care to omit FSF software from training.
Not a nothing burger, but not totally insignificant either.
Is it? The FSF's description of the judgement is that the training was fair use, but that the actual downloading of the material may have been a copyright infringement. What software does the FSF hold copyright to that can't be downloaded freely? Under what circumstances would the FSF be in a position to influence the nature of a settlement if they weren't harmed?
Is harm necessary to show in a copyright infringement case?
Copyright infringement causes harm, so if there's no harm there's no infringement. You can freely duplicate GFDLed material, so downloading it isn't an infringement. If training a model on that downloaded material is fair use then there's no infringement.
It’s pretty fucking simple: If GPL code is integrated into Claude, the Claude needs to be distributed under the terms of the GPL.
If it's pretty fucking simple, can you point to the statement in the linked post that supports this assertion? What it says is "According to the notice, the district court ruled that using the books to train LLMs was fair use", and while I accept that this doesn't mean the same would be true for software, I don't see anything in the FSF's post that contradicts the idea that training on GPLed software would also be fair use. I'm not passing a value judgement here, I'm a former board member of the FSF and I strongly believe in the value and effectiveness of copyleft licenses, I'm just asking how you get from what's in the post to such an absolute assertion.
Yet another instance of people jumping to comments based on the title of the submission alone. They don't mention GPL even once in that post...
It's pretty fucking simple: a judge needs to decide that, not armchair lawyers on HN.
We know AI will be pushed through. No matter the laws
what I keep wondering is what kind of laws will be rendered useless with the precedent they'll cause. Can this be beginning of the end of copyright and intellectual property?
Doubt it. I'm sure it will have an exclusion where for example using genAI to train on or replicate leaked or reverse-engineered Windows code will constitute copyright infringement, but doing the same for copyleft will be allowed. Always in favor of corporate interests.
Copyright, possibly. Intellectual property more broadly, no. AI has 0 impact on trademark law, quite clearly (which is anchored in consumer protection, in principle). Patent law is perhaps more related, but it's still pretty far.
In a way, I think so. Just let the code recreate existing code, say it's AI code and doesn't break any copyright laws
Is the FSF threatening Anthropic? The way I read it looks like they are not:
> 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”
HN really needs some stricter rules for editorialized title. The HN title has nothing to do with the link (unless the article is edited?)
The rule is fine and clear, it just wasn’t followed here. There’s no reason to have a stricter rule, what you’re complaining about is its enforcement. Two moderators can’t read everything, if you have a complaint, email them (contact link at the bottom of the page), they are quite responsive.
flag the submission?
What weak, counter-productive, messaging. This is like having a bully punching you in the face and responding with “hey man, I’m not going to do anything about this, I’m not even going to tell an adult, but I’d urge you to consider not punching me in the face”. Great news for the bully! You just removed one concern from their mind, essentially giving the permission to be as bad to you as they want.
The title is:
The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement, but when we do, we settle for freedom
A related topic that I have in the past thought about is, whether LLM derived code would necessitate the release under a copyleft license because of the training data. Never saw a cogent analysis that explained either why or why not this is the case beyond practicality due to models having been utilized in closed source codebases already…
The short answer is that we don't know. The longer answer based purely on this case is that there's an argument that training is fair use and so copyleft doesn't have any impact on the model, but this is one case in California and doesn't inherently set precedent in the US in general and has no impact at all on legal interpretations in other countries.
The dearth of case law here still makes a negative outcome for FSF pretty dangerous, even if they don't appeal it and set precedent in higher courts. It might not be binding but every subsequent case will be able to site it, potentially even in other common law countries that lack case law on the topic.
And then there is the chilling effect. If FSF can't enforce their license, who is going to sue to overturn the precedent? Large companies, publishers, and governments have mostly all done deals with the devil now. Joe Blow random developer is going to get a strip mall lawyer and overturn this? Seems unlikely
It looks like the stance of FSF is for proliferation of the copyleft to trained LLMs
> "Therefore, we urge Anthropic and other LLM developers that train models using huge datasets downloaded from the Internet to provide these LLMs to their users in freedom"
No, it looks like the stance of the FSF is that models should be free as a matter of principle, the same as their stance when it comes to software. Nothing in the linked post contradicts the description that the judgement was that the training was fair use.
The framing of 'share your weights freely' as a remedy is interesting but underspecified. The FSF's argument is essentially that training on copyrighted code without permission is infringement, and the remedy should be open weights. But open weights don't undo the infringement -- they just make a potentially infringing artifact publicly available. That's not how copyright remedies work. What they're actually asking for is more like a compulsory license, which Congress would have to create. The demand for open weights as a copyright remedy is a policy argument dressed up as a legal one.
In GPL cases for software, making the offending proprietary code publicly available under the GPL has been the usu outcome.
But whether you can actually be compelled to do that isn't well tested in court. Challenging that the GPL is enforcable in that way leads you down the path that you had no valid license at all, and for past GPL offenders that would have been the worse outcome. AI companies could change that
Misleading title
>share complete training inputs with every user of the LLM
They don't have the rights to distribute the training data.
So if a user can bring an LLM to output a copy of some training data, then the ones who distribute the LLM are engaging in illegal activity?
Good. I want to see more lawsuits going after these hyper scalers for blatantly disregarding copyright law while simultaneously benefiting from it. In a just world they would all go down and we would be left with just the OSS models. But we don't live in a fair world :(
> Among the works we hold copyrights over is Sam Williams and Richard Stallman's Free as in freedom: Richard Stallman's crusade for free software, which was found in datasets used by Anthropic as training inputs for their LLMs.
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.
They simply have way too much incentive to train on anything they can get their hands on. They are driving businesses, that are billions in losses so far. Someone somewhere is probably being told to feed the monster anything they can get, and not to document it, threatened with an NDA and personal financial ruin, if the proof of it ever came out. Opaque processes acting as a shield, like they do in so many other businesses.
Classic FSF, completely detached from reality. Did they propose any way for Anthropic to continue earning any revenue, paying its employees, and developing new models, if they give away their current models for free?
Please don't fulminate on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not the FSF's job to provide Anthropic with a business model. If it turns out that their business model depends entirely on copyright violation, they might not have a business model. That's true regardless of whether you think the case has any merit.
> Classic Hollywood, completely detached from reality. Did they propose any way for The Pirate Bay to continue earning any revenue, paying for its hosting, and developing new features, if they aren't allowed to redistribute movies for free?
Although it might not satisfy FSF there is a very simple way to do it - commit to release your models for free X months after they're first made available.
Should the FCC be proposing how Robocaller's continue earning any revenue in its decisions?
What the fuck? How is that their problem?
"Yeah we can't prosecute this person for stealing your car, because you haven't considered how they're going to get to work"
OH NO THE POOR CAPITALISTS