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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30866 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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I was worried when I saw that it had a custom license, but it turns out it's just a slightly modified MIT license, requiring credit if your project gets big enough. This truly is open source.

I remain of the opinion that it is likely (but not guaranteed) that courts will find "training models" to not be a sufficiently creative endeavour to merit copyright protection. "Throwing a bunch of data into the GPU blender and doing massive least squares" isn't IMO more creative than scanning a painting, compressing the works of Shakespeare with gzip, or having a monkey press the camera shutter.

Well, I don't really understand American law but it seems to me that Anthropic has set the precedent of LLM pretraining corpora being essentially immune to copyright claims. Anthropic's models are, ironically, the most paranoid about reproducing copyrighted material.

The Anthropic case there is focused on "Is it a copyright violation to train models on copyrighted data without licensed distribution?", which is an interesting question, but my comment is more on the separate "Is the resulting model I've trained something I can claim copyright over?" question.

Sorry, misunderstood you. I don't think we've seen anyone seriously defend having stolen or distilled someone's model. My bet is the precedent will depend on who/whom and lawyer muscle rather than fundamentals of the situation.

The closest I'm aware of is the nominal academic license of Facebook's llama models that seems to have been largely ignored once they were out in the wild. At the time, Meta was trailing a bit, and it probably helped their mindshare overall, but they didn't bring any court cases that I'm aware of either.

OTOH, it’s established that collections of data (such as phonebooks) can be copyrighted. None of the individual data items are under copyright, but the collection itself is.

Not in the US

A lot of the grognards over on HN don't think it counts, but they're the type who wouldn't accept blowjobs in heaven if the angels weren't Apache licensed.

As one such grognard I think the idea was sound but that it's poorly worded for the long term and opens one to lawsuits about the more vague components (what does prominent mean?)

Likely inconsequential in the long run, but still bad practice. Even as I perfectly understand why they did it.

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