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0 pointsspwa420d ago0 comments

Your first 3-4 arguments I just read as trying to weasel out from under the GPL. Because everyone trains on GPL code and if the GPL applies to the result ... well clearly you know the implications of that.

And btw: that a "compilation copyright" would apply to training data. Great. That only means, of course, that if they are publish their training data (like they agreed to when using GPL code to base their models on), people can't republish the exact same collection under different conditions (BUT they can under the same conditions). Everyone will happily follow that rule, don't worry.

> Paying someone to break into the DC and do that would subject you to criminal charges for burglary and conspiracy, and civil liability for the associated torts as well as for theft of trade secrets covering the resulting harms, even without copyright protection.

I don't claim the break-in would be legal, but without copyright protection, if that made a model leak, it would be fair game for everyone to use.

> Distillation is a violation of ToS, for which there are remedies outside of copyright.

But the models were created by violating ToS of webservers! This has the exact same problem the copyright violations have, only far far bigger! Scraping webservers is a violation of the ToS of those servers. For example [1]. Almost all have language somewhere that only allows humans to browse them, and bots, and IF bots are allowed at all (certainly not always), only specific bots for the purpose of indexing. So this is a much bigger problem for AI labs than even the GPL issue.

So yes, if you wanted to make the case that the AI labs, and large companies, violate any kind of contract, not just copyright licenses, excellent argument. But I know already: I'm a consultant, and I've had to sue, and won, 2 very large companies on terms of payment. In one case, I've had to do something called "forced execution", of the payment order (ie. going to the bank and demanding the bank execute the transaction against a random account of the company, against the will of the large company. Let me tell you, banks DO NOT like to do this)

Btw: what model training is doing, obviously, is distilling from the work, from the brain, of humans, against the will of those humans, and without paying for it. So in any reasonable interpretation, that's also a ToS violation. Probably a lot more implicit than the ones spelled out on websites, but not fundamentally different.

[1] https://www.bakerdatacounsel.com/blogs/terms-of-use-10-thing...

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dragonwriter19d ago

> Your first 3-4 arguments I just read as trying to weasel out from under the GPL.

I haven't talked about any license, or given any though to any particular license in any of this; I don't know where you are reading anything about the GPL specifically into it.

None of this has anything to do with the GPL, except that the GPL only is even necessary where there is something to license because of a prohibition on copyright law.

> nd btw: that a "compilation copyright" would apply to training data. Great. That only means, of course, that if they are publish their training data (like they agreed to when using GPL code to base their models on), people can't republish the exact same collection under different conditions (BUT they can under the same conditions).

No, that's not what it means, and I don't know where you got the "other terms" or the dependency on publication from; neither is from copyright law.

> But the models were created by violating ToS of webservers!

And, so what?

To the extent those terms are binding (more likely the case for sites where there is affirmative assent to the conditions, like ones that are gated on accounts with a signup process that requires agreeing to the ToS, e.g., “clickwrap”), there are remedies. For those where the conditions are not legally binding (more like the case where the terms are linked but there is no access gating, clear notice, or affirmative assent), well, they aren't binding.

> Btw: what model training is doing, obviously, is distilling from the work, from the brain, of humans, against the will of those humans, and without paying for it. So in any reasonable inteUhrpretation, that's also a ToS violation.

Uh, what? We are just creating imaginary new categories of intellectual property and imaginary terms of service and imaginary bases for those terms to be enforceable now?

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