alt Hacker NewsYou might wish that were true, but there are very strong arguments it's not. Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license violation. Any more than a person reading it is. In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that copyright no longer applies. It's fair use.
But agreed that we're waiting for a court case to confirm that. Although really, the main questions for any court cases are not going to be around the principle of fair use itself or whether training is transformative enough (it obviously is), but rather on the specifics:
1) Was any copyrighted material acquired legally (not applicable here), and
2) Is the LLM always providing a unique expression (e.g. not regurgitating books or libraries verbatim)
And in this particular case, they confirmed that the new implementation is 98.7% unique.
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A human reading a unit of work is not a “copy”. I’m pretty sure our legal systems agree that thought or sight is not copying something.
Training an LLM inherently requires making a copy of the work. Even the initial act of loading it from the internet and copying it into memory to then train the LLM is a copy that can be governed by its license and copyright law
> Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license violation. Any more than a person reading it is.
Some might hold that we've granted persons certain exemptions, on account of them being persons. We do not have to grant machines the same.
> In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that copyright no longer applies.
Has the model really performed an extreme transformation if it is able to produce the training data near-verbatim? Sure, it can also produce extremely transformed versions, but is that really relevant if it holds within it enough information for a (near-)verbatim reproduction?
The big difference between people reading code and LLMs reading code is that people have legal liability and LLMs do not. You can't sue an LLM for copyright infringement, and it's almost impossible for users to tell when it happens.
BTW in 2023 I watched ChatGPT spit out hundreds of lines of F# verbatim from my own GitHub. A lot of people had this experience with GitHub Copilot. "98.7% unique" is still a lot of infringement.
Transformative is not the only component of determining fair use, there’s also the economic displacement aspect. If you’re doing a book report and include portions of the original (or provide an interface for viewing portions à la Google Books) you aren’t a threat to the original authors ability to make a living.
If you’ve used copyrighted books and turned them into a free write-a-book machine, you are suddenly using the authors own works against them, in a way that a judge might rule is not very fair.
“ Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work: Here, courts review whether, and to what extent, the unlicensed use harms the existing or future market for the copyright owner’s original work. In assessing this factor, courts consider whether the use is hurting the current market for the original work (for example, by displacing sales of the original) and/or whether the use could cause substantial harm if it were to become widespread.”
https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/