Hacker News Reader

Comment by kklisura | Hacker News Reader

Should we be changing our open source licenses to explicitly prevent training such systems using our code?

Good idea, but if carved up into small enough chunks, it may be considered fair use.

What is confusing is that the neural net may take lots of small chunks and link them to one another, and then reproduce them in the same order verbatim.

One of the examples pointed out in the reply threads was the suggestion in a new file to insert the GPL disclaimer header.

So, the length of the samples being drawn is not necessarily small: the chunk size is based on its commonality. It could easily be long enough to trigger a copyright violation.

With music sampling, copyright protects down to the sound of a kick drum. No doubt Microsoft has a good set of attorneys working on their arguments as we speak.

That would be a legal no-op. Either their use is covered by copyright and they are violating your license, or it isn't covered by copyright and then any constraints that your license sets are meaningless.

Licenses hold no power outside of that granted to it by things being copyrighted by default.

I don't think so.

The code that is already used to train should be problematic for them, not only new Code in the future.

I'd assume this: In the same way as you can not forbid a human to learn concepts from your code, you can not forbid an automated system to learn concepts from your code, regardless the license. Also, if you would it would make your code non-free.

At least as long as the system really learns concepts. If it just copy & pastes code, then that's a different story (same as with humans).

Why forbid? Just use GPL and extend the contagion to the code trained using your code

Reply on news.ycombinator.com