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Comment by sebzim4500 | Hacker News Reader

Is there anything stopping anyone from using this for commercial purposes? I know that when you fill in the google form you need to agree to noncommercial use, but someone downloading this will never have agreed to that licence agreement.

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I don't know. Is there anything stopping you using the latest Miley Cyrus album for commercial purposes if you downloaded it via torrent and never agreed to any licencing terms?

IANAL, but I imagine it's a legal grey area if the weights can be copyrighted? Works produced by purely mechanical means don't normally meet the threshold of originality.

and, copyright rarely bites if you use something without publishing/redistributing it.

It would be like playing copyrighted music in your office without permission. Perhaps technically illegal, but your customers will never know what music your Devs were listening to...

I am quite confident that using this model for commercial purposes will, if detected, land you in quite a legal quagmire that almost certainly sides in favor of Meta.

And even if it did not, Meta certainly has a more capable legal team with more cash to spend than the average HN user.

Has any photo or art ever been found to have been illegal due to pirated photoshop?

I don't think weights can be copyrighted (unless overfit on your own other copywritten work), and I don't think weights shared broadly with the research community can be considered trade secrets. And even if they were trade secrets despite the wide sharing, only the people that leaked them could get into trouble, right? They aren't trade secrets anymore once you didn't keep them secret and they are out on torrents.

didnt they train this on copyrighted content?

They might have trained it on everyone's DMs.

IDK, its more like finding recipes to many great restaurant chains all mushed together by a 5th grader whose uncle stole it from them, on the sidewalk. looks like a grey area to me legally but IANAL.

That's what Facebook and OpenAI are doing. They consumed tons of copyrighted content without permission and are now using it for commercial purposes. So using their model seems fair game.

Is there anything stopping Meta (or openai etc) from using The Whole Web for commercial purposes in their LLM's?

Considering ML's tenuous relationship with IP, I can't help but find this situation amusing.

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