It's hilarious that big players in this space seem to think these are consistent views:
- It's okay to train a model on arbitrary internet data without permission/license just because you can access it
- It's not okay train a model on our model
- It's okay to train a model on arbitrary internet data without permission/license just because you can access it
- It's not okay train a model on our model
It’s completely illegal if you think about it.
So why LLMs who crawl the internet to present snippets and information should be treated differently from Google ? (who also reproduce verbatim the same content without paying any compensation to the copyright owners (all types: text, image, code)
Google would argue (and they won in federal court versus the Author's Guild using this argument) that displaying snippets of publicly-crawlable websites constitutes "fair use." Profitability weighs against fair use but it doesn't discount it outright.
They would also probably cite robots.txt as an easy and widely-accepted "opt-out" method.
Overall, I'm not sure any court would rule against Google's use of snippets for search. And since Google's been around for over 20 years and they haven't lost a lawsuit over it, I don't think it's accurate to say "it's completely illegal if you think about it."
US copyright law is one of those things that might seem simple, but really isn't. Hence many of the copyright lawsuits clogging our judicial system.
In addition, the fair use test contains a pillar about the use not affecting the market for the copyright holder's works[1] which I think in google's case (and probably in the current openAI case too) seems obviously not to have worked out (ie google's use has demonstrably negatively affected the market for the original copyrighted work in cases such as news for example).
[1]: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
Most news sites wouldn't get any traffic without search engines and aggegrators. Which is why they are now whining about FB et al no longer sending them traffic.
And let's not forget that both traditional and online news is no stranger to republishing other people's content - one of the reasons fair use exists in the first place.
I have no love for big tech but let's not pretent that this is about anything other than news publishers wanting more gibs.
This is less and less true, as evidenced by the progression of 0-click searchs.
> There are countries where content companies didn't like what Google does: Google took them out of the index -> suddenly they where ok with it again so that Google put them in again.
This story screams antitrust.
You're right, the number of news publishers that share a common owner is something that should be of concern to antitrust enforcers.
It does but the complainers are usually tabloid crap pushers whom no one in power really supports.
LLMs scrape my site and code, strip all identifying information and license, and provide/sell that to others for profit, without my consent.
There are so many wrongs here, at every level.
Presumably you can’t build an LLM that is a competitor of LlaMA using its outputs.
But AI weights are in legal gray zone for now. So it’s muddy waters and fair game for anyone who wants to take on the legal risks.
Should a publisher wish to be excluded from Google's, or any other web index's search and presentation, that's easy enough to specify.
<https://www.intellectualpropertyblawg.com/ip-management/what...>
<https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt>
(And no, I'm not a fan of Google by any stretch, but let's keep the discussion rigorous here.)
________________________________
Notes:
1. You don't feel old. You are old.
In the LLM space it seems even more clear because many/most of the works in the various corpora used for this training have very clear copyright terms which prevent digital storage and reproduction without the publishers permission (just look at the reverse of the title page of any book for the copyright notice if you don't believe me).
Finally, for LLMs many/most of the works are in corpora[2] that people just download so they aren't looking at a robots.txt file put up by teh original site. If you look at The Pile paper[3] for example they explicitly say that much of the material is under copyright and that they are relying on fair use.
[1]: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ [2] https://github.com/Zjh-819/LLMDataHub for example [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
<https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107>
Most critically, courts have put strong emphasis on the notion of transformative use of copyrighted works, and web indexing is transformative in the sense that it does not create a competing work, but provides a means of discovering and assessing the relevance of the indexed work itself.
As to web indexing, that (and associated factors including thumbnails and caching) have been ruled by courts to be fair-use adaptations of works:
Displaying a cached website in search engine results is a fair use and not an infringement. A “cache” refers to the temporary storage of an archival copy—often a copy of an image of part or all of a website. With cached technology it is possible to search Web pages that the website owner has permanently removed from display. An attorney/author sued Google when the company’s cached search results provided end users with copies of copyrighted works. The court held that Google did not infringe. Important factors: Google was considered passive in the activity—users chose whether to view the cached link. In addition, Google had an implied license to cache Web pages since owners of websites have the ability to turn on or turn off the caching of their sites using tags and code. In this case, the attorney/author knew of this ability and failed to turn off caching, making his claim against Google appear to be manufactured. (Field v. Google Inc., 412 F.Supp.2d 1106 (D. Nev., 2006).)
<https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/cases/>
Or, to use your phrase, by common law (precedential case law), that is precisely "how copyright law works". Note particularly that the courts leaned on publishers' capabilities to indicate whether or not caching was or was not permitted "using tags and code".
There's a larger issue which I'm not aware of being explicitly raised in case law, which concerns how the World Wide Web is indexed as contrasted to how a print library is indexed. In the case of a library, an independent third party (the library cataloguer) assigns metadata to a work (standardised title, author(s), translator(s), illustrator(s), publisher(s), etc., as well as subject headings and call numbers. Additional indexing is provided through citations indices (both forward and reverse --- works cited by, and citing, other works). These largely don't rely on the text of the indexed work itself, though of course the cataloguer presumably is reading at least portions of the work to classify it. Critically: the works themselves are physical artefacts of fixed form which are virtually always read directly rather than interpreted through some mechanism.[1]
As it's evolved over the past quarter century or so, Web search doesn't rely strongly on metadata (though some of this is taken into consideration), and most particularly publisher-provided keywords are almost wholly ignored, largely due to flagrant abuse of that feature by some publishers. Instead, a combined approach of full-text indexing (that is: capturing the full text of a work and identifying keywords and tuples (multi-word phrases) which can be matched against queries entered by persons searching for documents, and an assessment of the overall relevance of that work, usually at a site (or sub-site) level based on other indicia, most famously (though somewhat less relevantly today) "PageRank", Google's original site-ranking algorithm.
Further, the entire mechanism of the Web is of creating copies of works on request. When an HTTP request is sent, the server responds by copying the requested work to an output stream, which is then received (and duplicated, often multiple times) by the client system as an integral part of the utilisation of that content. US copyright law does not have a section specifically referring to computer-network transmission, but there are multiple limitations on exclusive rights to copy (by authors) above and beyond the 107 Fair Use exemptions in sections 108 through 122 of 17 U.S.C, including specifically ephemeral recordings (108) and the case of computer programmes (117).
<https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/chapter-1>
Large language model training is a new area of use and law (legislative or common) is yet to be determined, but there's at the very least existing statutory language as well as precedent which suggest that at least some uses might well be found to be fair use. As I'm watching the situation evolve, I'm reminded strongly of several articles copyright scholar Pamela Samuelson wrote in the 1990s over adapting copyright to the Internet age, and questions of what its future place might be: specific governance over the literal copying of expressive works, or a general doctrine against misappropriation. As always, there's a sharp tension between authors' rights (and, let's be brutally honest: publishers' profits) and the underlying Constitutional justification of US copyright law: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
<https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...>
And it seems Sameulson is engaged in the discussion of generative AI and copyright, though I've yet to read her work on the subject: <https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/05/16/generative-ai-meets-cop...>
(Discussion here strongly reliant on US law. There's general international agreement on copyright through the Berne Convention, though significant national differences exist.)
________________________________
Notes:
1. There is a spectrum of works, e.g., print books, phonographs, CDs and DVDs (the latter containing anti-circumvention mechanisms), etc., but in general there's minimal if any intermediate copying and duplication of works, and in many cases none at all.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/may/18/andy-wa...
That said, it would tend to darken the prospects for operators of LLM generative AI systems, IMO.
Parent's point is if your own scaping army respects the "scaping.txt" and goes down on Google as they don't opt-out in their scraping.txt, it probably wouldn't fly.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
....What "other people"?
If it's the "you" who is not allowed to scrape google in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817237 then you can make your own "google is not allowed to scrape my thing" rules if you think that's beneficial for you.
If it's somehow related to LLM providers or users I doubt that's what the original comment was referring to.
To be clear, I understand the original comment as
LLM companies say "I can use your content and you cannot not prevent me from doing so, but I won't allow you to use the output of the LLM" just like Google says "I can scrape your content and you cannot not prevent me from doing so, but I won't allow you to scrape the output of the search engine"
I see it as the equivalent of the spam mail that require the user to login to disable them.
they are consistent, if they believe themselves to be "special" and deserves special treatment!
Copyright is literally the right to copy. Arbitrary Internet data that is not copied does not have any copyright implications.
The difference is that LLaMa imposes additional contractual obligations that, for ideological reasons (Freedom #0), open source software does not.
This issue reminds me of the FSF/AGPL situation. At some point you just have to accept that copyright law, in and of itself, is not sufficient to control what people do with your software. If you want to do that, you have to limit end-user freedom with an EULA.
If someone uses LLaMa output to train models, it is unlikely they will be sued for copyright infringement. It is far more likely they will be sued for breach of contract.
Training a model on model output isn't copying.
There's no way to phrase this where training a model on copyrighted human-generated images/text isn't copying, but training a model on computer-generated images/text is copying.
> If you want to do that, you have to limit end-user freedom with an EULA.
If you want to limit end-user freedom with a EULA, you have to figure out how to get users to sign it. Copyright is one way to force them to do so, but doesn't really seem relevant to this situation if training a model on copyrighted material is fair use.
And again, if somebody generates a giant dataset with LLaMA, if you want to argue that pushing that into another LLM to train with is making a copy of that data, then there's no way to get around the implication there that training on a human-generated image is also making a copy of that image.
That's literally what I said.
> There's no way to phrase this where training a model on copyrighted human-generated images/text isn't copying, but training a model on computer-generated images/text is copying.
Literally nobody is saying that.
> If you want to limit end-user freedom with a EULA, you have to figure out how to get users to sign it.
That is not true. ProCD v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996).
You and others seem to have an over-the-top hostile reaction to the idea that contract law can do things copyright law cannot do. But it is objective and unarguable fact.
Okay? Apologies for making that assumption. But if you're not saying that, then your position here is even less defensible. Arguing that model output isn't copyrightable but that it's still covered by EULA if anyone anywhere tries to use it is even more absurd than arguing that it's covered by copyright. The interpretation that this is covered by copyright is arguably the charitable interpretation of what you wrote.
> That is not true. ProCD v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996).
ProCD is about shrinkwrap licenses, the court determined that buying the software and installing it was the equivalent of agreeing to the license.
In no way does that imply that licenses are enforceable on people who never agreed to the licenses. The court expanded what counts as agreement, it does not mean you don't have to get people to agree to the EULA. I mean, take pedantic issue with the word "sign" if you want (sure, other types of agreement exist, you're correct), but the basic point is still true -- if you want to restrict people with a EULA, they need to actually agree to the EULA. All that ProCD did was establish that buying a product and opening the package and installing it constituted agreement.
And that becomes a problem because if you don't have IP law as a way to block access to your stuff, then you don't really have a way to force people to agree to the EULA. Someone using LLaMA output to train a model may have never been in a position to agree to that EULA, and Facebook doesn't have the legal ability to say "hey, nobody can use output without agreeing to this" because they don't have copyright over that output. Can they get people to sign a EULA before downloading the weights from them? Sure. Is that enough to restrict everyone else who didn't download those weights? No.
To go a step further, if you don't believe that weights themselves are copyrightable, then putting a EULA in front of them is even less effective because people can just download the weights from someone else other than Facebook.
You can host a project Gutenberg book and get people to sign a EULA before they download it from you, even though you don't own the copyright. And that EULA would be binding, yes. But you cannot host a project Gutenberg book, put a EULA in front of it, and then claim that people who don't download it from you and instead just grab it off of a mirror are still bound by that EULA.
Your ability to control access is what gives you the ability to force people to sign the EULA. And that's kind of dependent on IP law. If someone sticks the LLaMA 2.0 weights on a P2P site, and those weights aren't covered by copyright or other IP law, then no, under no interpretation of US law would downloading those weights from a 3rd-party source constitute an agreement with Facebook.
But even if you don't take that position, even if you assume that model weights are copyrightable, if I download a dataset generated by LLaMA, there is still no shrinkwrap license on that data.
To your original point:
> If someone uses LLaMa output to train models, it is unlikely they will be sued for copyright infringement. It is far more likely they will be sued for breach of contract.
It is incredibly unlikely that someone using a 3rd-party database of LLaMA output would be found to be in violation of contract law unless at the very least they had actually agreed to the contract by downloading LLaMA themselves. A restriction on the usage of LLaMA does not mean anything for someone who is using LLaMA output but has not taken any action that would imply agreement to that EULA.
> You and others seem to have an over-the-top hostile reaction to the idea that contract law can do things copyright law cannot do. But it is objective and unarguable fact.
No, what we have a hostile reaction to is the objectively false idea that a EULA covers unrelated 3rd parties. That's not a thing, it's never been a thing.
I don't know what to say if you disagree with that other than that I'm putting a EULA in front of all of Shakespeare's works that says you now have to pay me $20 before you use them no matter where you get them from, and apparently that's a thing you believe I can do?
Clickwrap agreements are enforceable, and legally enforceable agreements can place more restrictions on the use of a piece of software than copyright law alone can.
As a result, software that, for ideological reasons, does not restrict use will always have fewer protections than software with more restrictive terms.
Your off-topic rant about Shakespeare is irrelevant.
> Clickwrap agreements are enforceable, and legally enforceable agreements can place more restrictions on the use of a piece of software than copyright law alone can.
To take a page from your earlier comment, literally no one here is denying the existence of clickwrap agreements. Clickwrap agreements are completely irrelevant to the current conversation.
> Your off-topic rant about Shakespeare is irrelevant.
You can not enforce a EULA on someone interacting with a piece of work you do not own IP rights to if they did not agree to that EULA in some way.
I'm sorry, but agreement is part of contract law.
If you think you can force a EULA on a piece of content you don't own that will bind people who got the content from a 3rd-party and who never agreed to your EULA under any legal definition of agreement, then by all means, slap a EULA on Shakespeare. It makes just as much sense as what you're suggesting.
> literally no one here is denying the existence of clickwrap agreements.
You denied the enforceability of clickwrap agreements. You were wrong.
LLaMA uses a clickwrap agreement. "By clicking 'I Accept' below or by using or distributing any portion or element of the Llama Materials, you agree to be bound by this Agreement."
That agreement covers its output: "You will not use the Llama Materials or any output or results of the Llama Materials to improve any other large language model (excluding Llama 2 or derivative works thereof)."
Your hypotheticals about third parties are off-topic and have zero bearing on this conversation.
The topic under discussion is whether it is logically "inconsistent" for Meta to claim its output is protected while other content is not. Those two positions are perfectly consistent in light of the fact that LLaMA output is protected by the terms of a clickwrap agreement.
It's all but certainly copied, and not just in the "held in memory" sense but actually stored along with the rest of the training collection. What may not happen is distribution. There's a difference in scale/nature of copyright violation between the two but both could well be construed that way.
Additionally, I think there's a reasonable argument that use as training data is a novel one that should be treated differently under the law. And if there's not:
> If you want to do that, you have to limit end-user freedom with an EULA.
What will eventually happen -- at least without some kind of worldwide convention -- is that someone who can successfully dodge licensing obligations will be able to take and redistribute weight-data and/or clean-room code.
At least, if we're adopting a "because we can" approach to everything related.
Regardless, the lack of a license cannot give you more permission than a restrictive license. You're arguing that if take a book out of a bookstore without paying (or signing a contract), then I have more rights than if I sign a contract and then leave with the book.
That is clearly false. It's hard to imagine the confusion of ideas that would lead you to such a conclusion.