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Comment by Der_Einzige | Hacker News Reader

"I call on @facebook, @cohere, @AnthropicAI, @MistralAI, @huggingface, @google and everyone else who cares about the future of AI to join the defense and smash the NYT in court for this overreaching attempt to twist and expand copyright to the determinant of pretty much everyone else on Earth but the NY Times."

Preach it louder! I think most of them (certainly Huggingface and Mistral) will be ready to help on this. Let's hope that big tech companies are savvy at getting better lawyers who can more clearly articulate the pro-LLM position to lawmakers.

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If an LLM scrapes a source code repository that requires attribution, will you also preach to tech companies to go after said license?

What license requires attribution to read and understand the code? Or to use techniques from code for totally different purposes, embodied in different code?

You may have a point for verbatim regurgitation of code, but I’m having a hard time seeing a violation in ingestion code and learning how it works.

> What license requires attribution to read and understand the code?

BSD, MIT, several others. Without a license you cannot read the code.

reading has never been one of the rights reserved to copyright holders under us copyright law, and in fact there are a number of carve-outs in us copyright law to ensure that copyright holders cannot prevent people from reading their work, such as the first-sale doctrine and the exemption for copying an executable into memory

there have at times been regimes that legally restricted the mere reading of published works, but such policies have generally been considered repugnant to liberal democracy and indeed liberalism in general

And who will preach morality, ethics, ownership, the right to retain your creative endeavours and benefit from them so that overall society keeps progressing and there's enough reward for putting labour into something creative and genuine?

Before someone comes up with the argument that LLMs are creative and genuine, yes as a technique they are. The art form, the theory and science is marvellous result of human ingenuity. Hats off.

But the end result, is not.

Just like tape recorder is a great invention but the pirated music recorded on it is not.

That using copywritten text in a commercial goal is not a breach of copyright?

It's gonna take Robert Kardashian to get that through

AFAIK compared to OpenAI and Microsoft, Huggingface and Mistral have no money.

I suppose they could file an amicus brief restating what openai's lawyers will say, but beyond that what are they supposed to do?

This isn’t an appeal. There’s no general ability to submit amicus briefs. Well, there is a way to, but trial courts ignore them (as they should, because this is a case between specific parties, and unless someone has some sort of privity making them worth hearing from, outside opinions are just noise).

What is "the pro-LLM position" in this case?

Weird he leaves openai and Microsoft out of the list. I assume it some game of thrones style ommission indicating where his loyalties lie.

The lawsuit is against MS and OpenAI. They don't need to be called to action, they're already on the front lines. This is for everyone not already being sued.

They are the target of the lawsuit. He is saying all these other LLMs have a target on their back and should be coming to help Microsoft and OpenAI.

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