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Comment by mushufasa | Hacker News Reader

The EU and others listed are actively trying to regulate AI. Permissive OSS libraries' "one job" is to disclaim liability. This is interesting that they are just prohibiting usage altogether in jurisdictions where the definition of liability is uncertain & worrying to the authors.

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Geological copyleft?

That would be an extremely lazy way of writing a license.

Unlikely laziness, since they went to the effort of writing a custom license in the first place.

A more plausible explanation is the requirements and obligations of those markets are ambiguous or open-ended in such a way that they cannot be meaningfully limited by a license, per the lawyers they retain to create things like licenses. Lawyers don’t like vague and uncertain risk, so they advised the company to reduce their risk exposure by opting out of those markets.

I don’t get it. Couldn’t they just write a liability disclaimer clause that covers that, without explicitly calling out particular jurisdictions? E.g. “you are solely responsible for ensuring your use of the model is lawful and agree to indemnify the authors or whatever. If you can’t do that in your jurisdiction, you can’t use the model.”

The problem is that AI act covers entities releasing AI software as open source. That has never been the case so far, so while they're still figuring it out, better safe than sorry.

Maybe, but if you cannot say something simple as "here is something you can use for free, use at your own risk, we are not liable for anything", then that is a clear indication of the bankruptcy of the law, imho.

Since the law is very well developed in the EU, I think the people who wrote the license were just lazy.

The AI act being "well developed" means it's dense enough that compliance can't be done without the backing of a major corporation's legal team. Tencent is a major corporation, but this is a janky research project that's not part of a product. The researchers don't have legal knowledge of EU regulations, and they probably have limited or zero access to anyone who does. Cutting off EU countries is the safe and responsible choice.

It's a careful way of running a business with potential users in highly-regulated markets. They don't know their regulations or laws. They don't want to invest labor in complying with them.

So, they reduced their liability by prohibiting usage of the model to show those jurisdictions' decision makers they were complying. I considered doing the same thing for EU. Although, I also considered one mught partner with an EU company if they are willing to make models legal in their jurisdiction. Just as a gift to Europeans mainly but maybe also a profit-sharing agreement.

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