Hacker News Reader

Comment by ezoe | Hacker News Reader

When the machine automation quality became okay enough, this conflict of interest happens.

His demand of not using his existing work for AI training is nonsense. Because the entire article is stated:

Didn't he agree on that?

So, this contributor revealed he doesn't understand the license his work is published under. As such, Mozilla must refuse his contribution because he don't understand the idea behind Creative Commons license. His wish granted I guess.

View on HN

You can rescind a license. If you own a property, it is yours. Even if you licensed it to someone, you own it and you can kick someone off. They can later address you for a breach of license, but it's still your property. You own it.

If mozilla wants to tell him that his work was valuable and therefore has grounds to sue him for rescinding the license, they will have a lot of difficulty proving that after their sumobot summarily deleted years of it for no good reason at a whim.

Good for him. He should probably consider suing them for destruction of his work.

Once your work is published under Creative Commons license, it is irreversible. No matter you have a copyright or not. You can't undo it the fact at one point you published your work in one of Creative Commons license(there are multiple incompatible Creative Commons licenses so it's bit complicated).

You can make updated version of your work to non-CC, but the version you published under CC is CC.

I would be curious if that is how Japanese courts would view it. They may not consider that a valid way. Or they might. But different jurisdictions vary.

There are some discussion if the whole concept of "license" fits under Japanese law. I think it's understood as "a contract to allow the usage of otherwise restricted work by copyright etc under conditions"

But I'm not a lawyer so I don't know and in real business, they casually use the word "license" in Japan. But in my opinion, everything is contract under Japanese law.

Yeah - I know in US law some terms are simply unenforceable and void. Much of the FOSS movement is designed around US contract law. There are issues with some US licenses being enforceable under other legal regimes - I was chatting a decade or so ago with a Russian who understood the...GPL(? I don't remember exactly) to be invalid in Russia and so it had to be bundled in some fashion to be usable.

Or to put another way, a license (a contract) is a tuple (terms, jurisdiction), and the juridical evaluation process will take both into account.

You need to think hard and understand that it is irreversible before you publish your content under certain licenses.

My problem with this type of gate keeping is that machine learning does open up translations that are accurate to the masses. It is quaint having a real human do your translations though. Kind of like having a real human drive your car or do your housework. Not everyone can afford that luxury. But, on the other hand, having a singular organization own the training data and the model and not publishing the model itself is where the gatekeeping continues.

> Once your work is published under Creative Commons license, it is irreversible.

I am not sure how it is under Japanese law, but in some countries a creator cannot be stripped of his rights by agreeing to a license. Even without that there is often a way to rescind any gift given in good faith if the receipients behavior warrants it.

In case of Japanese copyright law, that is 著作人格権(moral rights). A right that protect his work isn't used in a way the author don't want it.

It includes right to be not published(like a personal letter intended to be secret), attribution, right to be identical preservation(modifying in a way author don't intended, like adding extra arm to 3-arms monster)

You see, these rights are covered in Creative Commons, by agreeing and publishing his work under Creative Commons, the author explicitly promised he won't use these exclusive rights against the users.

If he didn't agree on the spirit of Creative Commons, why did he contributed Mozilla in CC license for 20 years? Did he intended to taint free software by incompatible non-free work?

This is exactly what happens if you ignore the free software definition explained by RMS.

this is not how CC / FOSS licenses work. if this is how FOSS worked not a soul would use it

It's a disappointing that after decades of free software movement, people can't understand this basic fact about license and the concept of "free".

And the fact 20+ years Mozilla contributor didn't understand it too. You can't restrict the usage to things you don't like it under CC.

I don't think it's at all clear that some foss licenses (MIT for instance) are irrevocable. Not in the US, and certainly not in any possible relevant country... It's not clear that they are revocable either. As I understand the law it at least in part rests on the question of whether there was consideration in exchange for the license, which might even make it a case by case analysis.

CC licenses (and some other foss licenses, e.g. Apache 2.0) are explicitly irrevocable... which is probably enough for US law though I still wonder to some degree if there isn't some country that would take issue with that term... especially a country which recognizes "Moral rights".

Some other FOSS licenses (GPL for instance) contain explicit terms allowing revocation under certain circumstances (but otherwise claim to be irrevocable).

Whether the license is revokable or not is irrelevant when the action isn't permitted by the license anyway.

In particular, the primary purpose of AI as we know it is to strip off attribution, which is explicitly forbidden by basically every license in existence.

True, license is probably irrelevant here because they aren't even intending to comply with the terms of it.

To nitpick "explicitly forbidden" isn't quite right. Licenses basically only grant more permissions, they can't remove them. It's explicitly excluded from the rights granted by the license, but it's not explicitly forbidden because it is the law that might or might not forbid the activity, not the license.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com