Hacker News Reader

Comment by singpolyma3 | Hacker News Reader

Love this.

It says MIT license but then readme has a separate section on prohibited use that maybe adds restrictions to make it nonfree? Not sure the legal implications here.

View on HN

For reference, the MIT license contains this text: "Permission is hereby granted... to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use". So the README containing a "Prohibited Use" section definitely creates a conflicting statement.

The "prohibited uses" section seems to be basically "not to be used for crime", which probably doesn't have much legal weight one way or another.

You might use it for something illegal in one country, and then leave for another country with no extradition… but you’ve lost the license to sue the software and can be sued for copyright infringement.

I think the only restriction that seems problematic is not being able to clone someone’s voice without permission. I think there’s probably a valid case for using it for satire.

Good question.

If a license says "you may use this, you are prohibited from using this", and I use it, did I break the license?

If memory serves, the license is the ultimate source of truth on what is allowed or not. You cannot add some section that isn't in the text of the license (at least in the US and other countries that use similar legal systems) on some website and expect it to hold up in court because the license doesn't include that text. I know of a few other bigger-name projects that try to pull these kinds of stunts because they don't believe anyone is going to actually read the text of the license.

The copyright holder can set whatever license they want, including writing their own.

In this case, I'd interpret it as they made up a new licence based on MIT, but their addendum makes it non-MIT, but something else. I agree with what others said; this "new" license has internal conflicts.

The license is clearly defined. It would be misleading, possibly fraudulent for them to then override the license elsewhere.

Simply, it's MIT licensed. If they want to change that, they have to remove that license file OR clearly update it to be a modified version of MIT.

I think if they took you to court for cloning someone's voice without permission they would probably lose because this conflict makes the terms unclear.

An unclear license would default back to full copyright protection I would think.

Not necessarily. I believe many courts have a principle that an unclear agreement is read in favor of the party that did not write the agreement.

Tried to use voice cloning but in order to download the model weights I have to create a HuggingFace account, connect it on the command line, give them my contact information, and agree to their conditions. The open source part is just the client and chunking logic which is pretty minimal.

From my understanding, the code is MIT, but the model isn't? What consitutes a "Software" anyway? Aren't resources like images, sounds and the likes exempt from it (hence, covered by usual copyright unless separately licensed)? If so, in the same vein, an ML model is not part of "Software". By the way, the same prohibition is repeated on the huggingface model card.

Yeah, I don't understand the point of the prohibited use section at all, seems like unnecessary fluff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com