The poster doesn't like it, so it's different. Most of the "legal analysis" and "foregone conclusions" in these types of discussions are vibes dressed up as objective declarations.
Whether data acquired from a licence that specifically forbids building a derivative work without also releasing that derivative under the same licence counts as a legitimate data gathering operation is anyone's guess, as those specific circumstances are about as far from that prior case as they can be.
Everybody is trying to have their cake and eat it, too, by license laundering.
Heck, money laundering means you at least lose some of the money.
> This License acknowledges your rights of fair use or other equivalent, as provided by copyright law.
It is legitimate to acquire GPL software. The requirements of the license only occur if you're distributing the work AND fair use does not apply.
Training certainly doesn't count as distribution, so the buck passes to inference, which leaves us dealing with substantial similarity test, and still, fair use.
If a human reads GPL code and outputs a recreation of that code (derivative work) using what they learned - that is illegal.
If an AI reads GPL code and outputs a recreation of that code using what it "learned" - it's not illegal?
If that is the case, then copyright holds no weight any more. I should be allowed to train an LLM on decompiled firmware (say, Playstation, Switch, iPhone) in countries where decompilation is legal - then have the LLM produce equivalent firmware that I later use to build an emulator (or competing open source firmware).
It's funny you mention that, because one of the biggest fair use cases that effectively cemented "fair use" for emulators is Sony Computer Entertainment Inc v. Connectix Corp.[1] where the copying of PlayStaion BIOS files for the purposes of reverse engineering and creating an emulator was explicitly ruled to be fair use, including running that code through a disassembler.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_I....
- The ROM was used to build the emulator (which didn't include the ROM but was only able to use it like any other hardware)
- Then the ROM was used to derive a specification and do A/B testing on (similar to Phoenix BIOS), and a different team coded a replacement ROM
There is no cleanroom inside an LLM.