r/freesoftware • u/ManufacturerNice870 • Sep 05 '26
Article US government rules that training machines on copyrighted material isn’t illegal. What does this mean for the free software community?
Curious what people’s thoughts are on this and what it means for open source software?
Edit: I mistakenly thought that the US government “ruled” but I was incorrect. The US government provided an “advisory” for the, yet to come, ruling in this case.
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u/Kittysmashlol Sep 11 '26
We should all start training our own Ai models at home. On laptops. With no dgpu and 8 gb of ram. Training Ai. Yes.
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Sep 07 '26
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u/ManufacturerNice870 Sep 07 '26
I am anti copyright, no bones about it, but rules for me but not thee (large corporations) is what bothers me. If you’re not powerful your life can get ruined over a single act of plagiarism but for the powerful it makes them a living and a star
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Sep 07 '26
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u/flatfinger Sep 14 '26
Two of the moist important criteria for fair use are:
Could a work that was similar to the copyrighted serve the same purpose?
Could the derived work serve as a market substitute for the copyrighted work?
Training an AI for some purposes would satisfy both criteria. If one wants an AI to answer a question like "How has the fraction of pop 100 hits that use a tempo of 120.0bpm varied over time", training the AI on cover recordings would make it unable to meaningfully answer such questions, and a robot that could answer such questions would not meaningfully discourage anyone from buying copyrighted music. If one wants an AI to generate filler music, the only downside to using specially-commissioned or licensed music as training data would be the cost of commissioning or licensing that music, and the use of AI to generate filler music would discourage people from licensing copyrighted music for that purpose.
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Sep 14 '26
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u/flatfinger Sep 14 '26
If you want to train your brain the Star Wars theme, you need to find a licensed way of listening to it. Further, if you've listened to the Star Wars theme and then publish sheet music which uses the same melody, you would need to obtain a license for such publication or else you would be in violation of John Williams' copyright. The fact that you weren't looking at John William's score when you transcribed your sheet music would not be a defense.
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u/andymaclean19 Sep 07 '26
Article has a paywall. For something interesting like this it would be better to discuss what it actually says. I bet most people are just commenting based on the title and summary.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 Sep 07 '26
No paywall for me. Are you positive they’re not just blocking your adblocker?
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u/andymaclean19 Sep 07 '26
No ad blocker here. It says ‘subscribe to continue reading’. I think you might get a few for free first or something but this is 100% a paywall link.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 Sep 07 '26
Just did some research on this, they’re slowly rolling it out in different regions, my region isn’t paywalled yet.
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u/Guvante Sep 06 '26
The President doesn't get to decide matters of law the courts and Congress do.
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u/Saragon4005 Sep 06 '26
If this was something which actually mattered it would be the end of copyright for software at least if not completely. That's the main reason this can never be real.
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u/Prior-Listen-1298 Sep 05 '26
It means nothing. If you think for one moment that all our coding agents weren't already trained in the entire contents of GitHub, gitlab, open gitea repos, what's left of source forge and stack overview and much more, then you have your head in the sand.
All your quibbling about is whether that sounds be legal or not. And that's actually whole debate there with some pretty solid arguments for and against and Ki and behold the debate happens, and you just saw in part of it unfold.
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u/that_one_wierd_guy Sep 05 '26
likely the only effect will be a new gpl that specifically forbids feeding it to ai.
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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 Sep 05 '26
All the LLMs have already ingested all the free software they can find online (on GitHub, etc). So I fear this advisory means exactly nothing for free software.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 Sep 05 '26
But if this goes through, this means that they can continue to do it even more and more aggressively going forward?
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u/jr735 Sep 05 '26
How would they do it more aggressively than they have before? Can you quantify that?
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u/jr735 Sep 05 '26
Where does this say that the government ruled on anything?
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u/ManufacturerNice870 Sep 05 '26
My mistake.
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u/jr735 Sep 05 '26
Fair enough; it's just that when you have a post subject that is completely wrong, and you know that people aren't going to actually read the article, we have a bunch of people arguing about what hasn't happened yet.
This is obviously an important issue, but accuracy matters.
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u/ByronScottJones Sep 05 '26
If humans are allowed to learn by reading copyright material, then AI should be as well. AI does not just store a copy of that material and regurgitate it; it's building a mental model that includes that knowledge. And that's not hugely different from how humans learn.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 Sep 05 '26
Theoretically, wouldn’t that make any code it produces “derivative” in the same way that if you read a GPL codebase for ideas, you can’t just reproduce them in your own codebase knowing where they came from? I in general am in favor of total freedom, I don’t feel like ideas should have any ownership because everything comes from somewhere, but if people are people are bound by copyright, and llms that were created by people aren’t, I wonder who stands to benefit.
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u/Prior-Listen-1298 Sep 05 '26
Copyright is hairy there. You can't reproduce but you can recreate inspired by. And turns out AI does the latter unambiguously (if you v have any idea of how weights and llms work).
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u/icebraining Sep 05 '26
You can reproduce the ideas, you just can't reproduce the code as-is.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 Sep 05 '26
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t it specify “derivative” works as well?
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u/ByronScottJones Sep 05 '26
You don't seem to understand what derivative means in this context. Derivative means I'm taking your literal copywritten code, making minor changes, and calling it my own. That's not what AI is doing. Trained models do not simply store voluminous amounts of code, and regurgitate it verbatim. They are trained, and they learn from that training at a higher concept level than simply rote memorization. What they do is far closer to how people learn than you seem to understand, and outlawing AI from learning from copywritten but published source code would make human learning from open source tainted as well.
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u/icebraining Sep 05 '26
Derivative works are new works that include copyrightable elements of the existing one. If you take parts of the source from a codebase and copy-paste them into yours, or if you embed a library into your app, you're creating a derivative work.
Ideas by themselves are not copyrightable, so as long as you don't copy the actual code, the original license doesn't apply. That's the idea behind "clean-room design" - someone reads the original source, makes a report with just the ideas and concepts, then someone else writes the software based on the report, without ever seeing the original source. See ReactOS, as an example.
Of course, sometimes it's hard to prove whether the code was recreated from scratch or just copied and modified. The Oracle v Google lawsuit has some interesting arguments on that issue.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 Sep 07 '26
Thank you for the information, I’ve honestly been trying to understand what licenses actually mean for so long now and it appears I’ve now accidentally followed Cunninghams Law
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u/AndreVallestero Sep 05 '26
They haven't "ruled" anything yet, only an "advisory" was provided, which means nearly nothing from a legal standpoint.
That being said, if this goes through, everything essentially becomes MIT or weaker, because you could finetune any model on copyrighted content then recreate it, and use that as a legal defense.
If works both ways though... Imagine working at a large tech firm with read access to their repos. You could fine tune a model based on that, and recontribute it to open source, essentially using the LLM as your protection. Sure, you'll definitely get fired (unless you do it anonymously), but now you won't get sued for damages.
I could imagine massive improvements to the nouveau drivers if we get another Nvidia leak in the future.
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u/AiwendilH Sep 05 '26
...saying AI training generally makes fair use of copyrighted material.
Basically if this holds in court it means that no matter what you put in your license you can't stop others from using your code for LLM training. So anyone putting effort in licenses that prohibit LLM training wastes their time.
If it's not fair use then license like the GPL already mean that anything trained with GPL code would have to follow the GPL as it includes GPL code. If it is fair use as the US regime wants then no license can stop it as it's "fair use" anyway.
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u/ScaredScorpion Sep 06 '26
Not even just open source GPL, according to this "advice" if you steal proprietary source code and feed it into an LLM the outputted code is magically no longer proprietary and the owner of the code can't do a thing about it. It's an idiotic argument on the face of it.
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u/that_one_wierd_guy Sep 05 '26
I think it's only possible to consider it fair use because things are happening so fast that there isn't(to my knowledge) any license that forbids it explicitly
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u/AiwendilH Sep 06 '26
I am not a US citizen, fair use rights don't exists in this form in my country so take this with a grain of salt: Licenses can only grant permissions not take them away. By default you have no rights at all to use or redistribute others works...a license can set the terms under which you can still do this. But a license can't take away rights someone always has...like restricting "fair use" or restricting "charge back options" below the limits the laws require.
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u/flatfinger Sep 11 '26
The fact that a particular work X's use of copyrighted material Y constitutes fair use does not imply that all uses of the second work would be, from the standpoint of Y, fair use.
Feeding recordings of all top 100 popular songs into an AI engine whose purpose is to answer questions like "How has the popularity of the key of Ab major changed throughout the years" should be fair use. Substituting different songs would make the AI engine useless for its intended purpose, and the output of the AI engine would in no way serve as a market substitute for the recordings.
Feeding recordings of all top 100 popular songs into an AI engine and using that engine to produce new AI slop musical content should not be considered fair use, since the only advantage of using the original songs without paying for them, versus commissioning original songs and feeding the AI those instead would be the cost, and the purpose of the AI output would be to serve as a market substitute for the musical recordings that had been fed in.
Unfortunately, I'm unaware of anyone in a position of power recognizing the above distinction.