Also, in 2022, several unidentified developers sued OpenAI and GitHub based on claims that the organizations used publicly posted programming code to train generative models in violation of software licensing terms
They can argue about it not being a copy all they want. If there is a single GPL licenced line of code scraped then anything they produce is a derivative work & must be licenced GPL.
And if so, I assume “derivative” will still subjective to some degree. Where do we draw the line between derivative and non-derivative?
I’m torn about my personal opinion about copyrights and software licensing in general. I think the main problem is the huge power imbalance between people and corporations, not so much the fact a company analyzed a bunch of available data to solve programming problems.
They don’t copy the data and sell it verbatim to others which would be a legal issue and in my mind also a moral issue, as they don’t add any additional value.
2: Normally derivative works are patched or modified versions of the original. I think the common English meaning would apply & chatGPT et al are fucked. I doubt there is a precedent for this yet.
The only way I can see them weaseling out of this is by keeping the program running the model made in-house and proprietary while releasing the model in a format unusable without the base (proprietary) program. But maybe the GPL forbids such obfuscstion efforts (I don’t know, I haven’t studied it in detail)
From the article:
They can argue about it not being a copy all they want. If there is a single GPL licenced line of code scraped then anything they produce is a derivative work & must be licenced GPL.
nice.
I’ll play the uniformed devils advocate here:
I’m torn about my personal opinion about copyrights and software licensing in general. I think the main problem is the huge power imbalance between people and corporations, not so much the fact a company analyzed a bunch of available data to solve programming problems.
They don’t copy the data and sell it verbatim to others which would be a legal issue and in my mind also a moral issue, as they don’t add any additional value.
1: yes
2: Normally derivative works are patched or modified versions of the original. I think the common English meaning would apply & chatGPT et al are fucked. I doubt there is a precedent for this yet.
The only way I can see them weaseling out of this is by keeping the program running the model made in-house and proprietary while releasing the model in a format unusable without the base (proprietary) program. But maybe the GPL forbids such obfuscstion efforts (I don’t know, I haven’t studied it in detail)
GPL v2 don’t, which lead to tivoization. But Linus himself didn’t agree with that standing.