> We have a system that clearly creates value, but no longer distributes it in a sustainable way

The same thing happened (and is still happening) with news media and aggregation/embedding like Google News or Facebook.

I don't know if anyone has found a working solution yet. There have been some laws passed and licensing deals [1]. But they don't really seem to be working out [2].

[1] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/canada_australia_platfor...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-02/media-bargaining-code...

> I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books

Aside from the incentive problem, there is a kind of theft, known as conversion: when you were granted a license under some conditions, and you went beyond them - you kept the car past your rental date, etc. In this case, the documentation is for people to read; AI using it to answer questions is a kind of conversion (no, not fair use). But these license limits are mostly implicit in the assumption that (only) people are reading, or buried in unenforceable site terms of use. So it's a squishy kind of stealing after breaching a squishy kind of contract - too fuzzy to stop incented parties.

There will be no royalties, simply make all the models that trained on the public internet also be required to be public.

This won't help tailwind in this case, but it'll change the answer to "Should I publish this thing free online?" from "No, because a few AI companies are going to exclusively benefit from it" to "Yes, I want to contribute to the corpus of human knowledge."

It's not as simple as calling it theft, but it is simply theft, plus the other good points you made.

> We have a system that clearly creates value, but no longer distributes it in a sustainable way.

It does not "create value" it harvests value and redirects the proceeds it accrues towards its owners. The business model is a middleman that arbitrages the content by separating it from the delivery.

Software licensing has been broken for 2 decades. That's why free software isn't financially viable for anybody except a tiny minority. It should be. The entire industry has been operating by charity. The rich mega corporations have decided they're not longer going to be charitable.

So you don’t like big corps getting ever richer by hiding behind copyright.

How about my books?

I’ve published a few, make maybe $500 a month from them.

Is it fine for the LLMs to rip them off?

I don't understand this mindset. I solve problems on stackoverflow and github because I want those problems to stay solved. If the fixes are more convenient for people to access as weights in an LLM... who cares?

I'd be all for forcing these companies to open source their models. I'm game to hear other proposals. But "just stop contributing to the commons" strikes me as a very negative result here.

We desperately need better legal abstractions for data-about-me and data-I-created so that we can stop using my-data as a one-size-fits-all square peg. Property is just out of place here.

https://www.softwareheritage.org/ will index it anyway.

Also, if you publish your code in your own server, it will be DDoSed to death by the many robots that will try to scrape it simultaneously.

that's why i don't add comments to my commits, i don't want them to know the reason for the changes.

Good, we don’t want code that people are possessive of, in the software commons. The attitude that you are concerned about what people do with your output means that nobody should touch your output, too big a risk of drama.

We don’t own anything we release to the world.

> just like humans are allowed to learn from copyrighted content

humans learning : machines learning == whale swimming : submarine swimming

It's not the exact 100% same thing. Therefore you cannot base any rights on it.

If you still don't buy it, consider this analogy:

killing a human vs. destroying a machine

Thank god that we're not using your line of thinking here.

Sure. But if I see listen to some song, and copy it, and release it, I could get sued. Even if I claim that I'm merely inspired by the original content - the court doesn't care.

You don't need to redistribute the original material, it's enough that you just copied it.

The problem here is "money".

The AI goldrush has proven that intellectual property laws are null and void. Money is all that matters.

The problem here is the "so what?"

Imagine OpenAI is required by law to list their weights on huggingface. The occasional nerd with enough GPUs can now self host.

How does this solve any tangible problems with LLMs regurgitating someone else's work?

I feel to be consistent the output of that model will also be under that same open license.

I can see this being extremely limiting in training data, as only "compatible" licensed data would be possible to package together to train each model.

B-b-but what if someone uses the weights and training code to train their own models!!

It'd substantially reduce the incentive for the training of new models.

Humans are punished for plagiarism all the time. Myriad examples exist of students being disenrolled from college, professionals being fired, and personal reputations tarnished forever.

When a LLM is trained on copyright works and regurgitates these works verbatim without consent or compensation, and then sells the result for profit, there is currently no negative impact for the company selling the LLM service.

Issue to me is that I or someone else bought those books. Or in case of local libraries the authors got money for my borrowing copy.

And I can not copy paste myself to discuss with thousands or millions of users at time.

To me clear solution is to make some large payment to each author of material used in traing per training of model say 10k to 100k range.

false equivalence because machines are not human beings

a lossy compression algorithm is not "inspired" when it is fed copyrighted input

If you are plagiarizing, “for free” doesn’t even save you.

If your book reproduces something 95% verbatim, you won't even be able to publish it.

If the entities democratizing access weren't companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars with a requirement to prioritize substantial returns for their investors, I'd agree with you!

How? You don't know what the llm was trained on and don't know if it has any bias. Imo llms are a disaster for knowledge work because they act like a black box.

Yes, it seems that way now.

The first one's free.

After you're hooked, and don't know how to think any more for yourself, and all the primary sources have folded, the deal will be altered.

The psychology behind "creating it for the sake of creating it" can also be significantly changed by seeing someone then take it and monetize it without so much as a "thank you".

It's come up quite often even before AI when people released things under significantly looser licenses than they really intended and imagined them being used.

>If I was able to memorize every pixel value to reconstruct a movie from memory, would that be theft?

Don an experiment, memorize a popular small poem, then publish it under your name (though I suggest to check the laws in your rtegion for this and also consider it might affect your reputation).

IMO is the same if ChatGPT memorizes my poem and then you ask it for a poem , you copy paste my poem from ChatGPT and publish it as your own.

Excuse me, but even if in principle of “information wants to be free”, the actual outcome of LLMs is the opposite of democratizing information and access. It completely centralizes accesses, censorship, and profits in the hands of a few mega corporations.

It is completely against the spirit of information wants to be free. Using that catch phrase in protection of mega corps is a travesty.

> In my opinion information wants to be free.

But I still need to pay rent.

> In my opinion information wants to be free.

Information has zero desires.

> It's wild to me seeing the tech world veer into hyper-capitalism and IP protectionism.

Really? Where have you been the last 50 years?

> Plumbers are not claiming use fees from the pipes they installed a decade ago.

Plumbers also don't discount the job on the hopes they can sell more, or just go around installing random pipes in random locations hoping they can convince someone to pay them.

> Why should intellectual property authors be given extreme ownership over behavior then?

The position that cultural artifacts should enter into the commons sooner rather than later is not unreasonable by any means, but most software is not cultural, requires heavy maintenance for the duration of its life, and still is well past obsolescence, gone and forgotten, well before the time frame you are discussing.

Writing the license is the easy part, the challenge is in making it legally actionable. If AI companies are allowed to get away with "nuh uh we ran it through the copyright-b-gone machine so your license doesn't count" then licenses alone are futile, it'll take lobbying to actually achieve anything.

I got an

"LLM Inference Compensation MIT License (LLM-ICMIT)"

A license that is MIT compatible but requires LLM providers to pay after inference, but only restricts online providers, not self-hosted models

I can ask Claude to generate you one right now. It will be just a bunch of bullshit words no matter how much work you put into writing them down (like any other such license).

They exist to protect the creator/inventor and allows them to get an ROI on their invested time/effort. But honestly today, the abundance of content, especially that can be generated by LLM, completely breaks this. We're overwhelmed with choice. Content has been comodotized. People will need to come to grasp with that and find other ways to get an ROI.

The article does provide a hint: "Operate". One needs to get paid for what LLMs cannot do. A good example is Laravel. They built services like Forge, Cloud, Nightwatch around open source.

The difference is that they are reselling it directly. They charge for inference that outputs tailwind.

It's fine to have a project that generates html-css as long as the users can find the docs for the dependencies, but when you take away the docs and stop giving real credit to the creators it starts feeling more like plagiarism and that is what's costing tailwind here.

This is a tone deaf take that ignores the massive imbalance in how IP law is wielded by large corporations vs individuals or small firms.

Disney lawyers would like to know your location.

Also, that Botox patent should be expiring by now, shouldn’t it?