Where's the threat? The FSF was notified that as part of the settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic they were potentially entitled to money, but in this case the works in question were released under a license that allowed free duplication and distribution so no harm was caused. There's then a note that if the FSF had been involved in such a suit they'd insist on any settlement requiring that the trained model be released under a free license. But they weren't, and they're not.

(Edit: In the event of it being changed to match the actual article title, the current subject line for this thread is " FSF Threatens Anthropic over Infringed Copyright: Share Your LLMs Freel")

Is the FSF threatening Anthropic? The way I read it looks like they are not:

> We are a small organization with limited resources and we have to pick our battles, but if the FSF were to participate in a lawsuit such as Bartz v. Anthropic and find our copyright and license violated, we would certainly request user freedom as compensation.

Sounds more like “we can’t and won’t sue, but this is the kind of compensation that we think would be appropriate”

HN really needs some stricter rules for editorialized title. The HN title has nothing to do with the link (unless the article is edited?)

The title is:

The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement, but when we do, we settle for freedom

> It is a class action lawsuit… the parties agreed to settle instead of waiting for the trial…

It would be nice if members of the class could vote to force a case to trial. For the typical token settlement amount, I’m sure many would rather have the precedent-setting case instead.

It looks like the stance of FSF is for proliferation of the copyleft to trained LLMs

> "Therefore, we urge Anthropic and other LLM developers that train models using huge datasets downloaded from the Internet to provide these LLMs to their users in freedom"

What weak, counter-productive, messaging. This is like having a bully punching you in the face and responding with “hey man, I’m not going to do anything about this, I’m not even going to tell an adult, but I’d urge you to consider not punching me in the face”. Great news for the bully! You just removed one concern from their mind, essentially giving the permission to be as bad to you as they want.

A related topic that I have in the past thought about is, whether LLM derived code would necessitate the release under a copyleft license because of the training data. Never saw a cogent analysis that explained either why or why not this is the case beyond practicality due to models having been utilized in closed source codebases already…

The framing of 'share your weights freely' as a remedy is interesting but underspecified. The FSF's argument is essentially that training on copyrighted code without permission is infringement, and the remedy should be open weights. But open weights don't undo the infringement -- they just make a potentially infringing artifact publicly available. That's not how copyright remedies work. What they're actually asking for is more like a compulsory license, which Congress would have to create. The demand for open weights as a copyright remedy is a policy argument dressed up as a legal one.

The FSF seems toothless when it comes to actually enforcing anything regarding license violations.

How dare they? Defending freedom of these filthy people and dignity of authors against these nice familiar corporations!

The rephrased¹ title "FSF Threatens Anthropic over Infringed Copyright: Share Your LLMs Free" certainly doesn’t dramatise enough how odious an act it can be.

¹ Original title is "The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement, but when we do, we settle for freedom"

Misleading title

>share complete training inputs with every user of the LLM

They don't have the rights to distribute the training data.

Good. I want to see more lawsuits going after these hyper scalers for blatantly disregarding copyright law while simultaneously benefiting from it. In a just world they would all go down and we would be left with just the OSS models. But we don't live in a fair world :(

> Among the works we hold copyrights over is Sam Williams and Richard Stallman's Free as in freedom: Richard Stallman's crusade for free software, which was found in datasets used by Anthropic as training inputs for their LLMs.

This is the reason why AI companies won't let anyone inspect which content was in the training set. It turns out the suspicions from many copyright holders (including the FSF) was true (of course).

Anthropic and others will never admit it, hence why they wanted to settle and not risk going to trial. AI boosters obviously will continue to gaslight copyright holders to believe nonsense like: "It only scraped the links, so AI didn't directly train on your content!", or "AI can't see like humans, it only see numbers, binary or digits" or "AI didn't reproduce exactly 100% of the content just like humans do when tracing from memory!".

They will not share the data-set used to train Claude, even if it was trained on AGPLv3 code.