It's the third sentence of the article:

> the district court ruled that using the books to train LLMs was fair use but left for trial the question of whether downloading them for this purpose was legal.

Stack Overflow has verbatim copied GPL code in some of its questions and answers. As presented by SO, that code is not under the GPL license (this also applies to other licenses - the BSD advertising clause and the original json will cause similar problems).

Arguably, the use of the code in the Stack Overflow question and answer is fair use.

The problem occurs not when someone reads the Q&A with the improperly licensed code but rather when they then copy that code verbatim into their own non GPL product and distribute that without adherence to the GPL.

It's the last step - some human distributing the improperly licensed software that is the violation of the GPL.

This same chain of what is allowed and what is not is equally applicable to LLMs. Providing examples from GPL licensed material to answer a question isn't a license violation. The human copying that code (from any source) and pasting it into their own software is a license violation.

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Some while back I had a discussion with a Swiss developer about the indefinite article used before "hobbit" in a text game. They used "an hobbit" and in the discussion of fixing it, I quoted the first line of The Hobbit. "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." That cleared it up and my use of it in that (and this) discussion is fair use.

If someone listening to that conversation (or reading this one) thought that the bit that I quoted would be great on a T-shirt and them printed that up and distributed it - that would be a copyright violation.

Google's use of thumbnails for images was found to be fair use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Amazon.com...

    The Ninth Circuit did, however, overturn the district court's decision that Google's thumbnail images were unauthorized and infringing copies of Perfect 10's original images. Google claimed that these images constituted fair use, and the circuit court agreed. This was because they were "highly transformative."

I believe that Stack Overflow, Google Images, and LLM models and their output constitutes an example of transformative fair use. What someone does with that output is where copyright infringement happens.

My claim isn't that AI vendors are blameless but rather that in the issue of copyright and license adherence it is the human in the process that is the one who has agency and needs to follow copyright (and for AI agents that were unleashed without oversight, it is the human that spun them up or unleashed them).

Does the reasoning in the cases where people to whom GPL software was distributed could sue the distributor for source code, rather than relying on the copyright holder suing for breach of copyright strengthen the argument that arbitrary limitations are enforceable?

This is in fact how I operate.

And the judgement said that the training was fair use, but that the duplication might be an infringement. The GFDL doesn't restrict duplication, only distribution, so if training on GFDLed material is fair use and not the creation of a derivative work then there's no damage.

For this to stand up in court you'd need to show that an LLM is distributing "a modified version of the document".

If I took a book and cut it up into individual words (or partial words even), and then used some of the words with words from every other book to write a new book, it'd be hard to argue that I'm really "distributing the first book", even if the subject of my book is the same as the first one.

This really just highlights how the law is a long way behind what's achievable with modern computing power.

Copyright infringement causes harm, so if there's no harm there's no infringement. You can freely duplicate GFDLed material, so downloading it isn't an infringement. If training a model on that downloaded material is fair use then there's no infringement.

what I keep wondering is what kind of laws will be rendered useless with the precedent they'll cause. Can this be beginning of the end of copyright and intellectual property?