Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code?
by kouteiheika on Thursday June 23, 2022 @11:05AM
(#31850111)
> Agreed, and I'm not sure why you think forcing GPT and Copilot to respect open licenses will make them illegal instead of more open.
I wasn't talking about Copilot. I was talking about the vast majority of other interesting models. It wouldn't make Copilot itself illegal because it was trained on explicitly licensed data (so it'd make it GPL-licensed), but it would make those other models illegal.
Take for example the GPT-J, which was trained on 825GB of data scraped off the Internet. If we assume the view that a machine learning model is a derivative work of its training data then that makes GPT-J illegal, because it was trained on a bunch of "all rights reserved" data, and there's no legal license under which it could be released. Most interesting models are like that.
I wasn't talking about Copilot. I was talking about the vast majority of other interesting models. It wouldn't make Copilot itself illegal because it was trained on explicitly licensed data (so it'd make it GPL-licensed), but it would make those other models illegal.
Take for example the GPT-J, which was trained on 825GB of data scraped off the Internet. If we assume the view that a machine learning model is a derivative work of its training data then that makes GPT-J illegal, because it was trained on a bunch of "all rights reserved" data, and there's no legal license under which it could be released. Most interesting models are like that.
> so Copilot must not charge users
That's not what the GPL says.