Regardless, the lack of a license cannot give you more permission than a restrictive license. You're arguing that if take a book out of a bookstore without paying (or signing a contract), then I have more rights than if I sign a contract and then leave with the book.
That is clearly false. It's hard to imagine the confusion of ideas that would lead you to such a conclusion.
Training a model on model output isn't copying.
There's no way to phrase this where training a model on copyrighted human-generated images/text isn't copying, but training a model on computer-generated images/text is copying.
> If you want to do that, you have to limit end-user freedom with an EULA.
If you want to limit end-user freedom with a EULA, you have to figure out how to get users to sign it. Copyright is one way to force them to do so, but doesn't really seem relevant to this situation if training a model on copyrighted material is fair use.
And again, if somebody generates a giant dataset with LLaMA, if you want to argue that pushing that into another LLM to train with is making a copy of that data, then there's no way to get around the implication there that training on a human-generated image is also making a copy of that image.
That's literally what I said.
> There's no way to phrase this where training a model on copyrighted human-generated images/text isn't copying, but training a model on computer-generated images/text is copying.
Literally nobody is saying that.
> If you want to limit end-user freedom with a EULA, you have to figure out how to get users to sign it.
That is not true. ProCD v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996).
You and others seem to have an over-the-top hostile reaction to the idea that contract law can do things copyright law cannot do. But it is objective and unarguable fact.
Okay? Apologies for making that assumption. But if you're not saying that, then your position here is even less defensible. Arguing that model output isn't copyrightable but that it's still covered by EULA if anyone anywhere tries to use it is even more absurd than arguing that it's covered by copyright.
> That is not true. ProCD v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996).
ProCD is about shrinkwrap licenses, the court determined that buying the software and installing it was the equivalent of agreeing to the license.
In no way does that imply that licenses are enforceable on people who never agreed to the licenses. The court expanded what counts as agreement, it does not mean you don't have to get people to agree to the EULA. I mean, take pedantic issue with the word "sign" if you want (sure, other types of agreement exist), but the point is still true -- if you want to restrict people with a EULA, they need to actually agree to the EULA.
And if you don't have IP law as a way to block access to your stuff, then you don't really have a way to force people to agree to the EULA. Someone using LLaMA output to train a model may have never been in a position to agree to that EULA, and Facebook doesn't have the legal ability to say "hey, nobody can use output without agreeing to this" because they don't have copyright over that output. Can they get people to sign a EULA that download the weights from them? Sure. Is that enough? No.
If I download a dataset generated by LLaMA, there is no shrinkwrap license on that data.
> If someone uses LLaMa output to train models, it is unlikely they will be sued for copyright infringement. It is far more likely they will be sued for breach of contract.
It is incredibly unlikely that someone using a 3rd-party database of LLaMA output would be found to be in violation of contract law unless at the very least they had actually agreed to the contract by downloading LLaMA themselves. A restriction on the usage of LLaMA does not mean anything for someone who is using LLaMA output but has not taken any action that would imply agreement to that EULA.
> You and others seem to have an over-the-top hostile reaction to the idea that contract law can do things copyright law cannot do. But it is objective and unarguable fact.
No, what we have a hostile reaction to is the objectively false idea that a EULA covers unrelated 3rd parties. That's not a thing, it's never been a thing.
Clickwrap agreements are enforceable, and legally enforceable agreements can place more restrictions on the use of a piece of software than copyright law alone can.
As a result, software that, for ideological reasons, does not restrict use will always have fewer protections than software with more restrictive terms.
Your off-topic rant about Shakespeare is irrelevant.
> Clickwrap agreements are enforceable, and legally enforceable agreements can place more restrictions on the use of a piece of software than copyright law alone can.
To take a page from your earlier comment, literally no one here is denying the existence of clickwrap agreements. Clickwrap agreements are completely irrelevant to the current conversation.
> Your off-topic rant about Shakespeare is irrelevant.
You can not enforce a EULA on someone interacting with a piece of work you do not own IP rights to if they did not agree to that EULA in some way.
I'm sorry, but agreement is part of contract law.
If you think you can force a EULA on a piece of content you don't own that will bind people who got the content from a 3rd-party and who never agreed to your EULA under any legal definition of agreement, then by all means, slap a EULA on Shakespeare. It makes just as much sense as what you're suggesting.
> literally no one here is denying the existence of clickwrap agreements.
You denied the enforceability of clickwrap agreements. You were wrong.
LLaMA uses a clickwrap agreement. "By clicking 'I Accept' below or by using or distributing any portion or element of the Llama Materials, you agree to be bound by this Agreement."
That agreement covers its output: "You will not use the Llama Materials or any output or results of the Llama Materials to improve any other large language model (excluding Llama 2 or derivative works thereof)."
Your hypotheticals about third parties are off-topic and have zero bearing on this conversation.
The topic under discussion is whether it is logically "inconsistent" for Meta to claim its output is protected while other content is not. Those two positions are perfectly consistent in light of the fact that LLaMA output is protected by the terms of a clickwrap agreement.
It's all but certainly copied, and not just in the "held in memory" sense but actually stored along with the rest of the training collection. What may not happen is distribution. There's a difference in scale/nature of copyright violation between the two but both could well be construed that way.
Additionally, I think there's a reasonable argument that use as training data is a novel one that should be treated differently under the law. And if there's not:
> If you want to do that, you have to limit end-user freedom with an EULA.
What will eventually happen -- at least without some kind of worldwide convention -- is that someone who can successfully dodge licensing obligations will be able to take and redistribute weight-data and/or clean-room code.
At least, if we're adopting a "because we can" approach to everything related.
Arbitrary Internet data that is not copied does not have any copyright implications.
If it is not clickwalled or have some sort of shrink wrap license, there is no mechanism by which to impose contractual obligations.
LLaMa does impose contractual obligations.
This issue reminds me of the whole FSF/AGPL situation. At some point you just have to accept that copyright law, in and of itself, is not sufficient to control what people do with your software. If you want to do that, you have to limit end-user freedom with an EULA.