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Reply to @cwebber@social.coop
Aaron Williamson@copiesofcopies@social.coop (2026-10-15 23:10:40)
@cwebber @bkuhn @trashheap IMO the real challenge to FOSS enforcement against LLM producers is the same one everyone else has: if the training is fair use because the resulting model is transformative, the producer doesn’t need a license (and doesn’t have to respect the terms of any existing license). It’s still early early days in terms of court decisions, but this looks like the direction we’re headed in the US (though the outcome will likely vary depending on how much memorization a model can be shown to do).
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Bradley M. Kühn@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org (2026-10-16 21:57:46)
@copiesofcopies
∃ **so many** cases pending! It seems to me we can't guess the outcome at this point with reliability beyond like a 1-to-100 (or more) chance against the field.
Also, keep in mind the way most software developers use LLM-gen-AI now is to modify a work in front of them: `git clone` something, then work with the #LLMGenAI to modify it. I don't see how a fair use defense will allow those changes to dodge license requirements.
Also, FOSS licenses are contracts, too.
Cc: @cwebber
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Aaron Williamson@copiesofcopies@social.coop (2026-10-16 22:37:48)
@bkuhn @cwebber
I expect the world looks very different from where you’re sitting than from where I am. Every time I look at my (FOSS-heavy) fedi feed, I’m struck by the contrast between the AI pessimism & skepticism here versus everywhere else I look.
LLMs have become part of everyday life for vast swaths of ordinary people. Skilled software developers routinely use them to produce code that’s far from slop. And probably most importantly, the AI industry is widely viewed as the most significant driver of U.S. economic growth and competitive advantage going right now.
All of those things surely sound negative to you, but they’re descriptively true. And against that backdrop, I see very little possibility that US courts will cut OpenAI et al off at the knees, even though we’ll surely see adverse rulings in cases of obvious misappropriation (Anthropic’s trove of pirated books, Sora reproducing entire songs from its training data).