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Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence

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  Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Gerardo Ballabio <gerardo.ballabio@gmail.com> - 2023-02-24 10:30 +0100
    Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-02-24 14:30 +0100
    Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-02-24 19:10 +0100
      Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> - 2023-02-24 20:00 +0100
        Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-02-24 20:50 +0100
          Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-02-26 17:10 +0100
            Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-02-26 21:50 +0100
              Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-02-27 02:50 +0100
                Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Scott Kitterman <debian@kitterman.com> - 2023-02-27 05:10 +0100
                Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-02-27 07:20 +0100
                  Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-02-27 08:50 +0100
                    Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-02-27 09:00 +0100
                    Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-02-27 18:50 +0100
                Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> - 2023-02-28 06:40 +0100
                  Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-02-28 09:10 +0100
                  Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-02-28 09:10 +0100
              Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-02-27 02:50 +0100
                Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-02-27 09:00 +0100
                  Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-02-27 09:40 +0100
                    Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-02-27 19:10 +0100
                      Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-02-28 00:40 +0100
                        Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Sam Hartman <hartmans@suchdamage.org> - 2023-02-28 15:50 +0100
                        Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-02-28 19:40 +0100
                          Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-02-28 20:00 +0100
                          Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> - 2023-03-02 06:00 +0100
                            Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-03-02 11:40 +0100
                              Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn@sfconservancy.org> - 2023-03-03 05:30 +0100
                              Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> - 2023-03-04 05:50 +0100
                                Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-03-04 09:10 +0100
                                  Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> - 2023-03-15 05:20 +0100
                                    Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence "Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> - 2023-03-22 05:20 +0100
          Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> - 2023-02-27 05:10 +0100
            Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Daniel Lange <DLange@debian.org> - 2023-03-23 15:30 +0100
              Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-03-23 17:20 +0100

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#13215

On Mon, 27 Feb 2023 at 19:08, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:

>
> No.  It's entirely possible that using databases as training sets for an
> AI/ML engine is fair use under existing United States law and precedent as
> long as that use is sufficiently transformative (the first factor of the
> test, and I suspect the most important one here).

Considering what you reported in the previous e-mail about US national
law in 17 U.S.C. § 107 in 1976, It is not possible to use an entire or
a significant portion of a database for {business, commercial,
marketing} purposes without the copyright holder.

Whoever says the contrary forgot that fair use has been introduced to
allow those non-profit activities which have a social value plus few
profit activities (like journalism) that have a social role but the
former could use a very limited portion of copyrighted work. Very
simple and straightforward example is a newspaper article that cites a
couple of paragraphs from a book or some statistical data from a
private database. There is no chance that the incorporation of an
entire database (or a significant part of it) would enter into fair
use for {business, commercial, marketing} purposes otherwise the
principle of copyright would be gone.

I strongly feel that this discussion cannot continue because the
presentation of a mass of legal stuff without a comprehension of the
law principles would lead nowhere more than a show like some US trials
are. Principles cannot be bend by misinterpretation, misjudgement and
ill-written law like US national law in 17 U.S.C. § 107 in 1976 in
which point (1)...(4) are written in such a way that everyone that is
not very acknowledged about principles could misunderstand up to
absurdity.

This (1) does not mean that non-profit and for-profit activities are
equal in enjoy the fair use

    (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use
    is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

but it means the opposite, that the two activities can fair-use a
completely different amount of the copyrighted work

   (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to
    the copyrighted work as a whole

and in particular the (3) also means that if I write an article of a
few words, it is not fair-use 2 paragraphs of a book.

One more thing: it does not matter that two parties had N trials
settled but the agreement they had at the end - principle - because a
significant judgement is a definitive one otherwise it means that it
was not significant enough even to close that specific case.

> The obvious example is
> a search engine, which performs a similar transformation of clearly
> copyrighted works into a new service with a different purpose, without the
> explicit permission of the copyright holders.

This is another completely story for two reasons:

1. indexing by keywords - the website manager tagged that keyword, so
the content has not been accessed
2. web crawling is an automatic process that do a keyword
identification and associate them to the url

This process has nothing to do with the content unless you would
affirm that the word "cataclysm" cannot be used because it belongs to
a certain copyrighted book and moreover this process is completely
automated in which no human creativity has been involved. Moreover,
indexing and web crawling are totally different processes that lead to
totally different results and aims than those related to an AI
training. Forget to make an analogy between AI training and Google
business because they are completely different things.

>
> This is the reason why people have focused so much on GitHub Copilot's
> willingness to insert large blocks of code from other projects verbatim.
> Reproducing code from other projects is less transformative and looks more
> like simple copying, and therefore opens GitHub to a legal argument that
> their AI model is not sufficiently transformative to be fair use.

Transformative is not the key, incorporating large pieces of code is
not the key. This is the peak of the iceberg for which people realised
that their code has been used. The iceberg to handle is the learning
process before it happens which is about the input collection. Here we
are: the input collection of an AI/ML training system is what we want
to keep free. Why do we want to keep the input collection? Because
like in compilation we also have the entire model in freedom. This in
exchange for the right to use our code as input data.

I am pretty sure that those complaining about GitHub Copilot are not
upset because the AI is not transformative enough to masquerade their
code!

Best regards, R-

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#13219

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

>>>>> "Roberto" == Roberto A Foglietta <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> writes:

    Roberto> On Mon, 27 Feb 2023 at 19:08, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
    >> 
    >> No.  It's entirely possible that using databases as training sets
    >> for an AI/ML engine is fair use under existing United States law
    >> and precedent as long as that use is sufficiently transformative
    >> (the first factor of the test, and I suspect the most important
    >> one here).

    Roberto> Considering what you reported in the previous e-mail about
    Roberto> US national law in 17 U.S.C. § 107 in 1976, It is not
    Roberto> possible to use an entire or a significant portion of a
    Roberto> database for {business, commercial, marketing} purposes
    Roberto> without the copyright holder.

Please stop!
It's clear that you are not building support for your argument.
You've made your case to the best of your ability and not been
convincing.

But beyond that, this discussion is no longer on topic for
debian-project.
Debian cannot decide what the law is.
We've established that this situation is complicated.
You've proposed various things that someone could do to limit the use of
free software in AI training sets.
Other people have pointed out that may or may not work.
You think it will.
You haven't managed to convince your critics..
We won't know until this gets hashed out in courts.

That's about the level of detail appropriate for debian-project.
Further discussion of this issue at this time on this list does not
serve the community.

--Sam

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#13220

On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 at 15:36, Sam Hartman <hartmans@suchdamage.org> wrote:
>
> >>>>> "Roberto" == Roberto A Foglietta <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> writes:
>
>     Roberto> On Mon, 27 Feb 2023 at 19:08, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>     >>
>     >> No.  It's entirely possible that using databases as training sets
>     >> for an AI/ML engine is fair use under existing United States law
>     >> and precedent as long as that use is sufficiently transformative
>     >> (the first factor of the test, and I suspect the most important
>     >> one here).
>
>     Roberto> Considering what you reported in the previous e-mail about
>     Roberto> US national law in 17 U.S.C. § 107 in 1976, It is not
>     Roberto> possible to use an entire or a significant portion of a
>     Roberto> database for {business, commercial, marketing} purposes
>     Roberto> without the copyright holder.
>
> Please stop!
> It's clear that you are not building support for your argument.
> You've made your case to the best of your ability and not been
> convincing.
>
> But beyond that, this discussion is no longer on topic for
> debian-project.
> Debian cannot decide what the law is.
> We've established that this situation is complicated.
> You've proposed various things that someone could do to limit the use of
> free software in AI training sets.
> Other people have pointed out that may or may not work.
> You think it will.
> You haven't managed to convince your critics..
> We won't know until this gets hashed out in courts.
>
> That's about the level of detail appropriate for debian-project.
> Further discussion of this issue at this time on this list does not
> serve the community.

Ok, then. No problem. This will be my last message on this topic.

However, my last suggestion here is to collect this material and share
it with the FSF and FSF Europe. My aim was not to convince people
(consensus gain) but to give technical details relevant to those who
have a law education but usually lack the ability to properly
understand technical IT mechanisms in detail. Only few have the
ability to master both sides. It is not about complexity [1], it is
about complication [2] and the complication arises because IT people
and law people have two completely mindsets and risk/value perceptions
and follow different rules to address them.

> We won't know until this gets hashed out in courts.

About upgrading A/L/GPLv3 in A/L/GPLv4, it  seems to me quite an
urgent thing to do but challenging it in a court might happen years
from now. So there is a lot of time for preparation.

About "uscapio" and related questions, there is a very very little
probability that someone will ever bring anyone in court and in case a
very little patch in the kernel will make a huge difference in finding
an agreement which is well known how it should be. The patch has been
shared with some kernel maintainers some months ago and it is not
pending to be applied because I did not complete all the steps
required. That patch implies license and technical changes in
perspectives, both.

> Debian cannot decide what the law is.

Law is somewhat different in different countries, starting from those
countries in which you have a better chance. There are many of them.
Do not try to win the world in a single step but play chess instead.
The king is the last piece to take, not the first one. If you feel in
danger, grant your position in all the countries in which it is
feasible and cheap enough. Bringing in allies is the first thing to
do. Moreover, allies can be cheap for Debian to acquire and very
costly for your counterparty to move on their side.

Everyone that has a kind of urgency about doing business can employ me
and I will set up a near-complete solution for them that I did not
explain to everyone - oh, it is a risky business, then. Nein, it is about
thinking out of the box and replicating the same scheme that worked in
the past in other similar cases. And yes, this would greatly help the
Debian community as well because it will break down every illusion
about finding another way to go.

Their resistance is futile (cit.) but enjoyable. :-)

Good luck, R-

[1] complexity (n.) "composite nature, quality or state of being
composed of interconnected parts," from complex. Meaning "intricacy".

[2] late Middle English: from late Latin compilation (n- ), from Latin
complicare ‘fold together’ - what can be fols, can be unfolded
(explained).

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#13221

On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 at 19:23, Roberto A. Foglietta
<roberto.foglietta@gmail.com> wrote:

> Everyone that has a kind of urgency about doing business can employ me
> and I will set up a near-complete solution for them that I did not
> explain to everyone

The "near-complete" does not mean that it is work-in-progress. It
means that it fully covers every significant business case I know.
Those that are not covered are not significant. For those I do not
know, I cannot say anything about even if they exist or not.

Best regards, R-

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#13224

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > About upgrading A/L/GPLv3 in A/L/GPLv4, it  seems to me quite an
  > urgent thing to do but challenging it in a court might happen years
  > from now. So there is a lot of time for preparation.

Making a new version of the GPL is a big effort, and I'm the one who
has to lead it.  I have not been able to follow this discussion; it
was long an complicated.  If it described a reason to change the GPL,
I could not see it.

Would you please tell me the problem that you think the GPL needs to
be changed for?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

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#13225

On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 at 05:31, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > About upgrading A/L/GPLv3 in A/L/GPLv4, it  seems to me quite an
>   > urgent thing to do but challenging it in a court might happen years
>   > from now. So there is a lot of time for preparation.
>
> Making a new version of the GPL is a big effort, and I'm the one who
> has to lead it.  I have not been able to follow this discussion; it
> was long an complicated.  If it described a reason to change the GPL,
> I could not see it.
>
> Would you please tell me the problem that you think the GPL needs to
> be changed for?

Microsoft Github Copilot has shown to use large blocks of code without
citing the author/project nor indicating the license terms about that
code. This is the tip of the iceberg only because the problem is much
worse than this and it will worsen faster. Debate is about fair use
but is a blurry definition and defining what is not "fair use" seems
not having gained enough consensus. Thus a general and standard
solution is required, IMHO.

- A/L/GPLv3 applies to source code and scripts that should be compiled
or run by an interpreter (not only but just to be specific)

- the AI/ML training engines use source code and scripts as data, this
might or might not be a fair use, but for sure is a novelty which is
not covered by A/L/GPLv3

- then I decided to protect my projects repositories as database
(collection) in addition to the standard way to protect the code with
a well-known license

- because of the copyright law about databases, if someone creates a
larger database that contains my database or a part of it, then they
have to comply with the license that I choose to protect my project as
a database.

At this point it is necessary to report how to upgrade these licenses
has been proposed but first a brief summary about fair use:

- fair use as legal term is a blurry one

- fair use cannot be limited but expanded by the authors/licenses

- fair use should include {testing, learning, storage} and usually it does

- fair use cannot include {business, commercial, marketing} rights in
any way and in any conditions and can relax these rights only a little
bit and for those activities/professions that have a clear social
role/value.

To better understand this point of view, I suggest digging into the
history of copyright. The London public library has a lot of material
about it considering that the UK was one of the first countries to
develop the law further than a mere top-down dictate.

THE PROPOSAL

A/L/GPLv4 is an update in which it will clearly state that the license
applies to the composition and the {business, commercial, marketing}
rights are reserved and exchanged for freedom. Then the license
presents a "fair use" open definition in which some rights {testing,
learning} are clearly included. Everything else should be brought back
in these two categories. Finally, the license should state that every
collection item that does not have its own specific copyright and
license note/header, it is licensed under A/GPLv3.

 So, in the most simple case in which no any file report a specific
copyright note/header but just the repository, then this happens:

 - git repository A is licensed with A/GPLv4
 - the composition is under A/GPLv4
 - every file is under A/GPLv3

Thus this equation takes place:

 copyright : money ~alike~ copyleft : freedom

and the definition of "fair use" is not intended to "change the law"
but to give a standard interpretation of a blurry definition that
exists in all legislations but differently perceived and differently
written. Because the A/L/GPLv4 will have a global scope, then its
"fair use" definition/clarification will help many countries to align
to a standard definition and interpretation, We cannot change the law
but we can help those do that job to converge toward a standard and
reasonable definition.

Moreover, I suggest to remember in the license that without the moral
rights {authorship} the copyright itself has no meaning and thus all
related rights are void. Just to remember those companies who are used
to removing the name of authors from their source code headers in such
a way nobody, even an internal inspection can find them and verify
that all the rights have been properly and legally transferred. Again,
this would not change the world but acknowledge developers about their
rights. Education is as important as influencing as much ruling in
court, especially in open-source software-libre.

Everything above, IMHO and in the hope that it helps.

Best regards,
-- 
Roberto A. Foglietta
+49.176.274.75.661
+39.349.33.30.697

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#13226

Hey, everyone, as many of you probably know, I've been involved with many of
the GPL and AGPL enforcement efforts that are (publicly) known to have happen
in the USA since 1999, and also have been involved with the drafting process
of various copyleft licenses.  I currently am continuing that ongoing work
along with my colleagues at Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).

>From that context and point of view, there are three main points I want to
contribute to this discussion:

Point 0:

Always keep in forefront of your mind that the complexity of legal issues and
enforcement of licenses lags technology by a period measured in decades.  For
example, many folks have referenced the Google v. Oracle SCOTUS case — which
dealt with questions of software licensing and copyright that we were
discussing in the copyleft community as far back as the early 1980s.  Yet,
the case didn't come before SCOTUS for consideration until a few years ago,
and (on top of that) SCOTUS' decision was complex and didn't really resolve
some of the fundamental questions that we all have about how software
licensing works.  Most of the key issues (such as “where is the bright line
for when it becomes copyright infringement if you reimplement a known,
documented API”?)  that we in FOSS were worried about, while they *came up*
in Google v. Oracle, they still remain open legal questions in the USA.


Point 1:

FOSS licensing doesn't rely solely on copyright law.  Yes, grant of a
copyright license is the fundamental part of all FOSS licenses, but they are
also contractual agreements too.  (For folks unfamiliar with this point, I
encourage you to read the stuff we published at SFC's when we filed our case
against contract Vizio <https://sfconservancy.org/vizio/>.)  So, when
thinking about these questions, an exclusive focus on copyright questions
might not be particularly helpful.

Furthermore, copyright law isn't moral code: it's just an extremely flawed
legal system that we're forced to deal with because various regimes decided
back in the 1970s that software would be governed by copyright.  What
copyright law says or doesn't say in any particular jurisdiction never
provides us any moral compass to what is wrong or right for software freedom.
We must approach *that* question “a priori” (and as philosophers) because all
the “a posteriori” exploration of the question in the real world are just too
heavily biased by the incumbent capitalist structures that serve and/or
benefit from the proprietarization of software.

On that point, I do invite everyone over to the mailing list we're hosting at
SFC to discuss the morality and ethical implications in FOSS of
machine-learning-assisted software development.  You can read more about
this, and subscribe the maling list, via:
<https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/feb/23/committee-ai-assisted-software-github-copilot/>

Point 2:

There are a number of mistakes FOSS activists have made historically in
copyleft licensing creation and drafting.  Having been involved myself in the
invention and drafting of AGPLv3, and a somewhat-involved witness to the
GPLv3 drafting process, I learned the hard way that trying to address every
“issue of the day” quickly in a copyleft license draft leads to problems.

A big example appears in the patent provisions found in A/GPLv3§11¶3-6.  They
are complicated, unnecessarily wordy, and as full of loopholes as the worst
tax legislation.  Admittedly, the primary problem there may be that the
drafting process was over-influenced by large patent holders.  However, the
reason such influence was successful was because of a fervor of concern among
FOSS activists about seemingly-urgent patent issues of the day.  In
hindsight, those issues were either moot, or turned out even *worse* than we
imagined, and therefore poorly addressed by this section anyway.

To be clear abundantly clear so I'm not misunderstood: I'm analyzing these
issues in hindsight to help inform our current issues of the day.  Lots of
really experienced and smart policy people contemporaneously believed
(probably reasonably) that A/GPLv3§11 was the be-all-end-all of patent
language for copyleft.  But the behavior and legislation both changed in the
intervening years, *and* some seemingly huge problems of those days also seem
minuscule in the rear view mirror a decade later, and problems that we
thought were solved or could be solved stubbornly got worse.

Most importantly to this point, over the decade after GPLv3's release, lots
of corporate attorneys pushed heavily anti-GPLv3 agendas — claiming that the
patent language was the problem.  In fact, after years of work responding to
those (as it turned out, specious) criticisms, we later learned that the
patent language was just a convenient place to hang their hats in their
broader anti-GPLv3 campaign.  So, IMO, we (as a FOSS community) got basically
*no* policy gains on patent issues in GPLv3 that we didn't already have in
GPLv2, *but* we handed the opposition a bunch of text for them to paint as
“big scary reasons” to avoid GPLv3.  That's a huge factor in how we ended up
in the complex GPLv2-only / GPLv3-or-later divide in copyleft circles that we
have today.

IMO, this seemingly unrelated example really shows three key issues highly
relevant to the issue of machine-learning and FOSS:

  (a) it's very easy as a FOSS license drafter to be caught up in the issues
      of the day and overcompensate by writing more text into the license
      thinking it's great policy but then it backfires for
      political/social/enforceability/advocacy reasons,

  (b) the echo chambers and deference to incumbent authority that have
      historically dominated FOSS license drafting really have been
      problematic and we've not fully explored how to solve that for future
      drafting, and

  (c) because copyleft is such an amazing invention, we (as a FOSS community)
      have a tendency to see everywhere nails that we think the hammer of
      copyleft can hit — even when they may well be screws, not nails.

On (c), I point to my current-favorite license, AGPLv3, which I admittedly
helped design and draft.  Ultimately, AGPLv3 didn't do nearly as much as we'd
hoped to solve software rights for network-deployed software, precisely
because the software freedom and rights issues that come up in such software
*can't* fully be addressed merely by a copyleft provision.  We erred because
we didn't see the obvious: a good copyleft license is a *necessary* but not a
*sufficient* condition to assure users' software rights and freedoms.

Furthermore, we didn't carefully consider when building the Affero clause how
much it could be abused in proprietary licensing schemes by companies like
Neo4j, MongoDB, and others.  Specifically, only years later did the community
(thanks to Richard Fontana) figure out that a copyleft equality clause was an
absolutely mandatory to offset the problem more on this at
<https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality/>.  Proprietary
relicensing is more-or-less a relatively simple problem to describe and
study, yet it took us about 30 years to come up with a copyleft clause that
can actually address the problem elegantly and in an enforceable way.

As such, based on all this that I've learned in copyleft drafting, I advise
*extreme caution* about rushing to copyleft as an obvious solution to the
disturbing things happening with machine learning applications.  There may
well be ways copyleft can be used to fight back against the horrible things
that OpenAI, Microsoft's GitHub, and dozens of other for-profit companies are
doing with machine learning.  However, I'm quite sure that whatever ways we
think copyleft can (or can't) be modified/improved/changed/applied to help
may well turn out to be the wrong decision if we rush.

The most important thing we can do now is advocacy: first and foremost, we
need to raise awareness about why this technology is bad for users and
impedes their software freedom and rights.  There are natural allies around —
from folks in the visual arts, to those who have correctly pointed out that
machine learning systems trained on existing date usually propagate the
biases inherent in past decisions and work.  Time spent coalition building
will serve us better than more navel-gazing at copyleft terms on this front.

Ultimately, if there *is* a legalistic/licensing solution implementable in
copyleft, the right one won't become apparent until the dangers and problems
are fully understood by society.  Similar to the advent of copyleft itself as
a strategy: proprietary software had to actually become a thing and a problem
before we could figure out how to answer it with copyleft.

Inventing new copyleft terms shouldn't be the first place we run to when
facing a threat to software rights or freedom; it should be a solution used
only sparingly when we're sure no other solution (including, most
importantly, enforcing the copyleft terms that we *have* already) will work
to address to the problem.

  -- bkuhn

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#13227

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > - then I decided to [restrict] my projects repositories as database
  > (collection) in addition to the standard way to [restrict] the code with
  > a well-known license

I absolutely reject using the word "protect" to describe what copyright does.

  > - fair use cannot include {business, commercial, marketing} rights in
  > any way

My understanding is that it sometimes does permit commercial use of
material, but mostly it does not.  Fair use depends on the purpose of
the use.  If the work is published commercially for education, for
instance, it might be fair use.

  > A/L/GPLv4 is an update in which it will clearly state that the license
  > applies to the composition and the {business, commercial, marketing}
  > rights are reserved and exchanged for freedom. 

I cannot concretely understand "the XYZ rights are reserved and
exchanged for freedom."  Are you proposing a substantive change in
what people can do with a GPL-covered work, or an implementation
change intended to result in roughly the same permissions as now?

  > Then the license
  > presents a "fair use" open definition in which some rights {testing,
  > learning} are clearly included. Everything else should be brought back
  > in these two categories.

I don't understand "brought back in these two categories".

  >  So, in the most simple case in which no any file report a specific
  > copyright note/header but just the repository, then this happens:

  >  - git repository A is licensed with A/GPLv4
  >  - the composition is under A/GPLv4
  >  - every file is under A/GPLv3

I think that is true already.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

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#13228

On Sat, 4 Mar 2023 at 05:16, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>

Dear Richard,

 I do not know personally "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn@sfconservancy.org>
but I appreciate very much his answer in which he set several points

https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2023/03/msg00004.html

 Please, focus on his answer instead of mine. As I wrote to you in
private, I have nothing to add on this subject anymore.

 Collaboration is the key to success.

Best regards, R-

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#13232

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  >  I do not know personally "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn@sfconservancy.org>
  > but I appreciate very much his answer in which he set several points

  > https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2023/03/msg00004.html

I will take a look.  Thanks.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

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#13242

On Wed, 15 Mar 2023 at 04:44, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   >  I do not know personally "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn@sfconservancy.org>
>   > but I appreciate very much his answer in which he set several points
>
>   > https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2023/03/msg00004.html
>
> I will take a look.  Thanks.
>

March 16, 2023 - Copyright Office Launches New Artificial Intelligence
Initiative by Copyright and Artificial Intelligence

- https://www.copyright.gov/ai/

U.S. Copyright Office Weighs in on the AI Debate

The U.S. Copyright Office has weighed in on the debate and have
ultimately assessed that only human-made works are eligible for
protection. In a report published last week, the Office cites a 2018
submission in which the applicant described their work as
“autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine.”
After a series of appeals, the artwork was ultimately denied a
copyright because it was made “without any creative contribution from
a human actor.”

The Office explained further:

“For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to
“write a poem about copyright law in the style of William
Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is
recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles
Shakespeare’s style. But the technology will decide the rhyming
pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. When
an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the
generated material is not the product of human authorship.”

- https://hypebeast.com/2023/3/u-s-copyright-office-ai-report

Best regards, R-

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#13204

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

On Fri, 2023-02-24 at 11:37 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:

> As a general principle, as a free software advocate, I approve of an
> expansive definition of fair use and believe that far more uses of
> copyrighted material should be fair use than are normally considered fair
> use today.  Expansive definitions of fair use are a key legal component to
> enabling reverse engineering and compatible replacement of non-free
> software with free software, for example.

I note that fair use isn't a worldwide concept and other parts of the
world have the more varied and restricted concept of "fair dealing".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationally
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing

So, as much as possible, we should try not to rely on fair use.

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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#13243

 From Paul Wise:
> I note that fair use isn't a worldwide concept and other parts of the
> world have the more varied and restricted concept of "fair dealing".
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationally
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing
> 
> So, as much as possible, we should try not to rely on fair use.

The Wikimedia Foundation fellow and legal counsel Valentina Vera-Quiroz 
(CC) has documented her current expertise around ChatGPT and Copyright at

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Copyright_Analysis_of_ChatGPT

I just wanted to drop the link on this thread as it starts to be a good 
collection of references. We may need that some time in the future.

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#13244

Daniel Lange <DLange@debian.org> writes:
> From Paul Wise:

>> I note that fair use isn't a worldwide concept and other parts of the
>> world have the more varied and restricted concept of "fair dealing".
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationally
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing
>> So, as much as possible, we should try not to rely on fair use.

> The Wikimedia Foundation fellow and legal counsel Valentina Vera-Quiroz
> (CC) has documented her current expertise around ChatGPT and Copyright at

> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Copyright_Analysis_of_ChatGPT

Oh, thank you very much for this link, and thank you to Valentina for
writing this!

The section "Can you use copyright-protected works to train AI models?"
says exactly what I was attempting to say in my previous contributions to
this thread, except more clearly, accurately, and succinctly.  Anyone who
was reading my previous messages should just go read that instead.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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