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mjg59today at 6:31 AM4 repliesview on HN

Where's the threat? The FSF was notified that as part of the settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic they were potentially entitled to money, but in this case the works in question were released under a license that allowed free duplication and distribution so no harm was caused. There's then a note that if the FSF had been involved in such a suit they'd insist on any settlement requiring that the trained model be released under a free license. But they weren't, and they're not.

(Edit: In the event of it being changed to match the actual article title, the current subject line for this thread is " FSF Threatens Anthropic over Infringed Copyright: Share Your LLMs Freel")


Replies

teiferertoday at 7:19 AM

> but in this case the works in question were released under a license that allowed free duplication and distribution so no harm was caused.

FSF licenses contain attribution and copyleft clauses. It's "do whatever you want with it provided that you X, Y and Z". Just taking the first part without the second part is a breach of the license.

It's like renting a car without paying and then claiming "well you said I can drive around with it for the rest of the day, so where is the harm?" while conveniently ignoring the payment clause.

You maybe confusing this with a "public domain" license.

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darkwatertoday at 8:52 AM

I don't like the editorialized title either but I would say that the actual post title

"The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement, but when we do, we settle for freedom"

and this sentence at the end

" We are a small organization with limited resources and we have to pick our battles, but if the FSF were to participate in a lawsuit such as Bartz v. Anthropic and find our copyright and license violated, we would certainly request user freedom as compensation."

could be seen as "threatening".

lelanthrantoday at 6:48 AM

It's just an indication to model trainers that they should take care to omit FSF software from training.

Not a nothing burger, but not totally insignificant either.

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eschatontoday at 7:00 AM

It’s pretty fucking simple: If GPL code is integrated into Claude, the Claude needs to be distributed under the terms of the GPL.

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