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Comment by maxloh | Hacker News Reader

To my understanding, if the material is publicly available or obtained legally (i.e., not pirated), then training a model with it falls under fair use.

Once training is established as fair use, it doesn't really matter if the license is MIT, GPL, or a proprietary one.

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fair use only applies in the united states (and Poland, and a very limited set of others)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#/media/File:Fair_use_...

and it is certainly not part of the Berne Convention

in almost every country in the world even timeshifting using your VCR and ripping your own CDs is copyright infringement

France and most of europe has fair use (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copie_priv%C3%A9e) but also has a mandatory tax on every sold medium that can do storage to recover the "lost fees" due to fair use

Is that not just an exemption for copying for private use? My french is not up to much but this:

> L'exception de copie privée autorise une personne à reproduire une œuvre de l'esprit pour son usage privé, ce qui implique l'utilisation personnelle, mais également dans le cercle privé incluant le cadre familial.

seems to be only for personal use?

Fair dealing in the UK and other countries is broader, and US fair use broader still.

Most commonwealth countries have fair dealing, which is similar although slightly different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing

importantly "fair dealing" has no concept of "transformation"

(which is the linch-pin of the sloppers)

Great, so the US and China can duke it out trying to create AGI or whatever, whereas most other countries are stuck in the past because of their copyright laws?

> To my understanding, if the material is publicly available or obtained legally (i.e., not pirated), then training a model with it falls under fair use.

Is this legally settled?

Yes. There have been multiple court cases affirming fair use.

That is just the sort of point I am trying to make. That is a copyright law issue, not a contractual one. If the GPL is a contract then you are in breach of contract regardless of fair use or equivalents.

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