What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments?
I know what the Creative Commons is but not this new thing or why it keeps popping up in comments on Lemmy
Because people don't understand how copyright works.
In most countries any copyrightable work that you produce is automatically covered by copyright. You don't need to do anything additional to gain that protection.
Most Lemmy instances don't have any sort of licensing grant in their terms of service. So that means that the original author maintains all ownership of their work.
So technically what these people are doing is granting a license to their comment that allows it to be used for more than would otherwise be allowed by the default copyright protections.
What they are probably trying to accomplish is to revoke the ability for commercial enterprises to use their comments. However that is already the default state so it is pretty irrelevant. Basically any company that cares about copyright and thinks that what they are doing isn't allowed as fair use already wouldn't be able to use their comments without the license note. So by adding the license note all they are doing is allowing non-commercial AI to scrape it (which is probably not what was intended). Of course most AI scraping companies don't care about copyright or think that their use is not protected under copyright. So it is again irrelevant.
Ding ding ding. It’s basically the equivalent of that “I don’t give Facebook permission to use my statuses, pictures, etc for commercial purposes…” chain letter that boomers love to post. It has enough fancy legalese and sounds juuuust plausible enough that it’ll get anyone who doesn’t already understand the law.
So by adding the license note all they are doing is allowing non-commercial AI to scrape it (which is probably not what was intended).
I have no problem with non-commercial scraping. It's commercial scraping that doesn't compensate me for my content that I have a problem with.
It's the internet equivalent of a sovereign citizen putting a fake license plate on their car.
The ones they're trying to "protect themselves" from do not give a shit.
By reading this comment you have entered in to a binding agreement to pay me $1000 per word.
I am not reading your comment, I am simply traveling through it with my eyeballs. Also your comment doesn’t have gold fringe and therefore lacks jurisdiction.
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOUR INTENT!
You didn't use my corporate name. Therefore, your contract is non-grata null and void according to the Articles of Confederation section 22B.4.22.
Remember when all those boomers were making Facebook posts about how they don't consent to Facebook doing the things in their terms and conditions?
I remember that shit. Most of them thought that Facebook "going public" meant that everyone could publish their Minions memes without permission. 🤦🏻♂️
2 bucks says commercial ai is still being trained on those comments.
It would be pretty funny if GPT starts putting licence notices under its answers because that's what people do in its training data.
Until now I was under the impression that this was the goal of these notices:
If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
Because if an LLM ingests a comment with a copyright notice like that, there's a chance it will start appending copyright notices to it's own responses, which could technically, legally, maybe make the AI model CC BY-NC-SA 4.0? A way to "poison" the dataset, so that OpenAI is obliged to distribute it's model under that license. Obviously there's no chance of that working, but it draws attention to AI companies breaking copyright law.
(also, I have no clue about copyrights)
Yeah it harkens back to seeing people make those posts on Facebook about how they don't consent to having their data collected and urging others to do the same before some imaginary upcoming deadline.
@onlinepersona@programming.dev and @CosmicCleric@lemmy.world should be able to give their perspectives.
@Pacrat173@lemmy.ml the license is actually a Creative Commons license for Non-Commercial uses. Creative Commons is a copyleft license that's "free to use with some restrictions". Mostly used in art, literature, audio, and film, for my part I'm using it to license my comments. Anybody can cite with attribution, but commercial use is forbidden by the license.
The why: I just don't like non-opensource commercial ventures. Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, Apple, and so on are harmful in many ways.
Enforcement and legality: Microsoft's Github CoPilot (a large language model / "AI") was trained on copyrighted text source code. A few licenses clearly state that derivatives should also be opensource, which CoPilot is not. So there is a big lawsuit against it. Many artists, non-programmer authors, musicians, and others are also unhappy that AI was trained on their copyrighted works and have sued for damages.
Until these cases make it out of court, it will not be clear if adding a license to comments could even jeopardize commercial AI vendors.
How exactly do you expect to see the "source" of a language model?
.....
Hey does anyone want to buy a t-shirt from me with this guy's worst comments printed on it?
Are you saying Microsoft CoPilot didn't respect copyleft licences? How are they not getting totally sued for something obviously illegal? Or is it only when copyright violations harm big companies that people get sued?
Seriously what is up with people and the downvotes on this. It is just a link guys.
A lot of this hate feels a bit manufactured because I can't honestly think of a good reason why so many would be so against this.
What he / she said.
It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how you automatically have copyright on any written work you produce, and how it's unclear whether any sort of licensing even applies to training data in the US.
From the copyright office's website:
Do I have to register with your office to be protected?
No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section “Copyright Registration.”
Yes, so you have copyright when you make the work. I have copyright on this comment just for having written it. Pasting a CC notice would give me less control over the use of this comment, not more. Regardless, I doubt anyone is planning on suing a multi-billion dollar business over their comments on social media being used as training data.
Is an internet comment a 'written work' though?
Yes. However whether or not it has protections under copyright is not always clear. Likely your comment is too short and simple to be protected. But if it can't be protected claiming to grant a license to that work doesn't change it.
Basically by adding this note they are effectively granting a license to the work. There is no situation in which granting a license can restrict how a work (which is effectively maximum protection).
Why wouldn't it be? It's just as much a textual medium as a PDF, or a book, for that matter. Hell, any file on a computer can be read as characters. I could type Homer's Odyssey in a series of comments, or the source code to DOOM, or the color values of every pixel of every frame of a video I took of my friend chasing a duck.
It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how you automatically have copyright on any written work you produce, and how it’s unclear whether any sort of licensing even applies to training data in the US.
For what its worth, I do understand copyright, and how it works. Part of my including the link is for futures sake, as I know that right now as we speak type Congress is getting lobbied for new laws on who owns the content that AI models are being trained from, and who has to pay who for the privledge of using that data to do so.
I don't understand what you are trying to say.
Congress is getting lobbied for new laws on who owns the content that AI models are being trained from
Training AI from something definitely can't change who owns that thing. This is ridiculous and I'm pretty sure isn't being considered.
If I let AI watch Frozen does that change who owns it? No Disney still does.
who has to pay who for the privledge of using that data
IIUC most of the laws talk about if AI training is "fair use". If it is fair use copyright protections don't apply. But granting a license to your work won't change that.
The only thing I could see potentially being done would be changing the default copyright protections to allowed a revocable default grant for AI training. But it isn't even clear if granting a new license would implicitly revoke that default grant. It also seems unlikely that this is the way the law would work.
Check if you actually saw multiple people or if it was always just a single user called internetpersona. They are the only one I saw doing that but are quite active here, so you might get a wrong impression. Imo this is completely useless.
I've seen 3 separate people. Including that guy you mentioned. Reminds me of the Facebook copy pasta lul.
I dislike it but merely because it normalizes having to sign content with an anti commercialization license to refuse to have your data harvested. Contributing to AI should be opt-in.
I agree it should be opt in but most platforms take ownership of your words as soon as they are submitted allowing the platform to decide if they want to sell the data for ai.
I agree it should be opt in but most platforms take ownership of your words as soon as they are submitted allowing the platform to decide if they want to sell the data for ai.
Lemmy.World does not (at least I didn't see that in the TOS).
And besides, because of federation, its better if I explicitly state my claim to my content inside of the content itself.
I dislike it but merely because it normalizes having to sign content with an anti commercialization license to refuse to have your data harvested. Contributing to AI should be opt-in.
Please let your House Representative know that.
Congress may (and probably will, one way or another) change that in the nearish future. But until then, you protect your content in the legal ways that you can.
I too would prefer not having to add the license/link to each of my comments. If Lemmy.World added a 'signature' field to an account, I could just put it there once and be done with it.
You don't need to license each of your comments. By default you retain all ownership. So you applying a license is strictly allowing more use. Basically if AI training was not allowed due to copyright than they can't use any comment by default. If AI training is fair-use (which seems to be most companies' claim) then it is irrelevant how you have licensed the comment.
In no situation does granting an additional license to a work restrict the ways in which works can be used under other licenses.
My simple understanding of the idea is it forces AI companies to have to avoid taking those comments. If they did, they would need to provide attribution to the sources etc.
Time will tell if it works
It won't. It's just like the boomers over on Facebook.
If they even notice it, they will say that the website TOS is the relevant license.
Eirher way, they will just go ahead and use it. None of us have the resources or perseverance to prove anything and take them to court in a meaningful way.
The CC requires copyright holders to contact companies that violate the license and give them 30 days to remediate.
I highly doubt:
I think people adding the license is fine. It's your comment. Do whatever. I don't think it's as harmful as sovereign citizens using their own license plate for "traveling".
I'm retired, and have money, so you never know. 😇
Plus also, it's also about future legislation, and putting a stake in the ground now. As it is, corporations are fighting each other over their content being used freely to program other corporations AI models, so I'm expecting a lot of lobbying money flying around in Washington just about now.
And finally, just because enforcement might be difficult, doesn't mean a license can't still be used.
It doesn't work.
By default you have complete ownership of all works you create. What that license link is doing is granting an additional license to the comment. (In this case likely the only available license.)
This means that people can choose to use the terms in this license rather than their "default" rights to the work (such as fair use which is which most AI companies are claiming). It can't take away any of their default privileges.
My simple understanding of the idea is it forces AI companies to have to avoid taking those comments. If they did, they would need to provide attribution to the sources etc.
Time will tell if it works
That's my understanding as well.
And yes, I can't force them to be legal and to honor the license, but I can do my part, and hope those who are coding over on their side are open source minded, and are willing to honor the license.
Generally speaking, just because someone else may break the law doesn't mean I can't use the law to try to protect myself.
WARNING: Any institution or person using this site or any of it's associated sites for study, projects, or personal agenda - You do not have my permission to use any of my profile or pictures in any form or forum, both current or future. You do not have my permission to copy, save, or print my pictures for your own personal use, including, but not limited to, saving them on your computer, posting them on any other website, or this one and passing them off as your own. If you have or do, it will be considered a violation of my privacy and will be subject to all legal remedies.
I should add that there is one approach that could be taken here. Take this with a huge grain of salt because I am not a lawyer.
When you are posting on Lemmy you are likely granting an implicit license to Lemmy server operators to distribute your work. Basically because you understand that posting a public comment on Lemmy will make it available on your and other Lemmy servers it is assumed that it is ok to do that.
In other words you can't write a story, post it on Lemmy, then sue every Lemmy instance that federated the comment and made it publicly available. That would be ridiculous.
There is a possible legal argument that twists this implicit grant to include AI training. Maybe you could have a disclaimer that this wasn't the case. I don't know how you would need to word this and if it would actually change anything. But I would talk to a lawyer.
In other words you can’t write a story, post it on Lemmy, then sue every Lemmy instance that federated the comment and made it publicly available. That would be ridiculous.
I don't see how what you've described is matching the situation of attaching a license to your own content/comment. Seems like a non-sequitur to me.
Take this with a huge grain of salt because I am not a lawyer.
Might not be best to try and give legal advice off of a hypothetical, if you are not a lawyer. Especially in a conversation that is already contested/heated.
ITT, a lot of ai bootlickers
This is following me around to different communities ...
Hey look at that, ProPublica posted an article here on Lemmy and they included a Creative Commons license at the top of their post as well.
And here's why they do and how you can too ...
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-you-or-your-newsroom-can-republish-propublicas-stories-515
https://www.propublica.org/nerds/happy-birthday-creative-commons
Thanks for the link!
This comment protected by anti-CosmicCleric response license 4k.
What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments?
On a tangent subject, why does everyone push back so forcefully, why do they care so incredibly, why do they enforce group think on you, just for including a link for an open source license in your comments?
I truly don't get the level of fevor, especially when they could just block the user if they don't want to see the license link.
But even more so, why does it trigger people so, why just having that link brings out the worse in people?
Are people trying to format the Internet so they see it exactly how they personally want to see it?
I truly don't understand why we're wasting so much time discussing this.
Is it really just the AI modeling companies that are forcefully trying to keep this from becoming a thing, by astroturfing, because then they really would have to start honoring the license if everyone did it, and if they get caught not doing so fearing the political/marketing and legal ramifications of such?
Because it's stupid and pointless, and I will assume that anyone who adds it to their comments is as well.
To clarify, I'm not anti-open source license. I'm also not anti-tin foil hats. Please feel free to wear them if you want. I completely support your right to do so, but it's also my right to judge you and laugh behind your back.
Because it’s stupid and pointless, and I will assume that anyone who adds it to their comments is as well.
To clarify, I’m not anti-open source license. I’m also not anti-tin foil hats. Please feel free to wear them if you want. I completely support your right to do so, but it’s also my right to judge you and laugh behind your back.
Look at your response to me, its rude, in a 'killing the messenger' sort of way. Why not just let it go by without attacking someone to their (virtual) face (not 'behind') for doing it?
Why does it trigger you so? Its just a link.
I thought Lemmy was supposed to be better than Reddit.
Because you are effectively spreading misinformation.
Your behaviour leads people to believe that in order for their comments not to be used for commercial AI training they need to have a signature. But that isn't true, at most the signature is allowing more uses of your comment, not restricting anything.
People already struggle to understand copyright. Adding more confusion is doing everyone reading your license a disservice.
A personal request, based on this subject.
I would very much like to not be astroturfed/brigaded every 18 to 24 hours because I'm licensing my comments.
Usually the first comment is someone asking me why I'm using a license, then the second comment replying to the first comment is someone else chastising my intelligence and my usage of the license and saying I don't know what I'm doing, and then explaining the completely wrong terms why I'm licensing it, and then the first person from the first comment replies with the third comment saying how dumb or silly or funny I am for doing that, rinse / repeat.
(A funny aside, the pattern I described above, the third comment was identical text, with days separating the two occurrences, and then later on someone went back and changed the third comment on the second most recent occurrence to be worded slightly different, after the fact.)
Another one is I get someone who goes on very very long diatribes asserting law and legalities (even though when I ask them if they are a lawyer they never answer, or they say no), using many paragraphed comments to tell me in every way why I'm wrong, but then finishing their diatribe off with how they really don't care about the subject, but are just giving a friendly explanation to me why I'm getting downvoted, when I didn't ask, and when voting wasn't even being discussed.
And finally, the 10-15ish downvotes on every comment I'm making. (The one that really made me laugh was the one where I reply with one word, "Thanks".)
Just leave me the f alone. If you don't like seeing my comments with a license link, feel free to block me.
It's really becoming harassment at this point.
Thank you for reading.
Yeah all of this hate just feels unnecessary. I'm sorry that @onlinepersona@programming.dev and you are going through this.
Just for the heads up I support you guys.
Thanks for the support 💗
I'm not very affected by it, honestly. It makes me chuckle that people get so offended about a link in a comment. Sometimes I respond, but quite often I block and move on.
Its gotten even more aggressive today, both in this community, and in other communities that I'm posting in. Its following me around.
Just for the heads up I support you guys.
Thank you, its appreciated.
Yeah all of this hate just feels unnecessary. I’m sorry that @onlinepersona@programming.dev and you are going through this.
Its so, irrational, for a single link in a comment.
I'm still of the thinking that its astroturfers trying to prevent licenses from being used (which if true, would REALLY like Lemmy.World admins to start handling the astroturfers). Either that, or its the non-'touch grass' anti-social crowd, which seem to rule here on Lemmy.
Never expected this level of a Spanish Inquisition. /queueMontyPython
It's meaningless bullshit if they think the AI companies give a shit about copyright
Even moreso: When you post online you typically give the website a license to distribute the content in the terms and conditions. That's all the license they need, it doesn't matter what you say in the comments.
If by "a while back" you mean "from the dawn of time immemorial until this day," then yes
Yeah, same shit new sites.
Yeah just adding a link to your comment doesn't negate the TOS of where you post it.
~~ Hey you can't use my ramblings!!! ~~
Is that in Lemmy World’s terms though?
Edit: Wow, you went back later and added that link to the YouTube video. So weird how people get trigged by this. /shakeshead
Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Is that in Lemmy World’s terms?
Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
You'd have to check with that instance, but IIRC they don't have any license on your content, meaning your content effectively falls under copyright unless states otherwise.