>> Not trying to shill anything; just want to build and share cool stuff.
Any commercial use of Facebook’s LLaMa remains a violation of the software’s terms of use to my understanding; not saying your use is a violation, but that as it relates to anything related to LLaMa there no related commercial use.
This is wrong.
Terms of service only apply if you agree to them. They do do not magically apply if you download the weights from someone else.
Both the weights and the fine-tuned data were generated without human creativity and thus not eligible for copyright protection under law.
Assuming you’re so sure of your opinion that you are willing to: post a commercial use of LLaMa; provide a public means of making payments; on the related site, provide your legal name, business name, legal address, etc.; and have no issue with users providing Facebook with proof of purchase and link to the purchase page for Facebook to make a purchase themselves, right?
Even if there was no legal basis, which I disagree with, since as other have pointed out, contracts breach the limits of copyrights — there’s zero reason Facebook would not be able to file a legal complaint and bring the matter to trial. Once at trial, judges are legally allowed to rule as they please, laws are ultimately irrelevant; yes, that ruling might be over turned on appeal and judges do not like to be overturned, but also possible the ruling would stand and become case law.
Why do you disagree with the premise that there is no legal basis? That's exactly the situation we find ourselves in right now.
The fact of the mater is that there is no law to address what you perceive as a problem. Until it exists, people and corporations are free to do as they please.
As for legal complaints, there would be no legal basis to sue third parties. I doubt they would go far enough to get a judgment let alone set a legal precident.
You’re clearly unwilling to assume any liability for your opinions of the matter; as such, in my opinion, you should explicitly acknowledge this, as it’s relevant to assessing the merits of your beliefs.
Beyond that, in this thread and in the comment you’re replied to, I already established legal basis for Facebook to contest any use of their property for commercial use as it relates to the topic at hand. Do you understand how contract law works?
Also pointed out that regardless of the presence of an existing precedent either via legal code or case law, Facebook has the legal right to file a legal complaint, have it ruled on, and judges are free to rule as they see fit.
Related comment on the impact of laundering stolen property on legal claims:
I see where your coming from, i really do. I also agree that facebook can sue people right and left.
Our main disagreement here is you maintaining that what people are sharing is Facebook's property while i maintain the exact opposite. At least not under current law. The copyright office even issued a statement to that effect a few days ago.
Can a judge overrule the copyright office? Sure, though I have no idea on what law it would be based. Can congress pass a new law that gives new rights to facebook? Very likely (as depressing as this answer may be).
This however does not change the fact that under current intellectual property laws, facebook does not have any rights to restrict the distribution and use of these weights among third-parties.
Understand your point, specifically that your claim is that subset of the intellectual property released by Facebook in your opinion is not protected by copyright law and that as such, it’s possible to use LLaMa given per you, none of the property required to use it for commercial use is legally protected property.
What you have failed to do though is address that if: there been a breach of contract; laundering the property as a means of separating the current use of the related property from its original terms is legal pretext including if party receives notice of the terms directly from Facebook; and lastly, most importantly, that it is your position that Facebook lacks any legal basis to forbid the commercial use of any of the property it made publicly available in this specific context based on the existing facts of the matter.
Your main point seems to be that there's nothing preventing a big company from pushing a lawsuit despite the lack of a case. That is true, but it's also not an argument about the law.
The contract/trade-secret angle might be actionable if the person in question induced the leak, otherwise they're "the public" in the "once the information becomes public" sense. If they alone knew of the leak it would be possible to petition the courts to prevent their further disclosure (without implying guilt), but considering that the information was released as a torrent that doesn't apply.
Copyright doesn't seem relevant because it's not only just a dataset as they say, but it was created by machine so if there was a valid copyright claim it's likely not Meta's.
> specifically that your claim is [...]
But, what is your claim? Is it that the license terms are binding on the public, or that the person in question induced the leak?
When it comes to litigation, the parties will and resources to engage an aggressive legal adversary is critical aspect of assessing legal dynamics in a matter. For example, even in cases for which there is no direct legal leverage, party might be exposed to patent, copyright, etc infringement if the other party discovers they have a valid existing claim for which the other party is dependent on and access to it is revocable.
Beyond that, it’s unclear to me if there is code that is part of LLaMa that’s not subject to copyright claims, if such code was authored by humans. Someone violating the terms, downloading the code, and reposting it, even without the terms, would be irrelevant to the rights of the party on future use by a party if they notified they’re infringing; otherwise, able copyright notices and software licenses would be meaningless, because you could simple launder stolen property, which is obviously not the case. If you’re positive there no copyrighted materials used in deploying LLaMa, then obviously there’s no copyright claim or breach of contract. To be clear, I agree human author per the US Copyright Office is at present required to claim copyrights.
Lastly, my core claim is it’s easy to state something is legal, it’s completely different story to take on legal liabilities related to defending those rights. I for one would have no interest in litigation with Facebook regardless of the legal merits of my position. The OP based on there ignoring the topic, which I raised, nor for that matter is it likely anyone that read this thread is likely to take on the burden of publicly disputing if LLaMa is free from legal claims for commercial use.
> if LLaMa is free from legal claims for commercial use.
That restriction is only in the license though, which was not accepted. So it won't apply, right?
> otherwise, [all?] copyright notices and software licenses would be meaningless, because you could simple launder stolen property
That applies to trade secrets. If I knowingly induce you to leak a secret I can't use it, but if you leak the secret to the public in an unrelated fashion and I discover it, I can. It doesn't apply to copyright, as you note.
> If you’re positive there no copyrighted materials used in deploying LLaMa, then obviously there’s no copyright claim or breach of contract.
There's no breach of contract because there was no agreement. Therefore there's no license to use, so you're right - the copyrightable parts will be a violation. Basically everything except 'data' or machine translations of someone else's works.
And yes, I assume that there's some incidental content, at least, which will be infringing. Even a readme is copyrighted after all. And yes, of course any code which isn't already public elsewhere.
I think the weights themselves are the interesting bit though, and perhaps someone could rerelease them without any incidentals just to clarify the issue.
Happy to be proven wrong, but the weights are meaningless without the parts written by humans. If someone refers to any parts that are protected to write a new interface to the weights it would most likely be violate the law. Using the weights alone, it would be impossible to reverse engineer them using a clean-room to develop new interface to the weights.
>> There's no breach of contract because there was no agreement.
No, this is property laundering. If intentional, it’s a crime. If unintentional, the property owner need just notify the party of their rights, the remedy they’re seeking, and if needed, send a cease and desist.
> weights are meaningless without the parts written by humans.
I think this can be true, but that the format of these is well known.
The torrent consists of params.json, consolidated.*.pth, and tokenizer.model plus some .chk files. Notably, there is one script, llama.sh, which is about 2k so even if it was needed, can't be that complex.
> If someone refers to any parts that are protected to write a new interface to the weights it would most likely be violate the law
Not at all. I can refer to pages and words in a book I don't own.
> No, this is property laundering. If intentional, it’s a crime.
Only if the weights are copyrightable. Otherwise it'd hinge on being a trade secret, the best theory I've seen yet, and that basically says the cat's out of the bag once the public knows something.
>> can't be that complex.
Point is unless the new system only references the property that’s free of any claims, there’s at the very least a valid legal basis to file a complaint and it would at that point be in the courts hands to decide whether the contracts or copyrights had been breached.
>> Not at all. I can refer to pages and words in a book I don't own.
It depends, the only way for this for sure not to be the case is for the author of the code to have never seen the relevant code. At the point they have seen the code, it would be up to the courts to decide the merits of the arguments presented in court.
>> Only if the weights are copyrightable.
Weights are irrelevant, what is relevant is any aspect of the system that is subject to the related terms of use and/or copyright.
> Weights are irrelevant, what is relevant is any aspect of the system that is subject to the related terms of use and/or copyright.
The leak appears to be essentially just weights. The copyrightability of weights is the central and perhaps only issue.
> it would be up to the courts
That's a non-argument. Everything is ultimately up to the courts despite the letter of the law.
> decide whether the contracts [...] had been breached.
If you didn't sign the contract or induce the breach then it isn't relevant.
You’re wrong, there’s a material and significant amount of copyrighted material related to LLaMa which is critical to running it. If you’re so confident it’s legal, feel free to link to a guide on how to LLaMa that uses the only materials originally provided by Facebook so it’s possible to assess the system’s dependencies on legally protected materials. Next, feel free to link to build that is not bound to any property claims by Facebook.
>> If you didn't sign the contract or induce the breach then it isn't relevant
Again, this is not true, that’s property laundering; see above comments, repeating points I have already made will not add to this discussion. If anything is unclear, let me know, but claim that party is not bound to an agreement related to legally protected property (not referring to the weights) if they launder it is obviously invalid, since if it was, no property for which the terms of use were separable from the property itself would be enforced; again, party would receive a cease and desist with a copy of the terms of use.
>> That's a non-argument. Everything is ultimately up to the courts despite the letter of the law.
No, if a legally it’s material. There is a massive difference between clean-room reverse engineering a systems from property that’s free from any claims — and referencing materials that are subject to claims to build a new system. Further, it is my position it is impossible to do a clean-room build in this situation. As a result, the only way anyone would have any confidence that a new system was free from material claims is as a result of a ruling.
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Beyond the prior points above, worth noting Facebook has already begun taking legal actions against developers related to LLaMa leak, so it’s clear they have no intention of releasing the weight for commercial use. Here’s an example: