[mjg59]

And the judgement said that the training was fair use, but that the duplication might be an infringement. The GFDL doesn't restrict duplication, only distribution, so if training on GFDLed material is fair use and not the creation of a derivative work then there's no damage.

[kennywinker]

> The GFDL doesn't restrict duplication

Right. I can publish the work in whole without asking permission. That’s unrestricted duplication.

However, as i read it, an LLM spitting out snippets from the text is not “duplicating” the work. That would fall under modifications. From the license:

> A "Modified Version" of the Document means any work containing the Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with modifications and/or translated into another language.

I read that pretty clearly as any work containing text from a gnu fdl document is a modification not a duplication.

[mjg59]

There's three steps here:

1) Obtaining the copyrighted works used for training. Anthropic did this without asking for the copyright holders' permission, which would be a copyright violation for any work that isn't under a license that grants permission to duplicate. The GFDL does, so no issue here. 2) Training the model. The case held that this was fair use, so no issue here. 3) Whether the output is a derivative work. If so then you get to figure out how the GFDL applies to the output, but to the best of my knowledge the case didn't ask this question so we don't know.

[leni536]

Last time I checked online LLMs distribute parts of their training corpus when you prompt them.