[dilliwal]

from the license:

If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, and the aggregate revenue of the Licensee and its affiliates exceeds 20 million US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in total over any consecutive 12 months, the Licensee must enter into a separate agreement with Moonshot AI before using the Software or its derivative works for any commercial purpose.

[gorgmah]

good find! This sounds a bit like what Meta was doing with the earlier Llama models?

There is also this paragraph in their licence that is smart marketing-wise:

> 3. If the Software (or any derivative works thereof) is used for any of the Licensee's commercial products or services that have more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars (or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, "Kimi K3" must be prominently displayed on the user interface of such product or service.

[whimsicalism]

Meta had much higher limits and not restricted merely to token resellers

[mock-possum]

Is that even enforceable?

[TheTaytay]

I think it is as enforceable as other licenses are.

[embedding-shape]

Before figuring that out, could Facebook take you to court in order to argue their case that it is enforceable, and thereby forcing you to get lawyers and be distracted by the preparation and all that comes with this?

[Imustaskforhelp]

Nothing stops anybody from suing anybody else (and maybe even winning) though. What Napster was doing in isolate was just a technology yet RIAA and others sued and the lawsuit had led to the conclusion that the tech could be held reliable and if what users were doing were an intentional known to the tech-creators.

So the mere knowing of it led them to lose it and Napster died because of that but also the actual nail in the coffin was that they couldn't significantly do anything to the problem about that given its P2P nature, Ipods were around the same time and RIAA was a bit afraid of that too but Steve jobs assured them that because of the walled garden they could better control the piracy issue and have proper ways of countering it.

Now aside from the interesting details of that time I showed, coming to my main point, Lawsuits can sometimes happen for lesser reasons than or just limited to plain and simple license violations and if a company is earning 20 Million dollars supposing so, then they might also have a really good lawyer insurance package and could lawyer up just as well.

The core argument lies on proving if AI weights are copyrightable or not from my understanding because the licenses could be best applied under copyright material not public domain materials and the other discussion[0] by @cosmojg shows the most likely cases of AI not being copyrightable?, so you would have to prove if AI is copyrightable or not.

Now that would be a fun lawsuit to watch though.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49074087

[dannyw]

What's wrong with it? Licenses like the MIT license already requires you to attribute, the only difference is the "prominent" part.

[cosmojg]

IANAL, but probably not, at least not in the United States. Under U.S. copyright law, the weights of machine learning models are excluded from copyright as they are the product of an automated optimization process (e.g., stochastic gradient descent, expectation maximization, genetic algorithms) rather than human authorship. Granted, this has yet to be fully tested in court and going to court is expensive, so it's likely that your employer would prefer to err on the side of caution and respect such attempts at model licensing anyway. Nonetheless, this was partially tested last year in Thaler v. Perlmutter which affirmed that copyright requires human authorship, reading the Copyright Act's provisions on ownership, duration, and transferability as presupposing a human author[1].

If you want to assess the position of the U.S. Copyright Office for yourself, the relevant text can be found in the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices § 313.2, "Works That Lack Human Authorship"[2], which states:

> […] the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable.

> […] the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.” U.S. COPYRIGHT OFFICE, REPORT TO THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS BY THE REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS 5 (1965).

Oh, and there's also a bit in the following Section 313.3, "Works That Do Not Constitute Copyrightable Subject Matter"[2], which explicitly excludes mathematical principles, formulas, algorithms, and equations, along with DNA sequences and other genetic or chemical compounds, regardless of whether they are produced by humans or by nature. If one takes the perspective that machine learning models are algorithms, the conclusions on copyrightability are pretty clear.

[1] https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2025/03/23-523...

[2] https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...

[hnfong]

If your argument is true, what would make LLM weights not copyrightable, but compiled code copyrightable?

[Imustaskforhelp]

(IANAL), but the argument would be the same because how compiled code (binary data) is copyrightable but the code (binary data) of an image of a painting created by say a monkey itself with no human involvement isn't.

As such as they have mentioned in the argument, their argument is sound in terms of the level of human involvement in creation of the artifact.

[biztos]

If you put a layer between the customer and the LLM, a la ChatGPT/Claude, are you a Model-as-a-Service business? I think you are not.

But then how thick does that layer need to be?

I think the real win from these models is enabling well-funded/profitable companies to not be beholden to the big closed-weight providers. But I like the idea of letting a hundred flowers bloom for under $20M/y each.