Ask HN: Is there a no-LLM license yet?

14 points by ahub 94 days ago | 25 comments

I'd like to keep sharing code online but would like to limit it's usage to prevent LLM training and usage on it. I've seen license

I can't be the only one looking for such a license, but I fail to find one. Do you know of any existing license, jurisprudence, or group working on redacting such a license?

I know licenses exists preventing the use of code in armament or other specific sectors, so surely there is a legal way to prevent it.

Lio 94 days ago |

I think the problem is that even if you have a "no training" license AI companies will just ignore it and you'll be left having to take legal action.

If the big publishing firms couldn't win an action against Meta for using pirated copies of their books you probably have no chance either.

rolandog 94 days ago | |

It may seem impossible on an individual level, but collectively it may make sense to take them on, ala death by a thousand paper cuts style.

k__ 94 days ago | |

If content with that license reaches critical mass, a law firm could sue for many at once.

exe34 94 days ago | | |

Do you believe this critical mass would likely exceed all books ever published within the current copyright window?

Do you think book publishers are somehow less financially able to muster a legal response than open source coders in their spare time?

internet_points 94 days ago |

You may find https://github.com/manyfold3d/manyfold/blob/main/AGENTS.md useful ;-)

HumanOstrich 94 days ago | |

Trying to set up a prompt injection attack for someone accessing a repo with a coding agent is juvenile and pointless. And it doesn't deal with the training part.

verdverm 94 days ago |

If you use a non-standard license, I will pass on your project, legal is not going to take the time to review and will just reject. It can be counterproductive to your project depending on your goals

You are looking for "ethical" / "permissioned" licenses (as many as there are people's gripes or causes), versus permissionless like MIT / Apache-2 / BSD-3

There is no legal way to prevent things. Bad actors will not care about your license. If you catch them, you can pay lawyers to try and have it enforced, but these licenses have not been tested in court yet, so no one knows who will win.

internet_points 94 days ago | |

> depending on your goals

is the important bit. Is your goal to have your project used by companies which have to "run things through legal", or do you have better goals?

gkbrk 94 days ago | | |

Not just companies, people too. It will have trouble getting into Linux distro repos. And a lot of devs/users avoid non-open-source projects especially if they went looking for solutions on Github.

embedding-shape 94 days ago | |

> If you use a non-standard license, I will pass on your project, legal is not going to take the time to review and will just reject. It can be counterproductive to your project depending on your goals

For personal projects, that actually sounds like a good thing, didn't think of it that way. Probably I'll start making my projects MIT-but-modified-enough-to-scare-lawyers, and also provide a "clean" MIT license to companies if they agree to pay per month with either money or engineering hours for maintenance.

Best of two worlds, would get rid of the worst vampires at least.

ketzu 94 days ago |

Would this even work legally?

I remember the case of books used for training, where the court found training to be fair use, but the material has to be legally obtained (=Bought instead of pirated the books).

> and usage on it

What do you mean by "usage on it"?

D13Fd 94 days ago | |

I think you nailed it here. What you are "licensing" with your license is copyright. But if training is fair use, copyright doesn't apply, so there is no need for a license.

ahub 94 days ago | |

I mean a clause along "don't ever have any LLM read my code" either for training, or for making a vibecoded output.

How does it work legally? IANAL so I have no idea and that's why I'm asking.

ddtaylor 94 days ago |

I look at this pretty similar to licenses that attempt to say something can't be used in some specific way, such as a "no evil" license. Famously, the JSON license:

    Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of
    this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in
    the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
    use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of
    the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
    subject to the following conditions:

    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
    copies or substantial portions of the Software.

    The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
    IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS
    FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR
    COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER
    IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
    CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

(Source: https://www.json.org/license.html)

This seemingly pointless yet straightforward addition of the license has caused problems, because it's highly subjective and therefore makes compliance with the license impossible to objectively measure - which is really important for a license!

I think LLM training seems right now a simple objectively measurable thing - and maybe it will always be that simple - but I could also see it becoming a subjective thing. At the very least the interpretation of copyright law has yet to be upheld, which historically was one of the most "powerful" license-like things in existence.

HumanOstrich 94 days ago | |

How do you objectively measure if an LLM is training on something if you don't have access to its training data?

ddtaylor 94 days ago | | |

In theory the same way people are making those claims about "stolen" art, such as models that produced watermarks from Getty images or Shutterstock. Similar "watermarks" have existed in some LLM output.

trentetrois 94 days ago |

Could we take this idea further and design a new programming language in which all LLM training would be prohibited? Any LLM capable of producing code for this language will have effectively violated this license... and incidentally, it will create a language where the joy of coding will remain :)

singularity2001 94 days ago |

"Bots strictly prohibited."

Some lawyers may try to weasel their way around but if it comes to a court case you should have a pretty straightforward interpretation of the phrase:

exe34 94 days ago |

Are you financially able to take on open ai, anthropic, Facebook, etc? If not, then it doesn't matter what licence you use.

eddd-ddde 94 days ago |

The only real no LLM license is keep your code private, I think it is that easy.

aargh_aargh 94 days ago |

Not an objection, you're fully within your rights to invent a license, just remember that a license with such clause would not be an open source license as per the Open Source Definition [1].

  6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

  The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

There's also 5. which probably isn't relevant here but possibly might depending on the definition of person (e.g. a legal person).

  5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

  The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

And then there's the obvious aspect of AI foundries blatantly ignoring copyright anyway (copyright law grants the the author the rights which he then gives away by way of a license).

[1] https://opensource.org/osd

GregDavidson 94 days ago |

Do what Linus does: Focus on code quality!

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.