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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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It may be that such a license can't exist. The way these viral copyleft licenses work is that they offer things to people who accept them that copyright otherwise doesn't permit. The usual example: you can distribute copies of this work (a thing that copyright prohibits you from doing by default) but in exchange you must release any derivative works you make under the same licence.
The problem is that you actually can reject that licence. You can download the software (that's allowed because the person distributing the software agreed to the copyleft license) and then decide you're not going to accept the license that came with it. At that point you're restricted by ordinary copyright and can only do the things you'd normally do with it.
There have already been court cases in the US that have ruled that training an AI is fair use, and the resulting model is not a derivative work covered by the copyright of the original. So you can just go ahead and train the AI at that point.
(Facedeer is a prolific pro-AI concern troll from Reddit, so take his post here with a huge grain of salt)
Did I say anything incorrect?
No. I explained the same thing a few days ago at https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55176429/24029241 without remembering anything you ever wrote.
Thanks. This has actually been a thing that bothered me many years before AI was ever a thing, there are open source programs I've installed that pop open a clickwrap "agree with the GPL before you can install this" step and it shows a misunderstanding of how these licenses fundamentally work. They're not EULAs.
As for whether I'm a "concern troll", AI happens to be an area of significant interest to me right now and so I've been commenting a lot on it. My opinion on it also happens to be unpopular. I don't like the idea of closed social media bubbles where only groupthink is allowed, so I just go ahead and speak my mind even knowing it'll likely get hit with a lot of downvotes. I'm finding the Fediverse to be a lot more insular than Reddit is in this regard, I suspect because the population in general is a lot smaller, but at least downvotes don't tend to "bury" comments.
If anyone can't stand reading my comments, I recommend blocking me. It's the ultimate downvote.
On that other question you raise, here is the FSF's position: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ClickThrough
Yeah, I'm not bothered by the actual clicking of "I accept the GPL", it's more the misunderstanding of it that the existence of the click-through represents. If someone's licencing their code I would hope they'd spend a bit of time researching how the license they're using actually works.