The Free Software Foundation holds the copyright to dozens of GNU programs and several books, including Sam Williams' Free as in Freedom. That book ships under the GNU Free Documentation License, meaning anyone can use it for any purpose. It also turned up in Anthropic's training data, which means the FSF recently got a settlement notice from the Bartz v. Anthropic class action, the FSF wrote in a blog post.
Quick background: the lawsuit alleged Anthropic infringed copyright by downloading books from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror (pirate book archives) to train its large language models. The court ruled that using the books for training was fair use, but left the question of whether downloading them was legal for trial. The parties settled instead, with Anthropic agreeing to a $1.5 billion fund.
The FSF wants something other than money. It wants Anthropic to share its complete training inputs, model weights, training configuration, and source code with every user. "If the FSF were to participate in a lawsuit such as Bartz v. Anthropic and find its copyright and license violated, we would certainly request user freedom as compensation," the foundation wrote.
It's a very FSF move. Four decades of insisting software should be free to run, study, modify, and distribute, now aimed at AI. Whether any court would actually order a company to open-source its models as a copyright remedy is an open question.
Previously:
