Training AI models on copyrighted works is "squarely what transformative use is," EFF’s Tori Noble told Reason - these are "general purpose tools" and "exactly the kind of creation that copyright is designed to foster.” https://reason.com/2026/09/04/doj-says-barring-ai-training-on-copyrighted-material-could-severely-hamper-tech-progress/
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@eff Ah. Okay. *writes down EFF on my company shitlist*
@eff I just read the article
I agree
@eff
Wow, the libertarians at EFF bootlicking the techno-fachists.
Not surprised at all.
@eff nope it's theft
@eff Ok, so I’ll download copyright material to train my own actual intelligence? That’s fine right and fair use? Nobody will sue me for breach of copyright, right? RIGHT?
My goddess give your head a wobble. Supporting mass theft of people’s work to feed to the Great Fascist Hallucination Machine? That’s probably the most stupid thing I’ve heard. To hear it from the EFF? Beyond stupid.
@eff How about those other three factors of fair use?
@eff thanks for spitting in artists faces....
@eff how to loose everything in one single statement.
@eff lawyers gonna tell you how they see it. Doesn't make it right or wrong.
I do not think fair use applies here. This also doesn't touch native rights at all. One corner of law in very narrow interpretation might be correct, it wider context it is still wrong.
This is usually where new laws get written tho.
@eff
> Training AI models on copyrighted works is "squarely what transformative use is," EFF’s Tori Noble told Reason
People are very upset about this. But it's not a simple 'pro-AI' vs. 'anti-AI' question. It's a complex legal one about where the boundary lines between fair use and copyright violation ought to lie. One can be vehemently opposed to #MOLE Trainers (as I am), without necessarily wanting the copyright monopoly strengthened in the way Big Content is pushing for here.
(1/?)
It's analogous to the link tax issue. Would I feel sorry for DataFarmers if they had to pay individual journalists a royalty whenever their work was linked on DataFarming platforms like FarceBook or Xitter? Not for a second.
So do I support link taxes as policy? Also, not for a second. Not because of their affect on the DataFarmers targeted, but because of the precedent created. If linking required a copyright license, and perhaps a royalty, that would fundamentally break the open web.
(2/?)
Let's say courts ruled that watching/ hearing/ reading a lot of official Star Trek works, then writing your own original fiction set in the Star Trek universe, was a copyright violation. I think most of us would agree that banning fan fiction would be an overextension of the copyright monopoly, so we would oppose this.
The EFF lawyer's take appears to be based on the belief that #MOLE Training is an automated version of this kind of process. If she's correct, her take is reasonable.
(3/?)
However I've seen evidence that suggests generative models are not transformative use. That what they actually do - at least when it comes to source code - is spit up complete copies of data they've ingested during #MOLE Training. Stripped of attribution, and claimed as a new work.
Which is plagiarism, and quite clearly a copyright violation. Not something the EFF ought to be defending. So the correct legal take here is highly dependent on what the tech is actually *doing*.
(4/4)
@eff You just died for me.
AIANAL, but I find obvious that using copyrighted content to create content that competes with the copyright holder is far from being 'fair use'.
The main reason I am not contributing to open source is I don't want my code to be used to be used by AI. I don't mind if code derived from my contributions were to be published under the same license, but that's clearly not the case with AI.
Stop helping big corporations destroy the commons, please.
@eff This is a fucking joke, right? Please, tell us all that this was just a joke.
I need to cut back on a some of the donations that I give to projects and this post just made it really easy to decide on at least one.
@eff Well, I guess "Bye, EFF!"
@eff And to think I used to have a recurring donation for the EFF. I'll have to find a way to counteract the help I gave you.
@eff Have you gone insane at the EFF?
As this basically is invalidating all your credibility!
@eff Yeah, that's not a bad legal decision. The threshold for copyright violation is deliberately set high, meaning that if you do something innovative with someone else's copyrighted material, you're *meant* to free to do that. That's by design.
@eff I am horrified. Seriously, EFF?
WTF? #AItheft #copyright #AI_slop
@eff who donated and how much for your to take that position?
This is a horrible take and I've just lost insurmountable amounts of respect for your organization
Hey, uh...
So if I set up a pantograph and use it to copy the contents of an entire book by tracing over the pages, and the pantograph is poorly-designed so it results in lots of errors, but the book is slightly larger and therefore distinguishable from the original by size alone, is that a transformative work? Especially if I sell it as an alternative to the original?
I'm just wondering where the limits apply.
@eff If we have to pay, they have to pay. No special cases.
That is the way copyright works.
@eff Wow, the irony is palpable in this one. This is the most "technically correct but in unintended way" take we've seen in a month.
Yes, this is *precisely* the kind of "creation" copyright is *designed to foster*. Corporation-centered, worker-oppressing framework to extract profit from others' labor and handwave away any complaints through legalese bullshit and arguing for fake moral superiority, when the reality is that multi-billion companies use copyright as a tool for oppression. genAI is just another iteration of "laws for thee but not for me", alongside many other oppressive things.
Shame on you.
@eff Okay so you're advocating piracy. I don't feel conflicted about it now. Can't have it both ways.
@eff Scale matters. Intent matters. A world-eating model, that benefits from every sentence ever written, cannot morally be locked up behind a paywall for the sole benefit of the few.
@eff interested to see what @pluralistic has to say about this…
@eff A technology only available to ultra-wealthy corporations that is built through copyright infringement is A-OK, but normal people can't have a a 4 second clip of Disney in the background of a video without getting sued.
Is that really what you're saying? I just want to be clear before I cancel my 25-year membership.
@eff I'm so confused. In front of me is Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender". The opening pages read:
"(c) 2026 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used to train artificial intelligence systems or reproduced in any form [...]"
What kind of a f*cking pro-slop-technofascism stance did you assume over night? I'll be dropping my recurring titanium donation if you do not clean this shit up.
@eff have you lost your fucking minds
@eff you what???? :///
@eff well this is the heel turn of the decade, so disappointed to see you siding with the fash
@eff why the fuck are you siding with fascists?
@eff Yeah, nah.
"It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for him."
Yes and reading a book is transformative to my knowledge and mind, so just give me all the copyrighted works. Does anyone dispute that a human reading those works makes a human better/smarter/more creative?
I'm not a huge fan of copyright holder lawsuits. However, AI companies are stacking cash, while standing on the heads of all of human history. It's not a public works project for the betterment of society, it's not a library you can freely use. It's not even like the beginning of the internet, where infrastructure and networking allowed collaboration and content creation.
Love the EFF but I don't think I'd help the AI overlords in this. Spend the time on something better than this.
Heaven forbid that the courts set a precedent that OpenAI pay for content they use for training purposes. Maybe they could just let them use torrent like Meta did already. I mean it's accepted use right. (/s)
@eff Tear out your lying, duplicitous tongues.
You betray everyone who ever looked to you, you goddamn demons.
@eff What a betrayal of content creators. The EFF might as well remove all its humans and function as an AI bot.
@eff There goes the donation I was going to make
@eff are you fucking high?
@eff interesting point of view. Not one I’m happy with but interesting and informative.
fuck "tech progress".
