But fleeing to another country and/or simply refusing to pay your debts, regardless of whether or not you are able to are is not bankruptcy. It's simply refusing to pay your debts.

Follow on that with the removals from the members list (which as near as I can gather is removing eligible voters from the delayed but mandated upcoming BoD elections). And looking through some of the other recent discussion, if the TDF majority group was hoping to come out of this looking like they're on the side of angels, they might want to get a refund on those tarnished halos.

[1]: https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/sorry-but-i-give-...

[2]: https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/vote-adopt-versio...

And it still just seems off that in the midst of such a massive blow to the job market and especially the low end of the market that a even historically large unemployment increase for such a small segment of the population caused the “poverty” as measured by this metric to improve beyond our EU peers all while only addressing one portion of the entire tangled mess that is the American poverty dynamic. And agin without any of the comparative countries showing any changes at all in their own trend lines for the same time period.

If a significant driver of this poverty metric was the increasing GNI coefficient, that GNI did drop quite a bit in the COVID period (in fact in a way that very closely mirrors this “average poverty” metric), but that drop was to mid 90s levels (roughly 0.40) and still well above the comparative counties (0.32 per the article). Which makes the sudden US improvement to better than 2 of the comparison counties seem anomalous. Again I’m not saying there might not be something interesting to be found in this metric, just that I don’t believe it’s accurately measuring what it claims to be measuring. I just don’t think the “average poverty” in the us was better than the “average poverty” in EU comparative EU counties given the vast disparity between the existing poverty programs and the relatively limited nature of the US ones during that time period even if they were historically bigger than the ones the US has normally employed during other financial crises.

I can absolutely believe it got better during that time period. I can believe it got better to a larger degree relative to the comparative countries. My difficulty is in believing it get better to such a large degree that for the 2 biggest years of COVID your were better off being in poverty in the US than in the EU. Not with such a huge disparity between them at all other times.

1) That all of the effects of America's wealth inequality on American poverty could be made up for simply by giving everyone a thousand dollars a year. Not even UBI proponents are that optimistic.

2) That nothing any of the 3 comparative countries did or did not do during a massive global pandemic did anything to alter the relative poverty levels of their populations in the slightest

3) That the major economic crashes and recessions over the last few decades have actually improved American average poverty (notice that the US rate dips for the beginnings of the dot com crash, 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, despite none of those coming with government stimulus checks.

This measurement might be have something interesting to say, but I'm not sure it's saying what is being claimed. It feels more like they've found a more volatile measure of the US economy and stock market than of poverty.

I agree that a ruling on the outputs specifically would have been interesting an instructive, but I disagree with the interpretation that by omission fair use would not apply to those outputs. The outputs were not challenged as the judge notes because the plaintiffs did not allege the outputs of the AI were infringing. The only conclusion we can really draw from this is that the plaintiffs didn't think they could make a good case for the outputs being infringing. Maybe GPL software authors could do so, but clearly these book authors did not think they could. Judge Alsup does note that it's certainly possible for those outputs to be infringing, but that such a case would have to be litigated separately.

And again, this all makes sense to me if you've followed copyright law through the digital age. A xerox machine can be use to create verbatim, clearly infringing copies of works covered by copyright. But that being the case does not mean that making a xerox machine is a violation of copyright, even if you use copyrighted material to test the machine. It does not mean that selling a xerox machine is a violation of copyright, even if you use copyrighted material to demonstrate the capabilities when selling the machine. And it does not mean that every use of a xerox machine is inherently a copyright violation, even if any individual use can be.

Similarly consider CD ripping software (like iTunes) or DVD/BluRay ripping software like Handbrake. I would be comfortable betting that over 90% of all copies made by iTunes or Handbrake are copies of works that the copy maker does not own copyright to (remember the "Rip, Mix, Burn" iTunes commercials?). But that being the case, iTunes CD ripping capabilities and Handbrakes DVD ripping capabilities are not themselves copyright violations, nor is distributing that software, even with instructions for how the end user can use that software to make copies of material that they do not own the copyright for. That this software can enable piracy on a mass scale does not inherently make every use of the software a copyright violation. Whether or not the output of iTunes or Handbrake is "fair use" is and must be litigated on an individual basis. The output is not inherently one or the other.

> The plaintiffs also make really awful arguments about “memorizing” and “learning” that falsely anthropomorphize LLMs. Which the judge shoots down.

> If we’re going to give LLMs the same rights as humans, there’s unlikely to much of an argument.

Judge Alsup goes much further than just "shoot[ing] down" the arguments about memorizing and learning, he also very explicitly says right on page 9:

    To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude
    and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the
    Copyright Act.

    In short, the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate
    new text was quintessentially transformative. Like any reader aspiring to be a writer,
    Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but
    to turn a hard corner and create something different. If this training process reasonably
    required making copies within the LLM or otherwise, those copies were engaged in a
    transformative use.

Which clause of the GPL requires the receiver of GPL code to agree to the terms of the GPL before being allowed to receive the source code that they are entitled to under the license? Because that would expressly contradict the first sentence of section 9:

    You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program.

> If you copy the GPL code, and it inherits the license, as the terms say it

> does, then you must also copy the license.

> The GPL does not give you an unfettered right to copy, it comes with terms

> and conditions protecting it under contract law. Thus, you must follow the > contract.

I agree that the GPL does not give you an unfettered right to copy. But the GPL like all such licenses are still governed by copyright law. And "fair use" is an exception to the copyright laws that allow you to make copies that you are not otherwise authorized to make. No publisher can put additional terms in their book, even if they wrap it in shrinkwrap that denies you the right to use that book for various fair use purposes like quoting it for criticism or parody. The Sony terms and conditions for the Play Station very clearly forbid copying the BIOS or decompiling it. But those terms are null and void when you copy the BIOS and decompile it for making a new emulator (at least in the US) because the courts have already ruled that such use is fair use.

So it is with the GPL. By default you have no right to make copies of the software at all. The GPL then grants you additional rights you normally wouldn't have under copyright law, but only to the extent that when exercising those rights, you comply with the terms of the GPL. But "Fair Use" then goes beyond that and says that for certain purposes, certain types and amounts of copies can be made, regardless of what rights the publisher does or does not reserve. This would be why the GPL specifically says:

    This License acknowledges your rights of fair use or other equivalent, as provided by copyright law.

    Do I have “fair use” rights in using the source code of a GPL-covered program? (#GPLFairUse)
    Yes, you do. “Fair use” is use that is allowed without any special 
    permission. Since you don't need the developers' permission for such use, you 
    can do it regardless of what the developers said about it—in the license or 
    elsewhere, whether that license be the GNU GPL or any other free software 
    license.

Fair use has repeatedly been found even in cases where the copies were used for commercial purposes. See Sony v. Connectix for example, where the cloning and disassembly of the PlayStation BIOS for the purposes of making a commercially sold (at retail, in a box) emulator of a then currently sold game console was determined to be fair use.

> Fail. In many cases at least, the copy written code is commercial or otherwise supports livelihoods; and is the result much high skill labor with the express stipulation for reciprocity.

Again, see Sony V. Connectix where the sales of PlayStation consoles support the livelihoods and skilled labor of Sony engineers.

> Fail. They use all of it.

And again, see Sony V. Connectix, where the entire BIOS was copied again and again until a clone could be written that sought to reproduce all the functionality of the real BIOS. Or see Google V. Oracle where cloning the entire Java API for a competing commercial product was also deemed fair use. Or the Google Books lawsuits, where cloning entire books for the purposes of making them searchable online was deemed fair use. Or see any of the various time/format shifting cases over the years (Cassette tapes, VCRs, DVRs, MP3 encoders, DVD ripping etc) where making whole and complete copies of works is deemed fair use.

> Fail to the extreme. There is already measurable decline in these markets. The leaders explicitly state that they want to put knowledge workers out of business.

Again, see Sony v. Connectix where the commercial product deemed to be fair use was directly competing with an actively sold video game console. Copyright protects the rights of creators to exploit their own works, it does not protect them against any and all forms of competition.

Or perhaps instead of referring you to the history of legislation around copyright in the digital age, I should instead simply point you at Judge Alsup's ruling in the Bartz case where he details exactly why the facts of the case and prior case law find that training an AI on copyrighted material is fair use [1]. Of particular interest to you might be the fact that each of the 4 factors is not a simple "pass/fail" metric, but a weighing of relative merits. For example, when examining factor 1, Judge Alsup writes:

> That the accused is a commercial entity is indicative, not dispositive. That

> the accused stands to benefit is likewise indicative. But what matters most

> is whether the format change exploits anything the Copyright Act reserves to

> the copyright owner.

[1]: https://admin.bakerlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/ECF-23...

I'm referring to the long history of carefully threaded fair use rulings and settlements, many of which we as an industry have benefitted greatly from. From determinations that cloning a BIOS can be fair use (see IBM PC bios cloning, but also Sony v. Connectix), or that cloning an entire API for the purposes of creating a parallel competitive product (Google v. Oracle), or digitizing books for the purposes of making those books searchable and even displaying portions of those books to users (Authors Guild v. Google) or even your cable company offering you "remote DVR" copying of broadcast TV (20th Century Fox v. Cablevision). Time and again the courts have found that copyright, and especially copyright with respect to digital transformations is far more limited than large corporations would prefer. Further they have found in plenty of cases that even a direct 1:1 copy of source can be fair use, let alone copies which are "transformative" as LLM training was found to be in Bartz.

Realistically, I don't see how anyone can have watched the various copyright cases that have been decided in the digital age, and seen the battles that the EFF (and a good part of the tech industry) have waged to reduce the strength of copyright and not also see how AI training can very easily fit within that same framework.

Not to cast aspersions on my fellow geeks and nerds, but it has been very interesting to me to watch the "hacker" world move from "information wants to be free" to "copyright maximalists" once it was their works that were being copied in ways they didn't like. For an industry that has brought about (and heavily promoted and supported) things like DeCSS, BitTorrent, Handbrake, Jellyfin/Plex, numerous emulators, WINE, BIOS and hardware cloning, ad blockers, web scrapers and many other things that copyright owners have been very unhappy about, it's very strange to see this newfound respect for the sanctity of copyright.

> I can easily make a case that "buying a copy" in the case of a GPL-2 codebase is "agreeing to the license" and that such an agreement could easily say "anything trained on this must also be released as GPL-2".

And I would argue that obtaining a legal copy of the GPL source to a program requires no such agreement. By downloading a copy of a GPLed program I am entitled by the terms under which that software was distributed to obtain a copy of the source code. I do not have to agree to any other terms in order to obtain that source code, downloading from someone authorized to distribute that code is in and of itself sufficient to entitle me to that source code. You can not, by the very terms of the GPL itself deny me a copy of the source code for GPL software you have distributed to me, even if you believe I intend to make distributions that are not GPL compliant. You can decline to distribute the software to me in the first place, but once you have distributed it to me, I am legally entitled to a copy of the source code. From there, now that I have a legal copy, the question becomes is making additional copies for the purposes of training an AI model fair use? So far, the most definitive case we have on the matter (Bartz) says yes it is.

So either we have to make the case that the original copy was somehow acquired from a source not authorized to make that copy, or we have to argue that the output of the AI model or the AI model is itself infringing. Given the ruling that copies made for training an AI model was ruled "exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act"[1] it seems unlikely that the AI model itself is going to be found to be infringing. That leaves the output of the model itself, which Bartz does not rule on, as the authors never alleged the output of the model was infringing. GPL software authors might be able to prevail on that point, but they would have a pretty uphill battle I think in demonstrating that the model generated infringing output and not simply functional necessary code that isn't covered by copyright. The ability of code to be subject to copyright has long been a sort of careful balance between protecting a larger creative idea, and also not simply walling off whole avenues of purely functional decisions from all competitors.

[1]: https://admin.bakerlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/ECF-23...

It's funny you mention that, because one of the biggest fair use cases that effectively cemented "fair use" for emulators is Sony Computer Entertainment Inc v. Connectix Corp.[1] where the copying of PlayStaion BIOS files for the purposes of reverse engineering and creating an emulator was explicitly ruled to be fair use, including running that code through a disassembler.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_I....

1) "Copies used to train specific LLMs", for which the ruling is:

> The copies used to train specific LLMs were justified as a fair use.

> Every factor but the nature of the copyrighted work favors this result.

> The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes.

Notable here is that all of the "copies used to train specific LLMs" were copies made from books Anthropic purchased. But also of note is that Anthropic need not have purchased them, as long as they had obtained the original sources legally. The case references the Google Books lawsuit as an example of something Anthropic could have done to avoid pirating the books they did pirate where in Google obtained the original materials on loan from willing and participating libraries, and did not purchase them.

2) "The copies used to convert purchased print library copies into digital library copies", where again the ruling is:

> justified, too, though for a different fair use. The first factor strongly

> favors this result, and the third favors it, too. The fourth is neutral. Only

> the second slightly disfavors it. On balance, as the purchased print copy was

> destroyed and its digital replacement not redistributed, this was a

> fair use.

Here one might argue where the use of GPL code is different in that in making the copy, no original was destroyed. But it's also very likely that this wouldn't apply at all in the case of GPL code because there was also no original physical copy to convert into a digital format. The code was already digitally available.

3) "The downloaded pirated copies used to build a central library" where the court finds clearly against fair use.

4) "And, as for any copies made from central library copies but not used for training" where as you note Judge Alsup declined to rule. But notice particularly that this is referring to copies made FROM the central library AND NOT for the purposes of training an LLM. The copies made from purchased materials to build the central library in the first place were already deemed fair use. And making copies from the central library to train an LLM from those copies was also determined to be fair use.The copies obtained by piracy were not. But for uses not pertaining to the training of an LLM, the judge is declining to make a ruling here because there was not enough evidence about what books from the central library were copied for what purposes and what the source of those copies was. As he says in the ruling:

> Anthropic is not entitled to an order blessing all copying “that Anthropic has ever made after obtaining the data,” to use its words

This declination applies both to the purchased and pirated sources, because it's about whether making additional copies from your central library copies (which themselves may or may not have been fair use), automatically qualifies as fair use. And this is perfectly reasonable. You have a right as part of fair use to make a copy of a TV broadcast to watch at a later time on your DVR. But having a right to make that copy does not inherently mean that you also have a right to make a copy from that copy for any other purposes. You may (and almost certainly do) have a right to make a copy to move it from your DVR to some other storage medium. You may not (and almost certainly do not) have a right to make a copy and give it to your friend.

At best, an argument that GPL software wouldn't be covered under the same considerations of fair use that this case considers would require arguing that the copies of GPL code obtained by Anthropic were not obtained legally. But that's likely going to be a very hard argument to make given that GPL code is freely distributed all over the place with no attempts made to restrict who can access that code. In fact, GPL code demands that if you distribute the software derived from that code, you MUST make copies of the code available to anyone you distribute the software to. Any AI trainer would simply need to download Linux or emacs and the GPL requires the person they downloaded that software from to provide them with the source code. How could you then argue that the original source from which copies were made was obtained illicitly when the terms of downloading the freely available software mandated that they be given a copy?

Why do you think "fair use" doesn't apply in this case? The prior Bartz vs Anthropic ruling laid out pretty clearly how training an AI model falls within the realm of fair use. Authors Guild vs Google and Authors Guild vs HathiTrust were both decided much earlier and both found that digitizing copyrighted works for the sake of making them searchable is sufficiently transformative to meet the standards of fair use. So what is it about GPL licensed software that you feel would make AI training on it not subject to the same copyright and fair use considerations that apply to books?

Sure they can. Perhaps a useful example of something like this would be to consider cryptography. Crypto is ridiculously complex and difficult to do correctly. Most individual developers have no hope of producing good cryptographic code on the same scale and dependability of the big crypto libraries and organizations. At the same time these central libraries and organizations have bugs, mistakes and weaknesses that can and do cause big problems for people. None of that changes the fact that for most developers “rolling your own crypto” is a bad idea.

It’s immensely frustrating to me that what should be a huge lesson in the importance of limited government power and diffusion of that power across multiple governmental levels isn’t likely to result in that lesson being learned. I have a real fear that in history Trump will have been an inflection point on the road to an ever more powerful federal government in general and executive branch in particular, rather than a historical anomaly at the high end of that same power dynamic.

So what I'm hearing is you don't want Apple to make their computers more repairable? Think of this like training a dog. My dog can open the cabinet in the kitchen on their own, pull out a specific requested item, close the door again and bring the item to me from anywhere in my house. Opening a door is just tugging on something, bringing something to me is just fetch, closing a door is just pushing with its nose. If I went into the training of this with the attitude of "oh wow, you pulled the door open" or "oh wow, you fetched the thing" and didn't reward my dog for doing those simple pieces because "any good dog can tug on a rope or fetch a ball", then my dog would never have gotten to the point of doing all of those things in a repeatable complex sequence that serves a useful purpose. Instead every part of it that my dog got right, they got all sorts of praise and rewards. And so once I started asking more, my dog eagerly tried to do those things because they knew if they did what I wanted, they could get the things they wanted.

Train your companies the same way. Give them the positive PR and praise they're looking for when they do the things you want them to do. You'll get them to do what you want a lot faster if they have an actual incentive to do it.

https://support.apple.com/mac-laptops/repair?services=servic...

https://getsupport.apple.com/repair-locations?locale=en_US

That level of simplicity lasted from approximately 1999 to 2002 when the 14 inch iBooks, the 17 inch iMacs and the eMacs were introduced, followed by the 12 and 17 inch powerbooks in 2003. By 2005 they had also introduced the Mac Mini. And again most of these had a "good", "better", "best" variant, though in some cases (like the first 17 inch iMacs, the "best" tier was also the next model variant).

Apple's lineup is undeniably more complicated now than it has been in the past, but the simplification was never really about cutting model types down, so much as it was about making distinct model categories that people could easily understand why they would pick one or the other.

I think they still do a relatively good job at retaining that distinction, and I agree that the iPad lineup is probably the most muddled. Though special mention goes to the "Macbook Pro with M4 Pro" branding, which anyone should have caught and thought that maybe they needed a better moniker than "Pro" for the processor variant (and of course also, is the "Pro", the "Max" or the "Ultra" the best?)