evashang's comments

agree with this - other industries like finance and law are much more greenfield

When are you going to add non-tech companies? I'm constantly scanning bios like this for lawyers, especially on what types of law they practice and what types of cases they've done in the past.

TL;DR our lawyers wrote a clause to protect open source code from being used by generative AI companies for profit. You can find it here: paytotrain.ai

A legal grey area exists as to whether publicly available creations (code or art) can be used to train datasets for generative AI projects without infringing their creators' underlying copyrights. Other types of claims, such as violation of license agreements and DMCA violations, require proof of damages to substantiate.

The legal solution we’ve identified is to add a specific damages amount to the license itself — a licensing fee. The failure to pay such a fee would cause the creator to suffer damages in the amount of the fee. By imbedding a licensing fee into a traditional open-source license, a creator can solve the proof-of-damages issue that could otherwise limit a claim under the DMCA or for breach of contract, and limit the fee to generative AI companies.

That’s why we built the Humans Only Clause. If you don’t want your code used by Copilot in this way, the Humans Only Clause can help strengthen your protections from use for training purposes. It’s a simple addition to your existing open source license to keep it free use and open source for other developers, but to prevent use without attribution by generative AI companies.

You can access the Humans Only Clause and insert it into your GitHub repo by going to PayToTrain.ai — we also built a payments form where you can set your own licensing fee depending on how valuable you believe your repo to be. If we get enough people using this clause, there’s a good chance we can assemble a separate class for a future class action, where each user gets significantly higher damages than what’s available statutorily under existing DMCA lawsuits.

On a philosophical level, we believe that the open source community is based on principles of taking and giving back to the collective. AI-based programming assistants strip away any attribution while drawing from the underlying contributions of the community. We want the open source community to continue to be open source, but we don’t want big companies to profit on our code.

If you’re interested, check it out: paytotrain.ai. We’d love to hear what you think

Legalist is repaid only in the event you recover money directly!

Hey! As you'll find on our website, we take a third of the judgment as a contingency stake, as per our usual practice.

Absolutely! The only authorized representatives are company officers or lawyers, and many small claims courts don't allow lawyers. So unless the CEO of Equifax attends every court hearing in the country, or unless the judge allows them to move it out of small claims court, you're likely to recover. (not a lawyer, not legal advice)

Just a clarification - while there are multiple class action lawsuits against Equifax, Legalist is funding individual consumers to take action in small claims court. It's faster and you're likely to recover more.

Litigation finance is like a contingency arrangement - if you file the case and the judge dismisses it, there's no risk to you. But if you do file the case and win $1000, we'll recover alongside you.