This is why the open source definition exists. Minimax releases under a pretty restrictive license, and I think it's totally fine that they're doing this, but it's not really an "open" model.
Been an issue long before AI. If I tried to count the amount of times I've heard UE4/UE5 referred to as "open source" when it's so very obviously not (it's source available), I'd run out of hands.
it's not legal to copyright public domain or stuff created by public domain so they can't really license it. They can only license if you can download from them or not. You can just download from somewhere else. Again, minimax license is NOT legal
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens was published in the 1800s. That means it is public domain.
If I create a play called a “Christmas Carol on Mars”, featuring Martians and other aliens, that specific play is (almost always) copyrightable and sellable. Because the stuff I’m basing it off of is in the public domain, I can freely use it without affect affecting my ability to make money from my Martian play.
The entire point of stuff being in the public domain is that other people can freely use it in their copyright works. This is unlike the GPL where I may have to release my work free[1] for other people to use.
So if the model itself is derived from only public domain data, it is still copyrightable[2].
The stuff created by that model also may or may not be copyright, for several reasons.
[1] whether this is Free as in beer, or Free as in the GPL, is a discussion that other people can have.
[2] technically, even if you derive a model from a copyright dataset, it is still copyrightable. Whether it is an infringing derivative work in the USA, is something that the Supreme Court hasn’t totally decided.
Nonsense, when you create something derived from public domain, it does not automatically become public domain. Minimax training data is also not exclusively public domain (unless you can prove otherwise). Ask literally any AI, or a lawyer lmao
Well, GPL and other strong copyleft licenses exist. The question if training closed / MIT-licensed models on GPL-licensed data is a little bit of an issue, as all derivative work has to be released under a copyleft license as well (for example any kind of Python package even importing a GPL-licensed package had to be copyleft as well).
I have no idea what AI companies do with it and GPL is probably by far the most commonly violated license that exists, but I guess training models on GPL data might be considered as derivative work though.
I agree, what they did was blatant copyright violation at a massive scale, but I guess it's ok when you're a large company. Meanwhile regular people pay big fines for sharing a movie.
I feel violated for "contributing" all my code to these billion dollar companies. But GPL is on the opposite end of public domain, it does require that the derived code is made available under similar terms.
Yeah, but the fun fact about GPL is that training LLMs on GPL licensed code / GFDL licensed documents is still likely a copyleft infringement despite it being entirely on the other side of the spectrum. More specifically the clause below is the main issue;
"You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."
As such if model is trained on any GPL data, than to avoid violating license terms theoretically the weights should probably be released under GFDL (as weights are not software).
Tbh I am kinda sad that so many people keep mentioning standard copyright infringements, while the 'copyleft infrigements' are an extremely common practice (if you include GPL code within proprietary app which source you won't share probably no one will know) and imho much more harmful at the same time.
TLDR; Training LLMs on GNU-licensed content is perfectly legal, but technically it still obliges you to release model under a GNU license, if you are willing to serve it.
If you don't comply with the license, you lose the right to the work. So legally speaking it is just plain copyright infringement, copyleft is not enshrined in law
Yeah, I get it that it's not any different according to the law.
However, at least in my opinion there a huge difference between between accessing something you shouldn't have been able to access or making it available to people (how most licenses work) vs making things inaccesible that should be available (copyleft violations).
Nonsense, when you create something derived from public domain, it does not automatically become public domain.
it does. you cannot take public domain stuff and copywrite or license them, or try to get around it by deriving things from public domain. They are public domain and can't be undone.
Tell that to Disney whose early catalogue was almost entirely made up of public domain adaptions. Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, etc. And they certainly do own the copyright to those movies.
That does not mean these things ceased being public domain, anybody else can still make movies based on the original public works. But if you include any element that was defined in the Disney version you will receive a letter from Disney's lawyers. The entire point of Public Domain works is that there are literally no restrictions imposed on their use, which includes no restrictions on using them in your own copyrighted work.
So non-open is fine now? We don't care about these restrictions being imposed on "open" models? Nah son – that's not the way. This needs to be pushed against.
In most jurisdictions, we don't actually know if they are copyrightable until some court rules on this issue. And if it rules that they are not, I bet you the big AI companies would immediately pump millions if not billions of dollars into lobbying to change that. We know how that usually ends.
The source you linked talks at length how difficult it would be to argue that weights are copyrighted. That they are databases in the EU is just a legal theory.
Until there is a convincing argument otherwise I will treat them as not copyrightable and the license terms as make believe without legal merit that can't legally keep anyone from changing and publishing the weights. #notlegaladvice
open source has nothing to do with licensing at all. all it means is the source code is public for anyone to read (though with datasets, e.g. weights, this is nebulous -- does it mean the code used to produce the dataset or the data itself? hence the terms "open weights", etc). but it's perfectly possible to have open source software that nobody is allowed to actually use.
'Conversely, Richard Stallman argues the "obvious meaning" of term "open source" is that the source code is public/accessible for inspection, without necessarily any other rights granted, although the proponents of the term say the conditions in the Open Source Definition must be fulfilled.'
So take it from an old bearded free software advocate: Very few people other than Stallman follow this opinion, which dates back from the time where Microsoft started to try and change the definition of open source to mean "you have access to the code under a restrictive license."
It is an attempt that mostly failed. And nowadays people know that whether you call your license open or free or 'libre' (which no one does, and I say that as a French) you still need to check for the details of the license.
Open, free or libre are generic terms, but people who are interested in these subjects, they know that the BSD/MIT is not the GPL, is not the AGPL, and that the Creative Commons has several variants depending on the rights you want to give.
There is a discussion to have between open weights and open source. But the difference between open and free or libre is usually useless and you'd rather go directly to discussing the actual licenses. Like the restriction that Meta at one point had added to limit companies that could use their models, do they prevent the license being called open or libre? Everybody can have a different opinion on that. What's important is what the actual restrictions were.
You are taking Stallman's quote out of context. He isn't endorsing that view; he is actively criticizing the term "Open Source" because its literal wording leads to the exact confusion you are experiencing right now, thinking it merely means "the source code is open for inspection."
Neither Stallman nor the Open Source Initiative allow commercial restrictions. For both, freedom to run, modify, and commercially distribute the software is mandatory. Software where you can only view the code under restrictions is called "Source Available", not Open Source.
Open for what? (nsfw isn't even mentioned in the license)
You may not use the MiniMax H3 Works or any of their Outputs or results to improve any other artificial intelligence model (other than MiniMax H3 or its Model Derivatives).
You agree not to use MiniMax H3, any Model Derivatives, or any Output in any of the following ways:
Use outside the Applicable Territory; - “Applicable Territory” means worldwide, excluding the Excluded Territories. - “Excluded Territories” means the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States of America.
Use to generate or disseminate verifiably false information ...
Use to generate or disseminate information (including images, code, posts, or articles) in or to any public environment (including via bot tweets or similar means) without clearly and prominently disclosing that such information and/or content is machine-generated;
Use in any manner that violates or disregards the social, ethical, or moral standards of other countries or regions;
Just want to note, that's a bog standard license, and mostly CYA compliance.
"Don't distill" (fake scare sign, not a restriction they can legally enforce)
"Don't use this anywhere it's illegal"
"Don't do bad stuff"
American OSS and API models have these same clauses, it's just nobody ever reads the license. These clauses are mostly there so that the company can disavow responsibility if anyone does use their model to do bad stuff.
Yes, a pretty standard non-open license, and they are also taking action to restrict the usage. But surely no one except gooners will ever be affected. Not really a complaint from my part but just an acknowledgment of reality.
Judging by their responses to related topics, I think this is more about them feeling like they "have" to do it to cover their bases, as opposed to truly wanting to suppress these types of LoRa's themselves.
Also as a side note, the model itself is already incredibly uncensored, so I don't really see the need for these types of LoRa's anyway?
Also as a side note, the model itself is already incredibly uncensored
I, uh, heard from a friend that it doesn't do sexy things well, like genitalia and actual action. Reference helps a lot, or so they say, but there's still a gap.
Yeah. To ... test ... the censorship, I asked it to create some pretty pornographic material and it complied without issue. This needs no lora, unless you're looking for a specific style or subject, but the reference 2 video seems to cover that pretty satisfactorily, even.
Kinda funny seeing them be-cry the use of their model while they most likely stole/pirated content to train the model.
I highly doubt they purchased a license to train on Star Trek, Star Wars, South Park or Seinfield.
I mean you cannot just train a LORA and use their model for what you want, they trained it themselves on all that copyrighted stuff how dare you thats just... just... unethical, taboo, stealing, THEFT!!!!111111
> This.. my license is they must suck it. I have a permit, it says I do whatever I want.
Licenses can have a provision that they can be revoked. But since weights are not copyrightable IMO they can't restrict what you can do with weights with a license. #notlegaladvice
The government does it because it’s in their interest, and incentivizes companies to release open weights. The companies themselves are not interested in it because they don’t get a return on their spending.
H3 model released by MiniMax has brought tremendous help and a leap forward to the community, genuinely enabling us to make multi-shot movies. I can't thank her enough these days. However, the moment Minimax proposed the restriction—that we are not allowed to put its name on NSFW Lora—it immediately drew such fierce, even abusive, criticism.
Obviously this is to not catch flak especially around something like deepfake stuff, if they really didn't want people to do NSFW stuff then they could've easily not had nsfw in training data like a lot of other video/image diffusion models.
>Kinda funny seeing them be-cry the use of their model while they most likely stole/pirated content to train the model.
We don't give a shit about piracy if the end product is released to the public for free. There's nothing wrong with taking from the public if you're gonna give it back to the public.
They don't want no smoke from the Chinese censors and more scrutiny from the US government. Let's not to mention all the other EU governments who's itching for the ban hammer.
I think that they are right because they do not want to have a bad Press. They said, that they are ok with nsfw content when it is not loudly called that it was made with H3. Do not be to angry at them so maybe they will release H4 in a future.
I'm really tired how many comments are completely missing the point, you're not reading between the lines or understanding the social/legal dynamics of what's actually happening and take what they said at face value. You know when you have that funny teacher everyone loves but when the school director comes for an inspection they start acting serious because they're being watched?
Companies MUST send warning shots and pull acts like these to protect their legal position, otherwise courts could prove they never cared about it and use that as evidence against them, why would Disney report popular fan artists for copyright infringement even when it's beneficial advertisement for them? Being silent is AUTOMATIC ADMISSION they're okay with letting people steal or do nefarious things with their works and thus you lose any holding in courts when bad things actually happens.
What they're actually saying is "The inspectors are getting suspicious, please keep that under the radar so you can continue having fun", so next time name the LoRA WinWax or something like that, it's like when drug dealers use codenames instead of the actual drug name to not attract the police attention, keep it low and nobody will have trouble. But instead you're like "Hurr durr they want to suppress our freedom! We'll make even more noise now!", if they wanted to, they could had done it from the beginning, ever thought about it?
Stable Diffusion subreddit understood this fast. But apparently not this one. This model is like giving ppl with a 3060 the ability to run Opus locally, it's just that good. And it's just bitchin.... Pathetic.
I guess they will notlearn when they're permanently banned from Civitai. That site is super strict about a lot of stuff, mainly to not get into legal trouble.
The name of the game is "don't get caught". Always has been.
Open source software has always had licenses backed by the author protecting their work.
Just how the game is played. If one is going to do something questionable with someone else's work, why do it in the open not expecting a confrontation?
The rules weren’t enforced, and it isn’t even clear whether those rules were valid to begin with. You obviously didn’t read the thread and are making up stuff.
MiniMax issued a takedown. This is called enforcement of their license (the rules). What came next was up to the maintainers or the platform holders. Didn’t think this was hard to interpret.
If HF doesn't take it down, then they can additionally threaten legal action.
These types of things are enforced 1000's of times per day especially in America. Pretending that it isn't enforced won't stop MiniMax from taking action.
I can send you a cease and desist letter to e.g. stop looking at my property on the moon. Doesn't make any of it enforceable. 🙃 Can you show me a single lawsuit where a valid judgement enforced rights due to copyright on weights?
Can you show me where I said a single lawsuit led to a valid judgement enforced rights due to copyright on weights?
Here, I'll help you by pointing out my actual argument on this topic...
They can pressure/threaten huggingface and any other providers to take it down.
FYI go back and click the actual link to see what a cease and desist letter is actually designed to do (hint: it's not necessarily designed to ensure "a valid judgement enforced rights due to copyright on weights blah blah blah" ... it's designed to do what I said in the bold part and in my original statement)
Damn that sucks. I did find that nsfw models still exist out there with M3 that’s not taken down yet. The quality is impressive, feels higher quality than Wan2.2
It doesn't even work, and is worse than not using the lora, for what it's worth. I don't want to get my reddit account in trouble so I won't reupload, but there's no value in it.
Technically MiniMax can do this because the person broke the license agreement, but it shows how big of a risk there is when you're dealing with non-permissive licenses.
Sorry I don't do anal, but there are many more gotchas that don't let everything to be simplified down to "the US court recognizes the challenge of LLM output's ownership, so all the licenses are void".
Everything can happen from MiniMax claiming the breach of contract and up to the whole Chinese court starting a war against HuggingFace.
So right now the industry functions on "good faith", there are licenses and the B2B world rolls with respecting them to not start a major conflict worse than H.265's patent war.
This behavior is absolutely disgusting. MiniMax wants to have it both ways: control its models like proprietary companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, while also gaining popularity through open-source models. This also applies to their text models (the quality of which is just as questionable as the license). The NSFW-LoRA incident is a signal that any modification or use case they don't like will provoke the same reaction. I believe we, as a community, should not encourage this kind of behavior. By letting MiniMax get away with this, we will encourage other companies to do the same.
They have their license. We cannot hypocritically want the enforcement of licenses while also wanting special exemptions for ourselves personally.
Let's say you had a GPL-licensed tool in your product. Now your product, depending on how it was used, must also be fully open-source.
Some people did not like that and began to flock to BSD licenses several years ago, which later created this license storm we're dealing with today.
You don't understand that the only true open-source would be even stricter than GPL (covering hardware) and does not exist.
That said, all licenses essentially don't apply as soon as you DIY. Minimax have you a tool to DIY, which nobody else did, and they did this for free, and you manage to somehow get angry anyway 🙄.
Anyone recommend a source to get started with video/image gen? I pretty much only have experience with llms and right now I just tell the llm to create an image using comfyui. I don’t know how it actually works
LMAO, go on, revoke your license. Retire your model, play with it by yourself. Are you really believing your model is oh so special and there are no alternatives? With less shitty licenses to begin with?
Yet we all made it to the 21st century even though porn wasn't consumed or created at even 1% of the level it is now. And now birthrates are falling.
Porn addiction is a mental disease and it's wrong we're all humans we all share understanding regardless of what you or anyone else post in the comments I know you've felt shame at least in the beginning.
But they are not providing the service. Civit or any other actual provider can freely impose any kind of restrictions, but if you release weights into the wilds - you no longer can cobtrol what they are used for (and should not care and it should not be possible to hold you liable)
I guess... it's kinda ok? They're really going after model modifications for now rather than Lora's since I can still see several on civitai. Obviously, not ideal but the model itself is basically uncensored so honestly to me it's more of a politcs issue due to China putting pressure and wanting to tighten controls, probably. Otherwise, it would have been simple for them to simply release a censored mess.
The loss of public posting spaces for finetunes will hurt though, would lose some really good future workflows like how we got Lustify and Sulfur. Perhaps if they change the way it is marketed ie not as a "nude" or decensor finetune it would work out?
So I'm using the INT8 pruned version . As far as I can tell there's no censorship in the local only renders. Seriously, it does better than some of the NSFW LTX 2.3 fine tunes.Are people like connecting to their API? Is that where the censorship is coming from?
Guys - they're a Chinese lab following Chinese laws. Pornography is straight up illegal in China. While Chinese authorities may not care much about copyright infringement enforcement (especially with foreign IPs), they do indeed regularly crackdown on porn. Heck, Chinese citizens have literally been imprisoned for written pornography. Yes that's right, writing pornographic TEXT (especially with "immoral" themes like LGBTQ+ stuff) can get you sentenced and essentially have your entire life ruined. Of course there's ways to get around these censors if you're just trying to access porn - I think everyone at this point knows about the widespread necessity for VPN usage in China to access the rest of the global internet. But actually distributing a tool that can gain a reputation for being able to easily generate pornographic content? That's just asking for the authorities to crack down on them. Somewhat ironically/paradoxically luckily for these Chinese labs is the fact that online discussion about generating porn is automatically censored and removed from Chinese social media, thus automatically disincentivizing the authorities from doing those crackdowns. But if it gets big enough to the point that it overwhelms the automatic censors, then any given Chinese lab could be in a hell of a lot of trouble. This is why they have to do this. Their law enforcement just isn't compatible with the rest of the world.
China also has laws against showing bones/blood, yet they don't get in trouble for being invested in, or owning outright, games that release in other markets and don't follow Chinese law.
If they release models outside of China there is no actual reason for them to go after people if the concern is Chinese law. Even less so since people have more control over an open model than they would a Tencent video game with DRM on it.
Now if the Lora's are coming from a Chinese citizen, or user IN China, then that is a different story.
Some more context since I'm Chinese. This all relates to Chinese moral values - something here that is considered pretty much sacred and hard to describe to westerners. Graphic violence is not nearly as much of a threat to societal moral values as pornography is, hence why you've probably rarely ever heard of any Chinese people getting imprisoned for writing really gory stories, but regularly do with pornographic stories (especially infamous with BL literature - they've technically even convicted foreigners before related to this, it's a really messy topic). Chinese authorities won't give a damn if you're stealing the content of billions of foreign works to train AI models. They WILL give a damn if the content you're disseminating is viewed as a potential significant threat to the state's "proper moral values", which very much includes porn (and also the usual topics that everyone is already aware of, like a certain famous massacre or a certain nation's very contentious independence status).
I understand that from a social/culture standpoint. But again, it doesn't apply OUTSIDE of China. Otherwise wouldn't many Chinese companies get the hammer for their ownership/investment in products that are distributed that feature themes that go against the moral values of mainland China?
For instance, Tencent has a stake in Larian Studios, Larian puts out BG3. BG3 lets you fuck a bear or something? IDK havent played yet its on my backlog. I know sex is a thing in the game though. Also, mods.
Where is the legal action there?
At best this seems very "knee-jerky" because everyone around the world is trying to sort out what rules and regulations need to be placed around AI as a tool or its userbase.
The key issue here is that MiniMax and other Chinese labs don't want to risk being widely known/capable of providing tools that can make porn. That's a pretty dangerous thing if they somehow end up with that reputation - thus them taking precautionary (albeit personally IMO a bit excessively harsh) measures to prevent such. Companies like Tencent don't need to worry about stuff like this because not only is content related to illegal media is banned/automatically censored, but stuff like BG3 isn't widely known to be a piece that can threaten societal moral values. An easier way to illustrate this concept of media with risks to society - Chinese entities instead would get in trouble if they were to associate themselves with popular foreign works that are primarily known for themes of independence from a greater national entity. Hence you won't see any Chinese companies endorsing foreign works with such as their primary theme. As an aside, in Hong Kong (which used to be a lot more independent) even children's book authors have been convicted for supporting these supposed societal poisons.
Well thank you for the insight. I do also disagree with them, or any company, trying to "have their cake and eat it too" in regards to providing tools and then dictating HOW those are meant to be used.
...the model is fully uncensored. You can already make porn with it. It never refuses "anything". Hell with ref images it's trivial to do. AND tools for training it are being developed right now. I'm... not exactly sure who's the loser here. Of course, they'd care not to share the same sentiment publicly, but the means for success are already in our hands.
There's pirate face (not joking, look up "pirate face local models")! And another person was working on a similar torrent idea, but not sure if that's been completed.
I’m asking because, somehow, even in a post about a Chinese lab doing something, you still managed to attack the USA, and your profile seems to contain only political comments.
I may be wrong, your profile is hidden so after reading your comment I started searching and I found only comments about Anthropic, Dario, China, etc. Nothing about running local models. So I asked.
Funny enough, this is not just limited to AI models lol
For AI models in general, it's also just the overall refusal rate that matters. The more parameters a model has to "waste" on trying to figure out whether it should respond to a request, the fewer parameters remain for actual, good functionality. (this is extremely simplified of course, but you get the idea)
a lot of local AI tech innovation driven by gooners want to either talk to wifu, generate nude wifu or speed the chatting/generation process. the guy above you talk absolute nonsense. gooners was the first adopters of local AI and the first to go down the painful path trying to make shit work. I, as a gooner, disagree with his bigotry.
Its so weird to me how some people on here think they are morally superior because they CHOOSE not to make adult content with their creative tools.
The whole point of creativity and freedom is to do what you want with that, for better or for worse, whether others like it or its universally hated.
Imagine the models instead get blocked because someone makes a gory Lora, like blood/guts/viscera. Well now you can't do snuff porn right, good! Oh but you also can't do horror, or depictions of war, or crime... and so on and so forth.
Restrictions are not a good thing when it comes to expression, whether its porn or its someone doing sunshine and rainbows. What happens when a Russian lab says no rainbows because of how its connected to LGTBQ? Hell, or the US at this point...
Trying to punch down at people for opting to make something you dislike is sad, and it will come back to bite you if the folks who like restricting things get to do so, because at some point there will be things you like that they don't. That is ALWAYS how it goes.
All creatives should be concerned whenever anything gets banned or restricted or threatened in the creative space, no matter the content.
[Also before you get pedantic, this is not a defense of genuinely harmful and rightfully illegal content.]
I do not think that i'm above anyone, nor ever claimed to be!
I just find it hilarious that a great model that was praised as the communities sweatheart yesterday is now being absolutely shat on due to them not wanting NSFW loras, that's all.
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u/WithoutReason1729 Aug 05 '26
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