License

In December of 2025, the Norwegian government entered into an agreement, through the National Library of Norway, to access copyrighted press material via Kopinor on behalf of the Norwegian Media Businesses’ Association (MBL), enabling the lawful training, development, maintenance, and public release of Norwegian language models. The agreement covers copyright-protected press publications published in Norway up to one year from the date of publication of the model, effectively creating a rolling cutoff date rather than a fixed historical cutoff. The agreement also covered the license under which models trained on such data must be released.

The license is an adaptation of the commonly used open-source Apache 2.0 license. However, due to some additional use-based restrictions, it cannot be considered open-source as per the OSI definition, albeit being commercially friendly. The most important aspects that make NB-License non open source are:

  1. You must not use the models to intentionally recreate material from training data, whether
    protected by intellectual property rights or as personal data.
  1. You must not use the models or their outputs, to provide end-user services whose primary purpose
    is to replace services for access to the press publications licensed as training data, unless you have a separate agreement with the copyright holders.

Below, you will find the full text of the license template and frequently asked questions and answers.