51–60 of 274 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it unestablished? Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents? Weights are just a different kind of a document.
No, a document's contents aren't inherently copyrightable. They have to be a creative work or a method of production, and part of that basically means it has to be human generated content (as opposed to computer or animal generated). AI weights might be considered a method of production, but that isn't clear yet.
The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. If they're not, then presumably "available weights", "ethical weights", and "open weights" are all the same: open weights. Either your weights are under NDA and presumably considered to be a trade secret, or they are public, and the words in your "license" mean absolutely nothing? That seems like…
Why is it unestablished? Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents? Weights are just a different kind of a document.
In particular, taking other documents and shoving them through a process that generates a lot of other numbers with no human or creative interaction is definitely something I'd be concerned the courts would judge as not sufficiently creative to be copyrightable. The process itself would certainly consist of copyrightable code, but the output doesn't necessarily. This would be somewhat similar to the observation that there is no copyright to be had in a big table of files and their MD5 hashes (or other hashes), such as a Linux distro might use for integrity checking. Lots of copyright in the original file contents, copyright available on the process for producing these tables, but the tables themselves would likely be ruled not itself copyrightable as there is no creativity in that output.
Note this also has absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether AI output is copyrightable, this is about the huge table of numbers that make up the neural net weights being copyrightable. (Though it would be sort of an interesting question for the legal system to grapple with as to how a non-copyrightable set of numbers could then produce something copyrightable. Call it a philosophical variation on the "copyright washing" argument; can copyright spring from a non-copyrightable source other than a human brain, thus somehow "flowing uphill"? Would a human brain be copyrightable? Stay tuned for those questions, I guess, or if not you, your grandchildren.)
Per your other comments, "work" is not the bar, "creativity" is. "Size" is not the bar either. Merely being a much larger table of numbers than a list of hashes or a phone book is not the question. No human is in that table of numbers creatively saying "no, wait, this neural weight should be -1.5 instead of 2.0 to produce this creative effect". No human is even capable of working in the medium of neural net weights in a creative manner.
If you want to go the "novel legal theory" route, you could play with claiming creativity in the selection of input material and claim the resulting neural weights has a copyright in compilation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation That's a long way from a slam dunk though. Way out on a legal limb there. It isn't entirely clear to me what exact rights would result from such a claim either. It would be a landmark copyright court case for sure.
The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. If they're not, then presumably "available weights", "ethical weights", and "open weights" are all the same: open weights. Either your weights are under NDA and presumably considered to be a trade secret, or they are public, and the words in your "license" mean absolutely nothing? That seems like…
Why is it unestablished? Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents? Weights are just a different kind of a document.
> Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents?
Creative process is the bigger issue.
> Weights are just a different kind of a document.
And who sits down and writes this document of weights?
One thing I don't see discussed enough is that, ok let's say the weights are unencumbered, and the source is under an OSI license: the point of open source licenses and free software was to expose the *human understandable* meaning of the final program. That's why distributing binaries isn't allowed even though technically all of the functionality is present in the machine code. AI weights are basically binary blobs.…
No. You can do further training on them. If they are something less than code I don't think it's going to warrant all this talk about licensing. GPL, MIT, or some proprietary should cover it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. A lot of the difficulty here is how they skip is the hugely important issue: An entirely reasonable, if not fully tested, statement is the following: Every single one of these AI weight things itself is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement -- accordingly, it's extremely difficult to say anything morally justifiable or authoritative about anyone elses "rights…
> is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement Why? Copyright covers expression not information, AIs can learn information from any source regardless of copyright. They should just not regurgitate copyrighted content, that's all. And much of what organic content is online is common knowledge, thus can't be copyright-controlled.
"You wouldn't look at a car and then remember what that looked like when someone asks you to draw another"
The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. If they're not, then presumably "available weights", "ethical weights", and "open weights" are all the same: open weights. Either your weights are under NDA and presumably considered to be a trade secret, or they are public, and the words in your "license" mean absolutely nothing? That seems like…
Why is it unestablished? Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents? Weights are just a different kind of a document.
Yes, exactly. It's copyright 101.
For example, if you write a random number generator, and print 10000 randon numbers in a document, it's not copyrightable.
Even if you invented a specific random number generation algorithm, the document is still not copyrightable. Your code is copyrightable.
Again it's just copyright 101. If any of above surprises you, maybe you should read a few copyright case studies.
The only people who can possibly own the copyright, if any such copyright exists, are the authors of the training data.
I find this whole discussion about copyright of weights almost absurd, the incredible amount of deference given to our corporate lords is such that we are “hallucinating” new forms of IP protection for NN weights that have never existed in any kind of statue or case law and cut completely against the grain of all the law that currently exists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, a document's contents aren't inherently copyrightable. They have to be a creative work or a method of production, and part of that basically means it has to be human generated content (as opposed to computer or animal generated). AI weights might be considered a method of production, but that isn't clear yet.
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Putting work into something is not a sufficient cirteria for copyright.
> All of it is just a stream of bytes that the computer can interpret somehow
This is also not a sufficient or at all relevant cirteria for assigning copyright.
Also, in the sense you presented, those files are not fundamentally different from random noise. Which is not a particularly useful reduction for this exercise.
The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. If they're not, then presumably "available weights", "ethical weights", and "open weights" are all the same: open weights. Either your weights are under NDA and presumably considered to be a trade secret, or they are public, and the words in your "license" mean absolutely nothing? That seems like…
Exactly. A lot of the difficulty here is how they skip is the hugely important issue: An entirely reasonable, if not fully tested, statement is the following: Every single one of these AI weight things itself is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement -- accordingly, it's extremely difficult to say anything morally justifiable or authoritative about anyone elses "rights…
Maybe the popular and free ones. Adobe has a product in beta that uses "ethical training data" as a selling point.
The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. If they're not, then presumably "available weights", "ethical weights", and "open weights" are all the same: open weights. Either your weights are under NDA and presumably considered to be a trade secret, or they are public, and the words in your "license" mean absolutely nothing? That seems like…
Exactly. A lot of the difficulty here is how they skip is the hugely important issue: An entirely reasonable, if not fully tested, statement is the following: Every single one of these AI weight things itself is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement -- accordingly, it's extremely difficult to say anything morally justifiable or authoritative about anyone elses "rights…