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AI weights are not open “source”

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Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#191

Post by cubefox »

feoren wrote: post #174
nerdponx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weights are equivalent to compiled object code IMO. All else follows from there.

Compiled object code of a bunch of code you didn't write . I don't know why programmers are so eager to forget that copyright is not at all about what something is , and all about where it came from . It'd be hard to assert that you hold copyright over object code compiled from code you didn't write!

Or is the fact that compiled code enjoys copyright protection, even though it is not human generated, evidence that being generated by a human is not overly important for copyright protection?

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#192

Post by dragonwriter »

londons_explore wrote: post #80
jrm4 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are not bad arguments, but I don't think they're conclusive. I am a lawyer, and I could absolutely see this going the other way. "You can't make these machine things without literally feeding this copyrighted information into them, therefore they do contain a copy. You can see this by when they reproduce, e.g. the "getty images" deal." *this is not legal advice, dangit commenter person below

It's just a race for which test case gets to the supreme court first really...

> It's just a race for which test case gets to the supreme court first really...

Not really for practical purposes. In the long term, the Supreme Court can and does overrule its own precedent, so the first case on the specific issue to get to the Supreme Court doesn’t end the discussion.

In the short-term, cases get resolved by lower courts and parties either lack funds to do the maximum level of appeals, or the Supreme Court chooses not to hear appeals (they tend to prefer an issue to be well-developed with circuit case law, often waiting till there is a conflict between the Circuit Courts of Appeal, before taking it up), so the state of the law prior to any specific ruling on the narrow topic by the Supreme Court matters quite a bit.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#193

Post by PartiallyTyped »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #145
drdaeman wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a problem with legal system (not unique to any specific country, mind you, the problem is global), not patent or copyright system specifically. It grew incredible amounts of complexity so pro se became a sad joke in all but simplest cases, and there's no incentive to fix it - quite the opposite, everyone in the system is all for keeping the status quo, because it generates money.

Personally I don’t think patents do what people believe they do (encourage innovation). It’s a bigger discussion but briefly, the only literal function of a patent is to discourage innovation by legally barring anyone from using a patented idea as part of a new innovation. The idea we have is that the secondary effects of this will be increased profits for inventors and therefore more innovation. But actually there’s…

Another possible example is the x86 and x86-64 ISAs locked between AMD and Intel. I don’t think Intel would have become complacent had there been more competitors…

… or the whole “oracle vs google” over the java API.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#194

Post by xigoi »

mike_d wrote: post #157
immibis wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with IP laws, and everything to do with baby formula laws. You don't seriously think that without the ability to sell the recipe, nobody would invent a safe and effective baby formula, right?

I'm not sure you fully grasp all the dimensions of IP law. If you have two brands of baby formula, Death brand that kills babies, and OK brand that is perfectly fine, and you start putting Death brand in fake cans labeled OK brand - that is absolutely an IP enforcement issue. The desire of OK brand to protect their brand, and profits, combined with reasonable IP laws allows them to lead enforcement actions and protec…

> you start putting Death brand in fake cans labeled OK brand - that is absolutely an IP enforcement issue.

This is a matter of trademark, which is completely orthogonal to copyright and nobody is protesting against it here.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#195

Post by WrongAssumption »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #61
ronsor wrote: post #15

Model weights are not source code, but data. Arguably because of how they are generated, they are not even copyrightable at all.

Corporate data is of course protect-able. Otherwise why don't you just open up all your databases so anyone can access them?

Copyright protection is what gives protection when you put something out into the public. The desire to not publish something is evidence against having these protections, because people know they are not copyright able, so for that reason and others they keep it private. You just presented evidence against your position.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#196

Post by xigoi »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #128
jstanley wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very difficult distinction to make. Would you consider a Python program to be data rather than program just because it is text input to the python interpreter instead of machine code for the CPU?

It is not at all a difficult distinction. Weights are literally numbers computed as output. They are not instructions. The semantics of those numbers even when emplaced (loaded) in an artificial neural net is such that they do not execute. They are not instructions. LLM engines and diffusers perform searches where the weights are used to calculate additional output. Is source code, like Python text, data? Yes. All co…

If a program has to consist of instructions, then source code written in a declarative language is not a program.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#197

Post by xigency »

feoren wrote: post #174
nerdponx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weights are equivalent to compiled object code IMO. All else follows from there.

Compiled object code of a bunch of code you didn't write . I don't know why programmers are so eager to forget that copyright is not at all about what something is , and all about where it came from . It'd be hard to assert that you hold copyright over object code compiled from code you didn't write!

> programmers are so eager to forget that copyright is not at all about what something is, and all about where it came from

See “What color are your bits?”: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

>> And very much of intellectual property law comes down to rules regarding intangible attributes of bits - Who created the bits? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Are they copies of other bits?

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#198

Post by ke88y »

jrm4 wrote: post #182
m4nu3l wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't make these machine things without literally feeding this copyrighted information into them, therefore they do contain a copy. They don't necessarily do. Think about that. You can take some copyrighted material and transform the information contained in it (for instance a fictional book). You can then write a summary. The summary contains information that was present in the original but it has been transfo…

I like this argument a lot; but again -- how does this play out in the real world? It's pretty easy to refute what will happen in real life. Think, e.g Batman. I could write a very new and original "Batman" comic that doesn't strongly resemble anything -- movie, toy, comic, whatever -- that exists, but would be recognizable to fans. Once it starts doing well, will DC come after me? You bet.

These models can definitely be used to intentionally store and recall content that is copyrighted in a way that's not subject to fair use. (eg: trivially, I can very easily train a large model that has a small subnetwork which encodes a compressed or even lossless copy of a picture, and if I were to intentionally train a model is that way then this would be no less a copyright violation than distributing a JPEG of the same image embedded in some large binary).

But also, an unintentional copy of a copyrighted image is not a violation of copyright. (eg: an executable binary which happens to contain the bits corresponding to a picture of Batman -- but which are actually instruction sequences and were provably not intended to encode the picture -- clearly doesn't infringe.)

LLMs are somewhere in-between #1 and #2, and the intent can happen both in the training and also the prompting.

Stack on top of this the fact that the models can also definitely generate content that counts as fair use, or which isn't copyrighted.

It's the multitude of possible outputs, across the copyright spectrum, combined with the function of intent in training and/or prompting, which make this such a thorny legal issue for which existing copyright statute and jurisprudence is ill-suited.

Taking your Batman example: DC would come after you for trademark as well as copyright, and the copyright claims would be very carefully evaluated with respect to your very specific work. But here we are talking about a large model that can generate tons of different work which isn't subject to copyright or which is possibly fair use.

I don't think that existing jurisprudence (or even statute?!) can handle this situation very well, at all, without tons of arbitrary interpretative work on the parts of juries/judges, because of the multitude and vague intent issues described above.

(...Also presumably the merits of the DC case wouldn't matter because your victory would be pyhrric unless you are a mega-corp. Which from a legal theory perspective is neither here nor there but from a legal practicality perspective may inform how companies go about enforcing copyright claims on model weights/outputs.)

Anyways. I think we have a right mess on our hands and the legislature needs to do their damn jobs. Welcome to America, I guess :)

Curious to hear your thoughts on these issues.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#199

Post by mirekrusin »

photonerd wrote: post #170
mirekrusin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that weights are not copyrightable, how much restrictions can you put on output through API from those networks/weights? Ie. if ClosedAI says you can't use output of their API to train competitive models - is that enforceable or not?

That would be down to contract/terms of service. You’d be in breach of that, not copyright

But is it enforceable? Companies can put in contracts all kind of nonsense, it doesn't mean all of it is unconditionally enforceable, right?

Ie. if somebody creates company that sells milkshakes and they say you can't use them to feed employees of competing milkshakes companies - it wouldn't fly, would it?

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#200

Post by radarsat1 »

Animats wrote: post #119
ndriscoll wrote: post #33

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…

> The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. Yes. Weights probably aren't copyrightable in the US. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone, in which the Supreme Court ruled that telephone directories are not copyrightable. The copyright clause in the Constitution ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to…

> Weights probably aren't copyrightable in the US. ... is understood to require human authorship.

Are you arguing here that because the weights come from an optimization program, they are not "human authored"? If so I find that to be a strange assertion. If I'm working every day on my model and training algorithm to ensure it produces the best weights possible to solve my problem, I would be very surprised for someone to tell me I have no ownership over those weights because they are generated from a program I wrote and data that I own.

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