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AI weights are not open “source”

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Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#151

Post by mike_d »

capr wrote: post #144
loudmax wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree that the existing copyright and intellectual property systems are dire need of deep reform. But to get people on board, you can't just propose burning it all down, you need to point to a viable alternative. Say, limiting copyrights to something sane like 15 or 30 years. Or making it easier to invalidate obvious or trivial patents. Or do you really want to do away with notions of intellectual property alto…

Pointing out that IP is broken is _not_ easy because most people believe in the contradictory notion of intellectual property, you included, not knowing the legal history of IP, the legal and economic history of the concept of property, and so on. If it were easy, it would be obvious to everybody that 1) IP law is immoral and 2) nothing bad would happen if it's abolished outright. Here's a free ebook on the subject,…

> 2) nothing bad would happen if it's abolished outright.

It is interesting that people living in the places with the weakest IP laws will pay a premium to import baby formula from the places with the strictest laws.

> Here's a free ebook on the subject

Of course it is some right-libertarian wonk piece.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#152

Post by immibis »

mike_d wrote: post #151
capr wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pointing out that IP is broken is _not_ easy because most people believe in the contradictory notion of intellectual property, you included, not knowing the legal history of IP, the legal and economic history of the concept of property, and so on. If it were easy, it would be obvious to everybody that 1) IP law is immoral and 2) nothing bad would happen if it's abolished outright. Here's a free ebook on the subject,…

> 2) nothing bad would happen if it's abolished outright. It is interesting that people living in the places with the weakest IP laws will pay a premium to import baby formula from the places with the strictest laws. > Here's a free ebook on the subject Of course it is some right-libertarian wonk piece.

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?

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#153

Post by shaky-carrousel »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #78
realusername wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also my understanding, either the weights are copyrightable and then all the models need explicit agreements for any work they include in it because models become derivatives or they are not copyrightable being just machine data (the most likely scenario in my opinion), they can't have it both ways.

There is also a (IMO less likely, but still conceivable) scenario where weights ARE copyrightable, but represent fair use of the training data on grounds of being "sufficiently transformative".

Also known as "having your cake and eating it".

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#154

Post by mike_d »

m4nu3l wrote: post #134
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

> 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…

> The summary contains information that was present in the original but it has been transformed and hence it's not a copy.

The summary also contains original thought, something is added to it by a human to make it unique. AI models are primarily deriviative.

A better example would be: if I take 1,000 different copyrighted works and put them into a ZIP file, does that resulting file violate copyright?

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#155

Post by mike_d »

staunton wrote: post #81
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

This is the first time I ever saw a comment including the text "I am a lawyer". Does that mean the comment technically contains "legal advice"?

If you choose to pay him, sure.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#156

Post by DannyBee »

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…

This is mostly right - It depends on what the weights represent and how they were generated so I would not go as far as the initial claim.

A collection of numbers is copyrightable if it's the encoded result of a creative process. Just because it's represented as a bunch of numbers does not make it non copyrightable. That's why it says " original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. "

You can't just classify the weights as facts simply because they are numbers. If they are creatively made by a human they would be copyrightable. Mechanically computed from random numbers, no. Somewhere in the middle? Harder

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#157

Post by mike_d »

immibis wrote: post #152
mike_d wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) nothing bad would happen if it's abolished outright. It is interesting that people living in the places with the weakest IP laws will pay a premium to import baby formula from the places with the strictest laws. > Here's a free ebook on the subject Of course it is some right-libertarian wonk piece.

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 protect consumers.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#158

Post by kevin42 »

DannyBee wrote: post #156
Animats wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is mostly right - It depends on what the weights represent and how they were generated so I would not go as far as the initial claim. A collection of numbers is copyrightable if it's the encoded result of a creative process. Just because it's represented as a bunch of numbers does not make it non copyrightable. That's why it says " original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now know…

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like you stood up a straw man there.

>Just because it's represented as a bunch of numbers does not make it non copyrightable.

Can you give an example of where the bunch of numbers is copyrightable when it's not just a numeric encoding of something that was already copyrightable? Taking music and encoding it as a wav file is not a creative work, but it's a representation of a copyrighted work.

Maybe you could create a long list of numbers and call it an artistic impression, but that's clearly not what AI weights are. I'm interested to hear an example of your copyrightable numbers.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#159

Post by Filligree »

8note wrote: post #146
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a (IMO less likely, but still conceivable) scenario where weights ARE copyrightable, but represent fair use of the training data on grounds of being "sufficiently transformative".

I consider that one super likely, but then using the model to make competing works with one the artists in their own style is a non-fair use derivative work

Style explicitly isn’t copyrightable. It’ll need to be for some other reason.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#160

Post by DannyBee »

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?

They are only protectable by copyright you the degree they are creative works of authorship. Copyright is not usually how these are protected.
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