Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shouldn't that be the default position? The training methods are certainly patentable, but the actual input to the algorithm is usually public domain, and outputs of algorithms are not generally copyrightable as new works (think of to_lowercase(Harry Potter), which is not a copyrightable work), so the model weights would be a derivative work of public domain materials, and hence also forced into the public domain fro…
> the model weights would be a derivative work of public domain materials, and hence also forced into the public domain from a copyright perspective. I don’t think “Public domain” means what you think it means.
IANAL but, I think, as far as US law goes, they have the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. Unsupervised training is an automated process, and the US Copyright Office has said [0] that the product of automated processes can't be copyrighted. While that statement was focused on the output of running an AI model, not the output of its training process (the parameters), I can't see how – for a model produced by unsupervised training – the conclusion would be any different.
This is probably not the case in many non-US jurisdictions, such as the EU, UK, Australia, etc – all of which have far weaker standards for copyrightability than the US does. It may not apply for supervised training – the supervision may be sufficient human input for copyrightability even in the US. It may not apply for AI models trained from copyrighted datasets, where the copyright owner of the dataset is claiming ownership of the model – that is not the case for OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc, who are all using training datasets predominantly copyright by third parties, but maybe Getty Images will build their own Stable Diffusion-style AI based on their image library, and that might give them a way of copyrighting their model which OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc lack.
It is always possible that US Congress will amend the law to make AI parameters copyrightable, or introduce some sui generis non-copyright legal protection for them, like the semiconductor mask work rights which were legislated in response to court rulings that semiconductor masks could not be copyrighted. I think the odds are reasonably high they will in fact do that sooner or later, but nobody knows for certain how things will pan out.
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...