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The post indicates there is a competition and prizes but I'm not seeing any discussion of what sort of license the data is being made available under (or the co

by yodon 7y ago

The post indicates there is a competition and prizes but I'm not seeing any discussion of what sort of license the data is being made available under (or the competition for that matter). Hopefully it's there and I'm just not seeing it.

ekc 7y ago
The Github they link to says it's under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
- bigiain 7y ago
  Hmmm. I wonder how much fun lawyers will have arguing about whether that "NC" clause means a model trained on this data cannot be used commercially by the researcher who built it?
  - parsimo2010 7y ago
    I would guess (I'm not a lawyer) that a commercial model would be in the clear as long as the company doesn't release anything including the data itself. Model weights that are derived from the data are not the data. I would make an analogy where the training data is like a textbook. If I read in a textbook about how to design/build a bridge, I don't have to give royalties to the textbook author when my civil engineering and construction firm gets paid to build a bridge. The copyright/license of the textbook can't prevent me from using the knowledge gained from the book to do a commercial job. In a similar vein, the knowledge gained from a public data set is probably fair game for whatever you want, just as long as you aren't repackaging the data itself. There's probably a good boundary requiring someone to stop at a point where the model weights can't be used to reconstruct the original data. Of course, other people can disagree. I would look forward to an actual legal opinion to clear this up.
    - jahewson 7y ago
      I disagree. The license specifies that "using the material for commercial purposes" is prohibited. The act of training a commercial model is obviously a commercial purpose. Whether or not the data is somehow incorporated into the resulting model is irrelevant. You're confusing this CC license with open source licenses that do not restrict use but require derived works to be created/distributed under certain conditions. This CC license restricts use, in that you are not allowed to use the data for any commercial purpose - this is totally different from open source, and more like the "academic use only" licenses which used to be more common.
      - parsimo2010 7y ago
        I think this is a pretty good argument, and more correct that my previous comment. It's too late for me to edit that one, but it's a pretty clear argument. I doubt that any company would be willing to take the risk of creating a commercial self-driving car using this data to get a head start. I don't think I'll be seeing this particular license fought over in court.
      - yodon 7y ago
        CC is rarely a good license to choose other than to make yourself feel good. It does a terrible job of dealing with the actual matters of importance to a license outside of photo sharing (and even there it's not a good choice, as many photographers have found because it explicitly grants rights to others that the photographer may not be able to to grant to them, leaving the photographer open to lawsuits as has happened). In this case, imagine a student working on a class assignment. They use this data for purely academic purposes with no commercial intent in mind. After they train their system, they realize yow I could use this trained system and get rich. There was arguably no commercial use during the training. The use of the data was purely academic, like a person learning math or French. What you do after running the learning is a separate matter, just as using a CC licensed textbook to learn math doesn't prevent you from getting a job as a statistician. Again, the tl;dr is instead of trying to divine how a court will deal with a poorly specified problem, it's much better to just not license your stuff using a CC license. There are almost always much better licenses to choose from.

by yodon 7y ago

ekc 7y ago

The Github they link to says it's under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

bigiain 7y ago
Hmmm. I wonder how much fun lawyers will have arguing about whether that "NC" clause means a model trained on this data cannot be used commercially by the researcher who built it?
- parsimo2010 7y ago
  I would guess (I'm not a lawyer) that a commercial model would be in the clear as long as the company doesn't release anything including the data itself. Model weights that are derived from the data are not the data. I would make an analogy where the training data is like a textbook. If I read in a textbook about how to design/build a bridge, I don't have to give royalties to the textbook author when my civil engineering and construction firm gets paid to build a bridge. The copyright/license of the textbook can't prevent me from using the knowledge gained from the book to do a commercial job. In a similar vein, the knowledge gained from a public data set is probably fair game for whatever you want, just as long as you aren't repackaging the data itself. There's probably a good boundary requiring someone to stop at a point where the model weights can't be used to reconstruct the original data. Of course, other people can disagree. I would look forward to an actual legal opinion to clear this up.
  - jahewson 7y ago
    I disagree. The license specifies that "using the material for commercial purposes" is prohibited. The act of training a commercial model is obviously a commercial purpose. Whether or not the data is somehow incorporated into the resulting model is irrelevant. You're confusing this CC license with open source licenses that do not restrict use but require derived works to be created/distributed under certain conditions. This CC license restricts use, in that you are not allowed to use the data for any commercial purpose - this is totally different from open source, and more like the "academic use only" licenses which used to be more common.
    - parsimo2010 7y ago
      I think this is a pretty good argument, and more correct that my previous comment. It's too late for me to edit that one, but it's a pretty clear argument. I doubt that any company would be willing to take the risk of creating a commercial self-driving car using this data to get a head start. I don't think I'll be seeing this particular license fought over in court.
    - yodon 7y ago
      CC is rarely a good license to choose other than to make yourself feel good. It does a terrible job of dealing with the actual matters of importance to a license outside of photo sharing (and even there it's not a good choice, as many photographers have found because it explicitly grants rights to others that the photographer may not be able to to grant to them, leaving the photographer open to lawsuits as has happened). In this case, imagine a student working on a class assignment. They use this data for purely academic purposes with no commercial intent in mind. After they train their system, they realize yow I could use this trained system and get rich. There was arguably no commercial use during the training. The use of the data was purely academic, like a person learning math or French. What you do after running the learning is a separate matter, just as using a CC licensed textbook to learn math doesn't prevent you from getting a job as a statistician. Again, the tl;dr is instead of trying to divine how a court will deal with a poorly specified problem, it's much better to just not license your stuff using a CC license. There are almost always much better licenses to choose from.