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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 "avail

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 a rather important point to bring up when discussing the licensing landscape for weights...

WanderPanda 3y ago
Of course weights are copyrightable. Otherwise nothing is copyrightable
- enlightens 3y ago
  Recipes, for example, are not copyrightable in the US. Neither are some of the concepts behind creating a fillable form. It's not an all-or-nothing system. https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf
throwaway98721 3y ago
Why is it unestablished? Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents? Weights are just a different kind of a document.
- Conscat 3y ago
  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.
  - throwaway98721 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - ketzu 3y ago
      > Was there no work put into their creation by someone? 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.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Was there no work put into their creation by someone? This is the “sweat of the brow” theory of copyrightability, which courts have rejected (for good reason based on the statute.) “Someone did work to enable this thing to exist” is not sufficient to make a thing copyright-protected. > There's no fundamental difference between an image, code, or weights. And neither images, code, nor weights that are mechanically produced with no creative input by a particular author are subject to copyright in their own right (depending on their relation to the source material on which the mechanical process rests, they may be covered by the copyright on the source material.) The best argument for weights being copyrightable (and it probably applies better to some models than others) is that the assembly of source material is a creative work subject to a compilers copyright, and that the model weights themselves are just a mechanical translation of that compilation subject to its copyright.
- jerf 3y ago
  Copyright is not for "documents", it is for works that have creativity in them. The legal bar for that level of creativity is low, so low that it is easy to come away thinking that anything that can be cast as a "document" must be copyrightable, but the bar is in fact not zero. 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 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.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Weights are the output of a mechanical process over the training set with no element of human authorship, just as much the output a model produces with a prompt is, which the Copyright Office has already declared outside of copyright. > 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?
- raincole 3y ago
  > Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents? 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
xg15 3y ago
Furthermore, if weights are copyrightable, wouldn't this make the issue of training data licenses even more urgent? IANAL, but if weights are IP, wouldn't they constitute a "derived work" of the training data?
- realusername 3y ago
  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.
  - phantom784 3y ago
    I think there could be an argument that it's copyrightable but not a derivative work. If I read a few books about a subject as research, and then I write an article about the subject, it's my own copyright. The fact that I did research doesn't make it derivative of those books (correct me if I'm wrong, IANAL). Perhaps a model created from copyrighted material be treated in the same way?
    - bloak 3y ago
      > If I read a few books about a subject as research, and then I write an article about the subject, it's my own copyright. Yes, because in that case you'd be the "author" doing "creative work". > Perhaps a model created from copyrighted material be treated in the same way? Who would be the author doing creative work in this case? The people who decided what training material to use? Perhaps, but it seems a stretch for the people who selected the training material to be authors but not the people who created the training material.
    - slaymaker1907 3y ago
      The difference is you are person and have many more rights than a machine.
    - floomk 3y ago
jrm4 3y ago
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" downstream, and to try to inject the word "ethical" makes the whole thing even more ridiculous.
- visarga 3y ago
  > 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.
  - version_five 3y ago
    A lot of people are just upset because their local equilibrium has been disrupted and they think that means they lost a natural right. "You wouldn't look at a car and then remember what that looked like when someone asks you to draw another"
    - jrm4 3y ago
      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
      - londons_explore 3y ago
        It's just a race for which test case gets to the supreme court first really...
spullara 3y ago
This has been my position from the beginning. It is very hard for me to imagine that weights can be copyrighted at all. IANAL.
nerdponx 3y ago
Weights are equivalent to compiled object code IMO. All else follows from there.
- feoren 3y ago
  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!
  - cubefox 3y ago
    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?
    - feoren 3y ago
      An mp3 encoding of a wav file of a copyrighted song is still copyrighted, despite those exact bits never having existed before, and being created entirely by a computer.
  - xigency 3y ago
    > 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 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?
Animats 3y ago
> 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 Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.") is understood to require human authorship. The US does not have database copyright, or "sweat of the brow" copyright. That it was expensive to produce some collection of data does not make it copyrightable. Outputs from LLMs, machine generated art, and machine generated music probably are not copyrightable either. US Copyright Office: "Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist."[1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-copyright-office-says-some-ai-assisted-works-may-be-copyrighted-2023-03-15/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-copyright-office-says-so...
- DannyBee 3y ago
  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
  - kevin42 3y ago
    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.
feoren 3y ago
Some thought experiments: What happens if we train a neural network on a single, copyrighted work? Say it has one input node (or even zero, if you like), and regardless of this input, its output is always exactly the copyrighted work it was trained on. What do its weights represent? Clearly, its weights represent a direct encoding of the original work. Those weights are copyrightable, but not by the person who trained the neural network -- the copyright is held by the owner of the original work. What if we train the neural network on just two copyrighted works? If its one input node is 0, it outputs the first, and if it's 1, it outputs the 2nd. Almost certainly, its weights are a complicated, tangled mix encoding both, like a compression algorithm that completely rearranged its input. Who owns the copyright to those weights? To whatever extent the weights can be "factored out" into a set representing the first work and a set representing the second, clearly the copyright holder of the first work holds the copyright on the first "factored set", and the 2nd on the 2nd. It seems obvious that we must be able to do this "factoring out" somehow (even if the topology of the factored networks is different), because we know both works are exactly represented by the weights, and the neural network itself can use this information to reconstruct them both, so they're in there ... somewhere. So is there a sort of "joint copyright" on the combined weights, where nobody is really allowed to do anything with it without approval of the other? Regardless, it's still clear that whoever trained the neural network has no claim on any copyright. Where is the breaking point extending this from 2 works to a billion? People make arguments like "drawing a car from memory isn't infringing on copyright design of that car", which ... are you sure? Reproducing a piece of music from memory (and selling it) is usually copyright infringement. You're allowed to learn a Taylor Swift song as part of your musical training, but you're not usually allowed to then play it back from memory and sell that recording (I'm not sure I morally agree with this treatment of covers, nor if it's globally applicable). So the argument that "surely neural networks are allowed to learn from copyrighted works" misses the point: they can learn all they want, but as soon as they reproduce verbatim (or close enough) a copyrighted work, they're infringing. And if they're representing a complete copy of the work within their weights (which they obviously are if they can reproduce it), then the original copyright holder has a claim on those weights. And never in this process has the trainer of the NN acquired any copyright to anything. The real trainer is a bunch of GPUs, after all. If the neural network cannot reproduce any of the copyrighted works verbatim, then we're getting closer to "fair use" territory. Yes, it's permissible to write a summary of a copyrighted work. That is so lossy as to not "compete" with the original work in any meaningful way. If it could be demonstrated that neural networks do not encode completed works (no matter how hard the factorization would be), then one could make this argument. Unfortunately, the evidence is that LLMs are more than happy to completely regurgitate copyrighted works verbatim. It seems to me the copyright holder of the original work therefore must hold a share of the claim on the weights. Still, the GPUs that trained the network do not magically acquire copyright over anything. I wonder if the real answer is that the weights are copyrighted, and that copyright is held jointly by hundreds of millions of people, and nobody can do anything with those weights without the approval of all the others. I'm not saying I like that universe, but I am saying it's the most internally consistent answer I can think of, and seems to follow from the above argument.

WanderPanda 3y ago

Of course weights are copyrightable. Otherwise nothing is copyrightable

enlightens 3y ago
Recipes, for example, are not copyrightable in the US. Neither are some of the concepts behind creating a fillable form. It's not an all-or-nothing system. https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf

throwaway98721 3y ago

Why is it unestablished? Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents? Weights are just a different kind of a document.

Conscat 3y ago
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.
- throwaway98721 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ketzu 3y ago
    > Was there no work put into their creation by someone? 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.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Was there no work put into their creation by someone? This is the “sweat of the brow” theory of copyrightability, which courts have rejected (for good reason based on the statute.) “Someone did work to enable this thing to exist” is not sufficient to make a thing copyright-protected. > There's no fundamental difference between an image, code, or weights. And neither images, code, nor weights that are mechanically produced with no creative input by a particular author are subject to copyright in their own right (depending on their relation to the source material on which the mechanical process rests, they may be covered by the copyright on the source material.) The best argument for weights being copyrightable (and it probably applies better to some models than others) is that the assembly of source material is a creative work subject to a compilers copyright, and that the model weights themselves are just a mechanical translation of that compilation subject to its copyright.
jerf 3y ago
Copyright is not for "documents", it is for works that have creativity in them. The legal bar for that level of creativity is low, so low that it is easy to come away thinking that anything that can be cast as a "document" must be copyrightable, but the bar is in fact not zero. 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 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.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
dragonwriter 3y ago
Weights are the output of a mechanical process over the training set with no element of human authorship, just as much the output a model produces with a prompt is, which the Copyright Office has already declared outside of copyright. > 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?
raincole 3y ago
> Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents? 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

xg15 3y ago

Furthermore, if weights are copyrightable, wouldn't this make the issue of training data licenses even more urgent? IANAL, but if weights are IP, wouldn't they constitute a "derived work" of the training data?

realusername 3y ago
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.
- phantom784 3y ago
  I think there could be an argument that it's copyrightable but not a derivative work. If I read a few books about a subject as research, and then I write an article about the subject, it's my own copyright. The fact that I did research doesn't make it derivative of those books (correct me if I'm wrong, IANAL). Perhaps a model created from copyrighted material be treated in the same way?
  - bloak 3y ago
    > If I read a few books about a subject as research, and then I write an article about the subject, it's my own copyright. Yes, because in that case you'd be the "author" doing "creative work". > Perhaps a model created from copyrighted material be treated in the same way? Who would be the author doing creative work in this case? The people who decided what training material to use? Perhaps, but it seems a stretch for the people who selected the training material to be authors but not the people who created the training material.
  - slaymaker1907 3y ago
    The difference is you are person and have many more rights than a machine.
  - floomk 3y ago

jrm4 3y ago

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" downstream, and to try to inject the word "ethical" makes the whole thing even more ridiculous.

visarga 3y ago
> 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.
- version_five 3y ago
  A lot of people are just upset because their local equilibrium has been disrupted and they think that means they lost a natural right. "You wouldn't look at a car and then remember what that looked like when someone asks you to draw another"
  - jrm4 3y ago
    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
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      It's just a race for which test case gets to the supreme court first really...

spullara 3y ago

This has been my position from the beginning. It is very hard for me to imagine that weights can be copyrighted at all. IANAL.

nerdponx 3y ago

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

feoren 3y ago
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!
- cubefox 3y ago
  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?
  - feoren 3y ago
    An mp3 encoding of a wav file of a copyrighted song is still copyrighted, despite those exact bits never having existed before, and being created entirely by a computer.
- xigency 3y ago
  > 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 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?

Animats 3y ago

> 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 Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.") is understood to require human authorship. The US does not have database copyright, or "sweat of the brow" copyright. That it was expensive to produce some collection of data does not make it copyrightable. Outputs from LLMs, machine generated art, and machine generated music probably are not copyrightable either. US Copyright Office: "Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist."[1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-copyright-office-says-some-ai-assisted-works-may-be-copyrighted-2023-03-15/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-copyright-office-says-so...

DannyBee 3y ago
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
- kevin42 3y ago
  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.

feoren 3y ago

Some thought experiments: What happens if we train a neural network on a single, copyrighted work? Say it has one input node (or even zero, if you like), and regardless of this input, its output is always exactly the copyrighted work it was trained on. What do its weights represent? Clearly, its weights represent a direct encoding of the original work. Those weights are copyrightable, but not by the person who trained the neural network -- the copyright is held by the owner of the original work. What if we train the neural network on just two copyrighted works? If its one input node is 0, it outputs the first, and if it's 1, it outputs the 2nd. Almost certainly, its weights are a complicated, tangled mix encoding both, like a compression algorithm that completely rearranged its input. Who owns the copyright to those weights? To whatever extent the weights can be "factored out" into a set representing the first work and a set representing the second, clearly the copyright holder of the first work holds the copyright on the first "factored set", and the 2nd on the 2nd. It seems obvious that we must be able to do this "factoring out" somehow (even if the topology of the factored networks is different), because we know both works are exactly represented by the weights, and the neural network itself can use this information to reconstruct them both, so they're in there ... somewhere. So is there a sort of "joint copyright" on the combined weights, where nobody is really allowed to do anything with it without approval of the other? Regardless, it's still clear that whoever trained the neural network has no claim on any copyright. Where is the breaking point extending this from 2 works to a billion? People make arguments like "drawing a car from memory isn't infringing on copyright design of that car", which ... are you sure? Reproducing a piece of music from memory (and selling it) is usually copyright infringement. You're allowed to learn a Taylor Swift song as part of your musical training, but you're not usually allowed to then play it back from memory and sell that recording (I'm not sure I morally agree with this treatment of covers, nor if it's globally applicable). So the argument that "surely neural networks are allowed to learn from copyrighted works" misses the point: they can learn all they want, but as soon as they reproduce verbatim (or close enough) a copyrighted work, they're infringing. And if they're representing a complete copy of the work within their weights (which they obviously are if they can reproduce it), then the original copyright holder has a claim on those weights. And never in this process has the trainer of the NN acquired any copyright to anything. The real trainer is a bunch of GPUs, after all. If the neural network cannot reproduce any of the copyrighted works verbatim, then we're getting closer to "fair use" territory. Yes, it's permissible to write a summary of a copyrighted work. That is so lossy as to not "compete" with the original work in any meaningful way. If it could be demonstrated that neural networks do not encode completed works (no matter how hard the factorization would be), then one could make this argument. Unfortunately, the evidence is that LLMs are more than happy to completely regurgitate copyrighted works verbatim. It seems to me the copyright holder of the original work therefore must hold a share of the claim on the weights. Still, the GPUs that trained the network do not magically acquire copyright over anything. I wonder if the real answer is that the weights are copyrighted, and that copyright is held jointly by hundreds of millions of people, and nobody can do anything with those weights without the approval of all the others. I'm not saying I like that universe, but I am saying it's the most internally consistent answer I can think of, and seems to follow from the above argument.