Hello everybody,
I could not help but fall into a series of rabbit holes over the past
weeks. The question this time: Are trained models (of the connectionist
AI flavour) actually protected by IP legislation? And if so: Why?
I stumbled across this through a semirelated question that made me
realize: I had read a lot about TDM exceptions and whether they apply
for training connectionist models. And on the output side of things,
there is ongoing discussion on whether the outputs of generative systems
deserve IP protection.
However, what I had to dig into and found just a bit of discussion, was
the question of IP protection of the trained models themselves. Or, in
other terms, if providers slap some license on a model they trained: On
what basis can they even constrain the way in which they can be re-used?
I am certainly not the first person to stumble over this, so I will be
very glad about any pointers towards articles on the topic.
What I found so far was a paper by the IPO from 2020 that laments the
supposed lack of sui generis protection for trained models:
<https://ipo.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/SG-model-rights-committee-paper-pub.pdf>.
In Section III A they argue that trained models as machine-created works
might not be subject to (US) copyright law, at least if no human
creative input or at least interaction is involved.
It could be argued that RLHF would constitute a human involvement
(albeit mostly outsourced to clickworkers in the global south) –
provided the feedback fulfills the minimum threshold of creativity and
is not merely a human in the loop that acts on predetermined rules that
leave no leeway for individual expression.
However, even this argument would fall flat whenever reinforcement
learning is based on synthetic input, e.g. a model being trained through
RL by another trained model.
After looking at patents and trade secrets, the IPO looks longingly at
existing sui generis rights, namely the European SGDR and asks for
similar SGR for trained connectionist AI models.
Nuno Sousa e Silva argues in
<https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2024/01/18/are-ai-models-weights-protected-databases/>
(after stumbling over the very same question I had) that SGDR could be
applied out-of-the-box at least to the weights of a connectionist model,
checking pretty much all of the boxes.
So, generally:
a) yay, another case for the consequences of SGDR
b) did I miss stuff? Had you come across arguments that trained models
check some other category for IP protection?
bb) If not: what even is the legal basis for any license at least
outside the EU?
Any thoughts are highly appreciated!
regards,
-stk
--
Stefan Kaufmann (er)
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