alt Hacker NewsProprietary model weights are IP, their outputs are not IP and I can't imagine a court decision that would rule otherwise because that would set an extremely far reaching and dangerous precedent, even for American businesses.
I don't think distillation as 'stealing IP' has any legal legs. They can probably claim violation of ToS at best because the terms of use do prohibit use for training rival models.
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I can't wrap my head around the idea that distillation is IP theft but mass training on books, music and art without consent is fair use. The two stances are incompatible. If it is transformative use of a book, it is transformative use of AI output.
> Proprietary model weights are IP
I don't think they are. Not copyright at least. There may be some "trade secret" stuff for them but they're not copyrightable.
Setting aside the strict definition of IP, this does satisfy the philosophical motivation of IP, which is to protect people making significant capital investments.
This is not too different from drug discovery where it's extremely difficult to come up with the molecule, but relatively easy to copy it. Similarly, it's really hard to create frontier models from scratch but much easier to distill them.
> their outputs are not IP and I can't imagine a court decision that would rule otherwise because that would set an extremely far reaching and dangerous precedent
Assume that their model output is considered IP and that it's ruled illegal to train on that IP. I will offer to sell every content producer on earth an identity LLM that takes their content and outputs precisely identical content that they can then post. Good luck ever getting any training data for free ever again.
> Proprietary model weights are IP
Not copyrightable IP, or at least it hasn't been challenged yet. I have experience with this: I made llama-dl, a way to download the original llama model. Meta issued a DMCA, I appealed to the HN community for funds, someone funded, and our lawyer successfully counterclaimed. Never heard from Meta again.
A lack of response to the counterclaim doesn't mean the issue is settled. But now there's legal precedent for people pushing back against companies that claim model weights are secret IP and therefore DMCA-able.