[currymj]

same as it’s legal to use open source licensed software to profit. a lot of academics don’t care, and their work might be built very strongly on other work. there might or might not be a patent on this research, but I would guess probably not?

[abledon]

I thought github projects were only ok to use if the author provided a LICENSE file e.g. MIT or APACHE 2.0 , do these papers include a license clause at the bottom? Usually no right , so it seems to be a ‘grey’ area

[currymj]

well, is it legal to do a "clean-room" implementation from the descriptions in the papers themselves, without looking at any provided code?

(this should almost always be feasible, and is commonly done for non-IP-related reasons e.g. someone might make a PyTorch version of something when the original version was done in Tensorflow.)

i'm not a lawyer but I would have assumed "probably", unless there's a patent. i mean, if it's not this would suggest it's illegal to attempt to replicate scientific experiments.

also, in many cases even for the code provided by the researchers there is an actual LICENSE file included, and it's often BSD or MIT. (Which sort of makes sense -- these two permissive free software licenses are named after the universities they came from. they reflect the academic CS culture around stuff like this.)