[innagadadavida]

Are ML model parameters copyrightable? Should it be? To me, it looks like that is the only claim google has - rest of the algorithms are all open sourced already.

Honestly, I don’t see much difference between this and the oracle java case. Google can’t have it both ways.

[KarlKemp]

This case involved technology that even hardcore critics of intellectual property rights would presumably consider "classic" patents. The LIDAR hardware was one of the major items, IIRC.

I don't remember anything about ML and especially not model parameters. But, yes, I'm somewhat sure those would meet the criteria for copyright.

What's far more interesting is the copyright status of the output of ML models: does it meet the required "creativity" when it's just the product of a computation you set up once, a long time ago? And is the ML model's creator still close enough to the product to be considered its author? If your text generator was trained on Wikipedia data, are the wikipedia authors co-creators? This stuff is going to be fun...

[cjblomqvist]

Let's not also forget trade secrets. You can just take secret information from one company to the next.