[nullc]

The notion that model weights are copyrightable is absurd on its face. In the US you cannot gain a copyright though sweat of the brow, there must be substantial creative work. Nor does mere collection (e.g. feist v rural) create a copyright. Feeding common crawl to a standard network structure and letting an optimizer do its thing isn't creative, it's just expensive. It requires expertise and skill, sure but so does creating a phone book.

The companies working on AI would be foolish to argue for more copyrightability are because it would be hard to conclude the models were copyrightable works without also concluding that the models are unlawful derivatives of the material they were trained on. "Congrats, models can be owned, but regrets: you're bankrupt now because you just committed 4.6 billion acts of copyright infringement carrying statutory damages of $250k each."

You might argue that this is far from sure, OKAY-- but parties that take this view will out-compete ones that don't. If it does turn out to be problematic, the people that had something to work from now will pivot to backing their work on something else and will still be ahead of people sitting on their hands.

You could see it as a calculated risk, but it seems at least as safe as the one behind the underlying authors of the model weights training on material they're not licensed to distribute.