[twbarr]

No, but what is it? Not your lawyer, not legal advice, but it's not a trade secret, they've given it to researchers. It's not a trademark because it's not an origin identifier. The structure might be patentable, but the weights won't be. It's certainly not a mask work.

It might have been a contract violation for the guy who redistributed it, but I'm not a party to that contract.

[Art9681]

I'm going to play devil's advocate and state that a lot of what you mentioned will be relevant to a tiny part of the world that has the means to enforce this. The law will be forced to change as a response to AI. Many debates will be had. Many crap laws will be made by people grasping at straws but it's too late. Putting red tape around this technology puts that nation at a technological disadvantage. I would go as far as labeling a national security threat.

I'm calling it now. Based on what I see today. Europe will position itself as a leader in AI legislation, and its economy will give way to the nations that want to enter the race and grab a chunk of the new economy.

It's a Catch 22. You either gimp your own technological progress, or start a war with a nation that does not. Pretty sure Russia and China don't really care about the ethics behind it. There are plenty of nations capable enough in the same boat.

Now what? OK, so in some hypothetical future China has an uncensored model with free reign over the internet. The US and Europe has banned this. What's stopping anyone from running the Chinese model? There isn't enough money in the world to enforce software laws.

How long have they tried to take down The Pirate Bay? Pretty much every permutation of every software that's ever been banned can be found and ran with impunity if you have the technical knowledge to do so. No law exists that can prevent that.

If it did, OpenAI wouldn't exist.

[rileymat2]

> How long have they tried to take down The Pirate Bay? Pretty much every permutation of every software that's ever been banned can be found and ran with impunity if you have the technical knowledge to do so. No law exists that can prevent that.

Forms of this argument get tossed out a lot. Laws don’t prevent, they hopefully limit. Murder has been illegal for a long time, it still happens.

[szundi]

You missed the point: these laws are not limiting other countries, only those who introduce them. Self-limiting, giving advantage to others.

[andsoitis]

> It might have been a contract violation for the guy who redistributed it, but I'm not a party to that contract.

Wouldn’t that violate the Nemo dat quod non habet legal principle and so you cannot hide behind the claim that you weren’t party to the contact?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemo_dat_quod_non_habet

[zarzavat]

No because the weights are not IP protected by the entity that trained the model, so they cannot prevent you to redistribute it because it doesn’t belong to them in any legal sense. GPU cycles alone don’t make IP.

The contracts in these cases are somewhat similar to an NDA, without the secrecy aspect. Restricted disclosure of public information. You can agree to such a contract if you want to, and a court might even enforce it, but it doesn’t affect anybody else’s rights to distribute that information.

Contracts are not statutes, they only bind the people directly involved. To restrict the actions of random strangers, you need to get elected.