[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.