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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The US doesn't have database copyright, but some countries, including the entire European Union, do.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right

Interesting. That could be a huge disadvantage for the EU and it's companies that want to use AI and also often can't give their Data to third parties. But I am not sure a neural net is even considered a DB. Because when this was created they clearly had structured Information accessed by people in mind. There has to be some distinction otherwise I make a db that stores digits of PI in a file and if you publish part of it, that is considered substantial enough, you are infringing on my DB rights.

If I copy your database, that violates copyright. I generate the same data using my own process, it doesn't.

That's different from creative works where it's implausible to claim that you created the same work independently of someone else.

Those protections rely on "systematic arrangement", i.e. that some effort has been put into finding, verifying and collection a set of facts / individual pieces of data. It is not obvious that would apply to the set of weights that come out of a training algorithm. (standard I'm not a lawyer, I don't know but I suspect it is unclear enough that it would need to be argued in court).

I assure you that if you scramble the weights of a neutral networks, the model will perform poorly... Training something new cost millions of dollars in accelerator and research salary, and evaluation ('verifying') is a big part of the work.

This is true, but not currently relevant. The cost (difficulty) of training does not indicate how good a fit the model is for copyright protection.

I suspect that part of the arguing this out in court will be making those economic arguments as part of an attempt to extend copyright protection to model weights - but that is a separate issue from if they are protected currently.

Part of the economic argument for copyright is to encourage the investment of time into producing new works, so it may be a persuasive argument for extending protection. Although (relatively) recent history suggests that persuasive argument is not as powerful as giant wads of cold hard cash in extending copyright coverage.

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