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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).

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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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