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Comment by JW_00000 | Hacker News Reader

> The weights are the derivative work of the [GPL licensed] code

This is not immediately obvious to me.

A small though experiment: the Harry Potter books are clearly copyrighted works. If I generate a frequency list of all words in these books, i.e. a list of all words and how often they appear, that frequency list is derived from the original work, in the normal way we would use the word "derived". But is it a "derivative work", under the strict legal definition of this term?

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What about N-grams frecuencies? 1-grams (aka characters) have too few information and are probably fine, using them you can only identify the language of the original work. With a few more you can identify the author and the book. I don't remember the exact number, but if you have the frecuencies of 10-grams you can probably reconstruct big chuncks of the book.

The frequency count is not a function. The trained model is. Arguably, they at deriving a new function from ones covered by copyright. It is up to the courts for an official decision though.

So what if we made a function. What if someone scans all the works of Harry Potter and generates a program/function that uses the frequency and pairing of phonemes in Harry Potter character names to create a “Wizard Name Generator” to generate random but plausible sounding names. Would we expect a court to find the name generator is infringing on JK Rowling’s copyrights? Certainly it’s possible for the generator to generate a name verbatim from the books, but does that make the generator a derived work and infringing? If the authors of the generator put their generator on the web as Harry Potter Name Generator, we might expect the courts to tell them they can’t use the Harry Potter name, but if they put it under “Wacky Warlocks Wizard Wonder Namer” is the mere fact that the underlying function uses factual data about a work under copyright sufficient to strike it down? What if it used name frequencies from multiple fantasy series? How many series would it have to use as a source before we say that the name generator is not infringing on copyrights? Can it ever not be?

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