AFAIK it’s still an open question whether there is any copyright in model weights, for various reasons including the lack of human authorship. Which would mean that if you didn’t separately and explicitly agree to the license by clicking through something, there is no basis for the “by using this model” agreement.

Of course you probably don’t have enough money to get a ruling on this question, just wanted to point out that (afaik) it is up for debate. Maybe you should just avoid clicking on license agreement buttons, if you can.

I'm in the "model weights aren't copyrightable" camp myself. I think the license exists largely to shield Meta from liability or the actions of third parties.

Humans make many choices that effect the trained weights: curation and choice of datasets, training schedules and hyperparameters. If these choices are made with an eye towards the generated results, rather than mechanically based upon test scores, why doesn't that rise up to the minimal level required to get a copyright on the weights?

> AFAIK it’s still an open question whether there is any copyright in model weights

There's definitely copyright when you ask the model to spit out Chapter 3 of a Harry Potter book and it literally gives it to you verbatim (Which I've gotten it to do with the right prompts). There's no world where the legal system gives Meta a right to license out content that never belonged to them in the first place.

In the US, it's not an open question. Feist v Rural holds that any work needs to possess a minimum spark of (human) creativity to be able to be copyrighted; data collected by the "sweat of the brow" is explicitly not allowed to be copyrighted. Thus things like maps and telephone books aren't really copyrightable (they do retain a "thin copyright" protection, but in the present context, you're going to say that the code has copyright but the model weights do not). Most European jurisdictions do recognize a "sweat of the brow" doctrine, and they could be copyrightable there.

What's not clear is whether or not the model weights infringe the copyright of the works they were trained on.

This seems like a reasonable position to take. Can you copyright the contents of a vacuum bag after pouring it down a gallon board as "art"?

Did you have any meaningful hand in constructing the contents?

Seriously. Can I copyright 34 * 712 * 9.2 * pi? I didn't think you could.

I wonder what Meta’s attitude towards copyright in general is. Last I heard their lawyers were trying to say that it’s all good to pirate copyrighted works to make machine learning models.