Trying to attach a license to model weights seems counter-productive to me. If you argue they are copyrightable then surely they are derivative works of the training data, which is unlikely to all be public domain. Machine learning enthusiasts are better off lobbying for model weights being non-copyrightable as it doesn't have any creative input and is the result of a purely mechanical process.
The copyright on the code, on the other hand, would definitely be copyrighted and would need a clean-room implementation, as you said. The community could pool its resources and do it once, and license it under the AGPL to keep it and further improvements available to everyone.
I think this is a lot better than the other option, which would've been not releasing it at all. No company in the business of making money wants to give away their edge to would-be competitors for free.
I mean I personally feel like almost all software is math and anything that isn’t frontend isn’t legally copyrightable or patentable. But the courts disagree with my interpretation. And if it were up to me all copyright and patents would have exponentially increasing fees on an annual basis to maintain, but thatd require a change is statutes. I think the jury is still out on your interpretation though, and I suspect the courts will fall in line with whatever the largest rights holders want.
effort and cost should be accounted for, reasonable licensing fees should go in the patent. Loss of lives and loss of quality of life should be considered. The only goal on the other end of the equation should be to encourage people sufficiently to not keep their invention secret.
We should also have a fund for particularly tricky inventions and copyrights that would greatly benefit mankind.
Say, someone or some institution writes a good school book. We can just buy the book for whatever we think is reasonable. If they want to publish the same book the next year with the chapters shuffled around they could be entitled to a tiny fraction of the previous sum or it could be denied for being spam. If this bankrupts the company is of very little interest.
My layman's reading is that the license does seem to allow recouping of costs, would be interested if there is a more nuanced interpretation to the contrary.
(tangentially, like another comment briefly mentioned, are models actually copyrightable? Programs are, because they are human authored creative works.)
Huge bummer. Prevents almost everyone from using this and recouping their costs.
I suppose motivated teams could reproduce the paper in a clean room, but that might also be subject to patents.