Ask HN: Do you think ML model weights are copyrightable?
The idea copyright is to protect the author’s specific personality in the expression of an idea while, at the same time, allowing for the free circulation of the idea itself.<p>An ML model has no personality. It is not a legal entity. Also, its outputs are in no way the direct expression of the personality of those who trained it.<p>It is precisely this what differentiates ML from regular code: With regular code, it’s the programmer who solves the problem in a way that is similarly personal as someone writing a novel or an easy. But with ML, the specific implementation is found by the software itself.<p>You can’t have it both ways. Both not having to write the solution itself AND claim personal ownership of the results.<p>(But of course, we’ll see what the courts actually say.)