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Comment by orlp

Not a lawyer, not legal advice, but... the legal status quo is that neural network outputs are not copyrightable. They are currently considered not made by humans nor considered a derivative work from the training material / network weights (assuming it's not regurgitating copyrighted material verbatim).

The cc-by-nc-4.0 license applies to the network weights. The only thing non-commercial about the license is that it restricts how you may reproduce the licensed material:

> reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part, for NonCommercial purposes only; and

As long as you are not selling the network weights themselves, nothing in the license prevents you from evaluating the neural network for commercial purposes and selling the outputs. In 'production' you will have to directly download the weights from Nvidia themselves (or another 3rd party which is distributing the network weights non-commercially in good faith) though, you can't share the network weights onto your commercial inference server from another one of your commercial deployment servers. Or at least, it gets more dicy there and may be considered commercial reproduction so better avoid it.

For similar reasons you may 3D print a CC-BY-NC model of a tool and use that tool in your commercial workshop, you may use a CC-BY-NC compiler of a language to compile commercial programs, etc.

parent orlp 2 years ago

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