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Comment by duckerude | Hacker News Reader

> The AlphaFold parameters are made available for non-commercial use only, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. You can find details at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode

Does CC BY-NC actually do this? As far as I can tell it only really talks about sharing/reproducing, not using.

Or is the only thing prohibiting other commercial use the words "available for non-commercial use only"?

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Artbreeder has some interesting prior art here: nVidia forbid commercial use of StyleGAN, but artbreeder disregarded it and happily sold all the breeding you wanted. No one seemed to care.

I suspect that the clause is there to prevent a startup launching on the basis of “see this trained model? Yeah, that’s literally our business model” though, which is a mildly amusing thought, wot wot.

So basically, a few tens of thousands, sure. A few million, big G might have a problem.

Still, the smart move would be to launch the business anyway, and gamble that you can work out a licensing deal.

If you took their parameters, then trained it for while on a different set of data, it would vary from the original. I wonder how much compute would be required to make the offset far enough to hold up from scrutiny, and in court.

Alternatively, you could manually change the network model, add a few hidden layers, etc... modifying the parameters in step, and result in a new model and new parameters. Some training to vary the parameters, and it's now a new work.

I would hazard a guess here that taking the parameters and continuing training constitutes "using" the parameters. Then when you get the subpoena you would have to explain the thousands of emails and slack messages discussing how you extend their parameters... :)

It's counterintuitive for me that this is a problem. One man should be able to do this in a month, no need for coordination that leaves behind evidence. Besides, how hard is it to communicate in secret?

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