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Comment by yeldarb | Hacker News Reader

Looks like the Vicuna repo is Apache 2.0 also[1].

What's the interpretation of copyright law that would prevent the code being Apache 2.0 based on the source of the fine-tuning dataset?

[1] https://github.com/lm-sys/FastChat

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Not quite: fastchat is the inference code which is Apache 2.0 but distinct from the model artifact. If you look at the model [0] it is licensed as non-commercial.

But why?

Well for one, Vicuna is a Llama finetune, which already excludes it from being Apache 2.0. It's also finetuned on OAI data which is... questionable in terms of license (don't think you can really legally license a model trained on OAI output as Apache 2.0 - although OAI doesn't really play by its own rules so who knows)

[0]: https://huggingface.co/lmsys/vicuna-13b-v1.3

Which part of copyright law are model weights governed by? (Or, if not by copyright law, what's the legal basis that would let you choose a "license" for model weights?)

Weights may or may not be subject to copyright law.

Are they a mere aggregation of facts -- some uncopyrightable, and some from other sources--, or is there a creative component to them?

https://libraries.emory.edu/research/copyright/copyright-dat...

There's no basis for models to be copyrightable that I can think of, licences on models are legal fictions for now until there's a new addition into copyright laws.

It has not yet been challenged, so we don’t really know yet.

Personally I will be surprised if weights aren’t considered to be licensable - courts are a lot more practical than one might expect.

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