[License-review] Notice requirement for model output: OSD-compliant or not? (ModelGo)

[Pamela Chestek]

On 3/4/2025 7:31 PM, Moming Duan wrote:
>
>
>> 2. Also, by my reading, the notice requirement isn't inheritable.  So 
>> if I were to take the output from a ModelGo model, and use it to 
>> train a new model called "JoshAI", then there is no requirement that 
>> JoshAI have any particular notices.
>
> Partly so. If the original model is licensed under MG-BY-OS, 
> derivatives must also be licensed under MG-BY-OS because it is 
> copyleft. However, for other variants like MG0, no such notice is 
> required.  The reason I intend to add a notice in MG-BY-OS is to 
> ensure open-source inheritance. Consider a scenario where I use an 
> MG-BY-OS model and distribute its output as a dataset on Hugging Face 
> without indicating which model I used. If another user downloads the 
> dataset, trains a new model, and changes its license, they may 
> unintentionally violate the MG-BY-OS license. This behavior is very 
> common in current model development, and you can find many such 
> extracted datasets on Hugging Face.
>
I believe that you have a drafting flaw that means that the copyleft 
doesn't necessarily work, specifically that your license is 
sublicenseable. The GPLs are not; that is one of the brilliant aspects 
of the GPLs.

The BY-OS license in section 2.1(a) says "/Subject to the terms and 
conditions of this License, the Licensor hereby grants to You a 
non-exclusive, non-transferable, /sublicensable/, irrevocable, 
royalty-free, worldwide right //and license (including the relevant 
copyrights and patent rights) to .../"

The notice requirement is in 2.4(b) and says "/You may Distribute the 
Output to third parties provided that You indicate as part of the 
Distribution that any Output generated through the use of the Licensed 
Materials and/or Derivative Materials may contain AI-generated content./"

Notably in both sections the person bound is "You," defined in Section 
1.1 as "/you, or any other person or entity (if you are entering into 
this license on behalf of such person or entity and provided you have 
the legal authority to bind such person or entity)./" I don't think that 
a sublicensee is necessarily "You" - perhaps you can argue that the 
Licensee is entering the license on behalf of its sublicensees, but I 
don't believe that is the intended meaning of this section. I believe 
the intended meaning covers the case where "You" is acting as an agent 
for the licensee, for example, a vendor who is creating a software 
program for a client. That's what I think it means in the Apache license.

So if "You" doesn't include sublicensees, then sublicensees can lawfully 
create Output but have no contractual obligation to label it.

There is an argument that the sublicensee might still be required to 
label, depending on whether Section 2.4 is considered a condition of a 
copyright license. But that's taking your chances that two things are 
true: (1) there is copyrightable subject matter and (2) the obligation 
to label output, in an entirely different section of the agreement 
without any signal language such as "on the condition that" or "provided 
that," would still nevertheless be a condition on the copyright license. 
So I wouldn't count on it.

This is a major hurdle with models, you have to assume that the 
obligations you want to impose related to them are only enforceable 
through contract, not copyright. So that means you have to find a way to 
be directly in privity with all users so they are contractually bound, 
but granting sublicenses means you aren't.

Pam

Pamela S. Chestek (in my personal capacity)
Chestek Legal
PLEASE NOTE OUR NEW MAILING ADDRESS
4641 Post St.
Unit 4316
El Dorado Hills, CA 95762
+1 919-800-8033
pamela at chesteklegal
www.chesteklegal.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20250304/4f81146b/attachment.htm>