<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div>Hi Pamela,</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Many thanks for your professional explanation. Your response is not only valuable for amending the ModelGo license but also highly educational for me. I truly appreciate your attention to detail and admire your expertise in licensing. As an ML researcher trying to understand licensing in my own way, I recognize that GPL has an automatic licensing mechanism rather than sublicensing. Additionally, some ModelGo license variants, such as the non-commercial (NC) one, are non-sublicensable. I now see this as a flaw that neither my lawyer nor I initially identified, or perhaps they believed the notice sufficiently addressed it. I will continue consulting with legal experts to verify this matter.</div><div><br></div>Best,<div>Moming<br id="lineBreakAtBeginningOfMessage"><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On 5 Mar 2025, at 1:43 PM, Pamela Chestek <pamela@chesteklegal.com> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 3/4/2025 7:31 PM, Moming Duan wrote:<br>
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<div>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.<br>
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<div>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.</div>
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</blockquote><p>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.</p><p>The BY-OS license in section 2.1(a) says "<i>Subject to the terms
and conditions of this License, the Licensor hereby grants to
You a non-exclusive, non-transferable, </i>sublicensable<i>,
irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide right </i><i>and license
(including the relevant copyrights and patent rights) to ...</i>"</p><p>The notice requirement is in 2.4(b) and says "<i>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.</i>"</p><p>Notably in both sections the person bound is "You," defined in
Section 1.1 as "<i>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>" 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.<br>
</p><p>So if "You" doesn't include sublicensees, then sublicensees can
lawfully create Output but have no contractual obligation to label
it.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Pam<br>
</p><p>Pamela S. Chestek (in my personal capacity)<br>
Chestek Legal<br>
PLEASE NOTE OUR NEW MAILING ADDRESS<br>
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