> This. Tables of numbers are explicitly not subject to copyright; that’s a copyright 101 fact.
Ok, but there's clearly more nuance there. Otherwise I could claim that any mp3 file I wanted to distribute is just a table of 8-bit integers and therefore not subject to copyright.
I wanted to reply in this direction. Ultimately, literally everything and anything in SW is a sequence of numbers, that anybody could easily put in some kind of table form.
I don’t know where the catch is, but that sentence can not be true in general.
A table of numbers is copyrightable if it represents some creative expression by a human being. For example, a BMP representing a sketch is a table of numbers and clearly copyrightable.
Weights are numbers that come from an optimization process. To the extent that weights encode any creativity, they encode the creativity of the training data. But any company using AI models (including Apple) does not want that interpretation because they are using AI models that were trained on other people's copyrighted works. If weights could be copyrighted, we all of us would own them.
That is simply not true. The details might vary by jurisdiction and the protection might not be under the exact name of “copyright” but there most certainly are comparable legal protections for the contents of databases (“tables of numbers”). See for example: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/running-business/intel...
Disney would like you have a word with you. Why would their pile of numbers that represent Avatar3.m4a be any more subject to copyright than Apple_2D_3D.bin. Or GPT52.mlx or Opus45.gguf?
Any of the code that wraps the model or makes it useful is subject to copyright. But the weights themselves are as unrestricted as it gets.