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twilight-actual t1_jcd0wcs wrote

Reply to comment by bartturner in [D] What do people think about OpenAI not releasing its research but benefiting from others’ research? Should google meta enforce its patents against them? by [deleted]

What exactly would that pushback be? Boycott? Post mean things?

About the only thing that could potentially prevent this is if the algorithms that we put into the public domain are protected by a license like the GPL, or something similar.

I haven't been following code releases, so I don't know if that's being done. And to be honest, I doubt most of the information flow is going by code. Rather, it's in the papers.

Is there a way to protect papers by a "GPL"? I honestly doubt it, because at that level, we're dealing strictly with ideas. And the only way to protect an idea is to patent them.

Perhaps the community, as a whole, should start patenting all their ideas, and then assigning the patents to a public trust that ensures that any derivative technology is published freely, too, under the same patent type.

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VelveteenAmbush t1_jcd6opg wrote

You could patent your algorithm and offer some sort of GPL-like patent license, but no one respects software patents anyway (for good reason IMO) and you'd be viewed as a patent troll if you tried to sue to enforce it.

GPL itself is a copyright license and does you no good if OpenAI is using your ideas but not your code. (Plus you'd actually want AGPL to force code release for an API-gated service, but that's a separate issue.)

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Smallpaul t1_jcdnffe wrote

Software patents assigned to a public trust are a different idea than randomly suing people.

It might be set up to only sue companies that are not open.

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VelveteenAmbush t1_jcdxc8v wrote

Maybe you're onto something.

I guess the trick is coming up with foundational patents that can't be traced back to a large tech company that would worry about being countersued. Like if you make these inventions at Google and then Google contributes them to the GPL-esque patent enforcer entity, and then that entity starts suing other tech co's, you can bet that those tech co's will start asserting their patents against Google, and Google (anticipating that) likely wouldn't be willing to contribute the patents in the first place.

Also patent litigation is really expensive, and you have to prove damages.

But maybe I'm just reaching to find problems at this point. It's not a crazy idea.

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twilight-actual t1_jce1tou wrote

The cat's kinda out of the bag at this point. But a non-profit public trust that acted as a patent-store to enforce the public dissemination of any derivative works based on the ideas maintained by the patent-store could make a huge difference ten, twenty years down the road. It would need an initial endowment to get started, retain a lawyer or two to manage it.

And then, publicize the hell out of it, evangelize the foundation over every college campus with a CS department. When students have established new state of art with ML, they can toss the design to the foundation in addition to arxiv, and where ever else they might publish.

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bartturner t1_jcetimy wrote

> Post mean things?

Not the terminology I would choose. But yes post things that they should not be doing this. Public opinion is a very, very powerful tool to get people to behave.

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1998marcom t1_jcf3er8 wrote

Detail note: to the best of my knowledge, as for what OpenAI is doing right now with their software, they could very well be using GPL code in their stack, and they wouldn't be violating any of the GPL clauses. A stricter licence such as AGPL I guess would be needed to cover as usage cases not only the shipping of software to the customer but also the mere utilization of the software.

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