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Trade secrets are easy to claim but hard to turn into a tort without having someone steal them. I'm sure some lawyer can come up with a filing that tries to make distillation an act of theft, but there would be many weak links in that chain.

Contrast this with Apple's case where it looks like they've got evidence of people walking out of the building with various physical artifacts on their way to an OpenAI interview.

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Trade secrets are a type of IP.
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Yes, but if a company publishes its trade secrets on the web you are entitled to read them and use them.
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Only if you're going to use them to train an LLM!

Also, more seriously, there are plenty of pieces of information that are compelled to be published that don't lose their confidentiality. There actually is a general concept that confidentiality can be lost if you are negligent in its protection but it's a very nuanced thing.

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And if an AI generated those wights, they are not copyrightable
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That could effectively be the case here but your statement in isolation is an oversimplification of recent legal guidance on this matter -- AI generated things are copyrightable if there is sufficient human authorship involved in the generation process.

The copyright office's recent statement on this matter were sensationalized when they really said nothing groundbreaking at all -- this was always the standard applied when any tools are used in creating a work.

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Even if the weights are just made through traditional training and no AI is used to make the weights... is there a copyright right? If the weights are a numerical derivation that aren't made by a human is there even human expression? Absent human expression, there is no copyright right?
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The output being created by a machine is not automatically disqualifying. e.g. PCM audio data is all created by a machine, but that doesn't prevent CDs from being copyrighted... because the input to it was highly human-created.

Ultimately it all hinges on the specifics of the training and how much human involvement was involved throughout the creation process. I suspect arguing this successfully in favor of upholding a copyright would be an uphill battle for many situations, but ultimately we'll need more court cases to know for sure.

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