[Legal question] Is it legal to use pre-trained models from the model zoo for commercial purposes?

[ternaus]

I see discussions at

• Reddit
• Kaggle
• PyTorch forum
• Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc.

But there is no definitive answer.

[ternaus]

Similar question to:

• Google: [Legal question] Is it legal to use pre-trained models from the repo for commercial purposes? tensorflow/models#9131
• Facebook: [Legal question] Is it legal to use pre-trained models for commercial purposes? pytorch/vision#2597

[vladimir-dudnik]

@ternaus please contact your company legal department for conditions of use under certain license questions.

[ternaus]

@ternaus please contact your company legal department for conditions of use under certain license questions.

OpenVino provides models. What does the legal department at Intel think about pre-trained models provided by OpenVino:

It would be great to see at https://docs.openvinotoolkit.org/2019_R1/_docs_Pre_Trained_Models.html

Model A: Apache-2
Model B: CC-BY
Model C: GPL

etc

(If all of them Apache-2 it would be great :) )

For sure, it is a problem on the side of the users to decide if they can use for commercial or not, but the message about

model <> license should be more transparent. The fact that there is a License file for Apache 2 in the repo is not enough. At least that is what lawyers that I talk to say.

[ternaus]

As I understand:

What is the outbound license for the github repositories of OpenVINO™ toolkit?
All content of OpenVINO™ toolkit are distributed under Apache License, Version 2.0

in https://01.org/openvinooolkit/faq

is very close to what will be nice to have.

If there will be a line in FAQ or statement at the page with the list of pre-trained models:

Q: What is the license for pre-trained models?
A: The license for all pre-trained models is Apache-2.

It would solve all the issues.