facebookresearch / facebookresearch/co-tracker

Clarify intent of noncommercial licensing clause

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Description

CC-BY-NC isn't recommended for software. This project's license makes it unclear whether the developers' intentions are:

1. Disallowing this model to be distributed as part of commercial software, but not disallowing commercial use of whatever a user creates with the model (e.g. using it for VFX in a commercial film), or:
2. Disallowing the model to be used to create anything commercial

Other Meta projects have switched their noncommercial license to FAIR, which makes me think it's 2. But CC-BY-NC probably only applies to 1.

CC covers derivative works (in this case, derivative software or uses of the model's code) but no explicit clause covering model outputs. A new video or dataset created using this model would (probably) not be considered a derivative work under copyright law (though afaik this has never been tested in court)

If the intention is to restrict commercial use of model outputs, please relicense this under FAIR.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Review the project's current license and the cited CC-BY-NC and FAIR terms. Confirm with maintainers whether commercial use of model outputs is intended to be restricted; done means the licensing intent is decided, documented, and the license is changed if necessary.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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