Query regarding model licensing

[ThibautGoldsborough]

Hello,

Please feel free to redirect me to the Image.sc forum if this is not the right place to discuss about licensing.

We are in the process of uploading a number of instanseg models and had a query regarding the licensing of our models. The instanseg method is released under Apache-2.0, however the weights were trained on a number of datasets, each with their own licensing terms. So far we have kept to CC-BY or CC-0 datasets as these are compatible under the Apache-2.0 terms. But we'd like to release more models trained on less permissive licences (e.g. cellpose dataset, tissuenet dataset, livecell dataset), which have confusing strictly non-commercial custom licenses (cellpose and tissuenet).

I noticed that some of the popular models hosted on bioimageio (e.g. https://bioimage.io/#/?id=10.5281%2Fzenodo.5869899&type=model) were released under a fully open license (CC-BY-4.0) yet the training data (livecell) is released under a more restrictive CC-BY-NC. Does bioimageio assume that the license of a model is not tied to the license of the training dataset?

I'm aware this is not your direct responsibility, but there seems to be a lack of guidelines for model developers which could lead to unintended downstream risks for model users.

[FynnBe]

Thank you @ThibautGoldsborough for raising this issue.
It is my current understanding that the license of an RDF applies to the metadata it holds only.
I will forward this to our weekly discussions and report back here (and hopefully update the documentation to make this clear(er)).