License / Permissions confusion

[boringcrypto]

Reading the discussions here I got this far:

• All SD models must be licensed under CreativeML Open RAIL-M (or compatible altered license)
• The additional "restrictions" such as Creator Credit required, No generation services, No selling models, etc are simply requests from the creator to people using their model (https://github.com/orgs/civitai/discussions/168)
• Some models, like Dreamlike actually use an updated license (https://huggingface.co/dreamlike-art/dreamlike-diffusion-1.0/blob/main/LICENSE.md) according to the description, but also still lists CreativeML Open RAIL-M as license on Civitai.
• The additional "restrictions" are editable, which means they may change over time. Some models that I downloaded have since changed their restrictions, which isn't quite how licensing is supposed to work, but I guess it's fine if it's just a request.
• With merges, we don't actually know what is in it and how that is licensed.
• I guess we don't yet know how copyright will be applied to models, fine-tunes, merges and generated images (there's been some initial feedback on this from the US)

One confusing request is the "no generation services". Does this mean I can't use Google Colab? I can't use it on Stable Horde? What about a hosted Automatic1111 server like RunDiffusion? What about an AWS server on which I install Automatic1111?

Our product allows our users to use any Civitai model by providing the URL and will soon also allow any URL, such as from huggingface or anywhere else. I see this as similar to using Google Colab (which is also a freemium service, just more cumbersome). We provide credit on each image generated using the name of the model and a link back to the Civitai model page.

Overall it feels like a mess right now. Personally I'd say the easiest way out would be to say that all models on Civitai need to be CreativeML Open RAIL-M. If you want to tweak licensing, don't put it on Civitai.

Or Civitai could add an actual list of licenses that are CreativeML Open RAIL-M compatible that creators can choose from and don't allow the license to change for a version once it's published (or only changed to a more relaxed license). It should be very clear to the user if a model isn't licensed with the standard licensing and maybe even a confirmation before downloading, because I bet that most users have never even noticed the requests as they are added now (I didn't until I really started looking into it).