Module 5 Lesson 5: AI Intellectual Property Risks
Is your model legally protected? Explore the legal and technical landscape of AI IP, from copyright issues to the dangers of using 'License-Violating' data.
Module 5 Lesson 5: Intellectual property risks
AI security isn't just about "Hacking"; it's about Legal and Economic Stability. If your AI's IP is compromised, your business model might collapse.
1. The Model as Trade Secret
In many jurisdictions, AI models are currently protected under Trade Secret Law. Unlike a patent (which is public), a trade secret only works if you keep it hidden.
- The Risk: If your model is "Extracted" (cloned) by a competitor, and you didn't have "Reasonable Security Measures" (like rate limiting), you might lose your legal right to claim it was a trade secret.
2. Licensing Contamination
If a developer at your company uses a "Public" dataset that contains Copyleft (GPL) code or licensed images without permission to train your model:
- The Risk: Your entire model could be considered "Derivative Work." In extreme cases, you might be legally forced to Delete the Model or make it Open Source. This is known as Model Poisoning by Litigation.
3. The "Foundational" Dependency
Most companies build on top of base models like Llama or Claude.
- The Risk: You are at the mercy of their license. If Meta or Anthropic changes their "Commercial Use" terms next year, your business might become illegal overnight. This is a Supply Chain IP Risk.
4. Technical Protection vs. Legal Protection
- Technical: Watermarking, Rate Limiting, Obfuscation.
- Legal: Terms of Service (ToS) that explicitly forbid "Crawling for the purpose of model extraction."
Note: Technical protections provide Evidence, while legal protections provide Recourse. You need both.
Exercise: The Legal Audit
- Read the Llama 3 Community License. Can you use it to build a model for a company with 800 million monthly active users?
- If an AI "hallucinates" a piece of copyrighted music, who is liable: the model creator or the user who prompted it?
- Why is "Model Watermarking" essential for a company that sells its model to be run on a customer's private servers?
- Research: What happened in the "New York Times vs. OpenAI" lawsuit regarding training data?
Summary
You have completed Module 5: Model-Level Attacks. You now understand that your model is a target for theft, its weights can leak private data, and its legal status is as fragile as its mathematical parameters.
Next Module: Forces of Nature: Module 6: Adversarial Attacks on Models.