Let's say I take a collection of images and use a program to compress them. When decompressed, the images are close to, but not exactly the same as the originals. Despite being in a different format, and despite not being exactly the same as the originals, the copyright to the compressed images is still held by whoever previously held it.

If I take the collection of images from earlier and train a diffusion model based on it, I'm essentially just compressing it a different way. With the right prompt, you can get out something very similar to what you put in.

I understand the idea, it's not truly open in that case, but so long as the ability to build new things on it and prosper from it is preserved im alright.

The key is that it's not doing something like trying to restrict you from using it in a certain way, only requiring you give a fair share of profits.

This was, fun fact, the original purpose of patents. They weren't designed to keep things closed and owned by individuals, they were designed to allow people to freely share and make a profit so that ideas could be built on by each other. The patent system is turned into this corrupted terrible mess where things are almost never shared through licensing or payment, and it's just a way to build monopolistic enterprises nowadays.

An open source system that allows for this sort of payment would also allow for many many more things to be open when currently the bad actors who will build and take that work and just never pay you back for it.