Can I use this publicly available dataset to build commercial AI software? -- A Case Study on Publicly Available Image Datasets
This addresses a critical legal and practical issue for AI developers and companies relying on public datasets, though it is incremental as it builds on existing license analysis concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of unclear licensing for publicly available datasets used in commercial AI software, proposing a new approach to assess potential license compliance violations and finding that all six studied image datasets pose risks for commercial use.
Publicly available datasets are one of the key drivers for commercial AI software. The use of publicly available datasets is governed by dataset licenses. These dataset licenses outline the rights one is entitled to on a given dataset and the obligations that one must fulfil to enjoy such rights without any license compliance violations. Unlike standardized Open Source Software (OSS) licenses, existing dataset licenses are defined in an ad-hoc manner and do not clearly outline the rights and obligations associated with their usage. Further, a public dataset may be hosted in multiple locations and created from multiple data sources each of which may have different licenses. Hence, existing approaches on checking OSS license compliance cannot be used. In this paper, we propose a new approach to assessing the potential license compliance violations if a given publicly available dataset were to be used for building commercial AI software. We conduct a case study with our approach on 6 commonly used publicly available image datasets. Our results show that there exists potential risks of license violations associated with all of the studied datasets if they were used for commercial purposes.