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Published video-model weights, licences and hardware notes

Derivative weights, and what they inherit

Derivative weights are what comes out of fine-tuning, merging or quantising a released model. The output is a new file and it is not a fresh start: the terms of the original travel with it in most licences. As of 2026-09-22.

Three ways a derivative gets madeFine-tuning, merging and quantising all produce a file that did not exist before and that carries the licence history of whatever it was derived from.Where did this weights file come fromFine-tuned from a releaseTerms followThe base licence conditionsthe result, and attributionis normally required.Merged from severalEvery source countsThe strictest of thecontributing licencesusually governs the whole.Quantised or distilledStill a derivativeChanging the numeric formatdoes not make the weightsoriginal work.A new file is not a clean slate
Fig. 1 Three routine operations, each producing a file with inherited terms.
Operations that produce derivative weights, and what they change. Recorded 2026-09-22.
OperationWhat changes
Fine-tuningBehaviour, and the file
MergingThe set of licences involved
QuantisationThe numeric format and the memory needed
DistillationThe architecture as well as the weights

Inclusion rule. Operations that produce a new weights file from released ones. Inference is excluded: it produces output, not weights. Order. From smallest change to the file to largest.

1Merging multiplies the reading

A merged model inherits from every source, so a single permissive licence in the set does not simplify anything. The practical rule is that the most restrictive contributing document governs the result.

That is why provenance is worth recording at the point of the merge rather than reconstructed later. A file with unknown ancestry cannot be cleared at all.

2Quantising feels like packaging and is not

Converting weights to fp8 changes the file and not the authorship, so the result is a derivative in the licence sense even though nothing was learned. Publishing it is redistribution.

This register records the licence on the released weights. Whatever anyone builds from them is outside the entry, and the entry is the starting point for working out what the derivative may do.

3Why the register stops at the release

Every entry here describes weights a vendor published. A fine-tune, a merge or a quantised rebuild is somebody else's file, with a provenance the register has no way to verify and no column to hold.

That boundary is the same one drawn around upscaling and interpolation. The register records what a repository states and stops where a second party's work begins.

A reading note, not an entry: no vendor value appears on this page. Where the register records this term for a particular release, it is on the licence column and on that family's own page. Nearby terms: Output rights, Licence tag.