I originally posted this on /r/MachineLearning, but also wanted to try here.

Hi everyone!

As many of you might know, Kaggle datasets vary in terms of licensing: some are open, some are good for academic use, and some you have to ask the distributor for permission to use for other projects.

This got me thinking: let's pretend that there's a website with a lot of copyrighted images, free to download. Do any of these actions have licensing issues, assuming I'm not able to get in touch with the copyright holder in advance?

1. Using the images to create models, then crediting the website with the dataset used to create them in a journal article

2. Same as 1), but also publishing the processed dataset with features used (not enough information to recreate any images in the dataset)

3. Same as 2), but also publishing image variants generated by a model

4. Using the images to create a model which may be sold as a corporate product

I feel like 1 and 2 are probably okay, while 3 and 4 may not be. However, I have absolutely no basis for this claim, legally or otherwise. Does anyone have any experience, or can anyone link me to any discussions or papers on this subject? I'm also interested in whether similar reasoning applies to other domains, especially written software.