Licensing of Polish voices fine-tuned from the Lessac base model
All three Polish medium voices report a CC0 dataset but a Lessac-derived training base:
| Voice | Dataset | Dataset licence | Training |
|---|---|---|---|
pl_PL-darkman-medium |
OHF-Voice/voice-datasets | CC0 | Finetuned from U.S. English lessac voice (medium) |
pl_PL-gosia-medium |
OHF-Voice/voice-datasets | CC0 | Finetuned from U.S. English lessac voice (medium) |
pl_PL-mc_speech-medium |
Kaggle czyzi0/the-mc-speech-dataset |
CC0 | Finetuned from U.S. English lessac voice (medium) |
The Lessac corpus was distributed under Blizzard Challenge terms, which as I understand them restrict use to non-commercial research. This leaves the status of the resulting Polish voices ambiguous: the speech data is public domain, but the base model is not.
This was raised in general terms in rhasspy/piper#271, but no conclusion was reached there, and it does not cover the Polish voices specifically.
Questions
- Are model weights fine-tuned from the lessac base considered derivative works of the Lessac corpus for licensing purposes?
- If they are, does that restriction extend to the generated audio, or only to redistribution of the weights?
- Is there a recommended Polish voice that does not carry this lineage? I noticed
pl_PL-basswas added more recently β is it trained from a different base? - Would it be possible to add an explicit
Base model licence:field toMODEL_CARD, alongside the existing dataset licence? The dataset licence alone is currently the field most users read, and it is not sufficient to determine whether a voice can be used commercially.
Context
I am building a Polish language-learning application. It is a private project today, so nothing here blocks me β but I may publish it commercially, and I would rather establish the position before building on it. I suspect others hit the same question, since the "CC0 dataset, restricted base" pattern appears across many non-English voices, not just Polish.
This is something that I don't think has been tested yet legally, so I'm not sure what the answer is. Either way, I've trained a new base model from LibriTTS-R (CC-BY) and will slowly be re-training many of the Piper voices so that they can at least be used for commercial purposes.