Position: The Pre/Post-Training Boundary Should Govern IP in Industry-Academia ML Collaborations (opens in new tab)

Industry-academia ML collaborations routinely fail to launch -- not for scientific reasons, but because academics must publish while companies must protect models trained on proprietary data, and no standard contract framework resolves this tension. Because contracts are negotiated by legal departments alone, many apparent legal disputes are incentive misalignment problems that only scientists at the table can correctly diagnose. We propose PBOS...