I don't think you can classify "public data in" as public domain. Public data could also include commercial licenses which forbid using it in any way other than what the license states. Just because the source is open for viewing does not necessarily mean it is OSL.
That's the core issue here. All models are trained on ALL source code that is publicly available irrespective of how it was licensed. It is illegal but every company training LLMs is doing it anyways.
Only (?) in America. In the EU, scraping is legal by default unless explicitly opted out with machine-readable instructions like robots.txt. That covers "training input". For training output, the rule is: "if the output is unrecognizable to the input, the license of the input does not matter" (otherwise, any project X could sue project Y for copyright infringement even if the projects only barely resemble each other). The cases where companies actually got sued were where the output was a direct copy or repetition of the input, even if an LLM was involved.
There is, however, a larger philosophical divide between the US and the EU based on history and religion. The US philosophy is highly individualistic, capitalistic, and considers "first-order principles." Copyright is a "property right": "I own this string of bits, you used them, therefore you owe me" (principle of absolute ownership).
Continental philosophy is more social and considers "second-order / causal effects." Copyright is a "personality right" that exists within a social ecosystem. The focus is on the effect of the action rather than a singular principle like "intellectual property." If the new code provides a secondary benefit to society and doesn't "hurt" the original creator's unique intellectual stamp, the law is inclined to view it as a new work.
In terms of legal sociology, America and Britain are more "individual-property-atomistic" thanks to their Protestant heritage, focusing on the rights of the individual (sola me, and my property, and God). Meanwhile, Europe was, at least to a large part, Catholic (esp. France), which focuses more on works, results, and effects on society to determine morality. While the states are officially secular, the heritage of this echoes in different definitions of what is considered "legal" or "moral", depending on which side of the ocean you are on.
Copyright is not a blacklist but an allowlist of things kept aside for the holder. Everything else is free game. LLM ingestion comes under fair use so no worries. If someone can get their hand on it, nothing in law stops it from training ingestion.
We can debate if this law is moral. Like the GP I took agree public data in -> public domain out is what's right for society. Copyright as an artificial concept has gone on for long enough.
I don't think so. It is no where "limited use". Entirety of the source code is ingested for training the model. In other words, it meets the bar of "heart of the work" being used for training. There are other factors as well, such as not harming owner's ability to profit from original work.
Alsup absolutely did not vindicate Anthropic as "fair use".
> Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies. [0]
It was only fair use, where they already had a license to the information at hand.
This hasn't gone to Supreme Court yet. And this is just USA. Courts in rest of the World will also have to take a call. It is not as simple as you make it out to be. Developers are spread across the World with majority living outside USA. Jurisdiction matters in these things.
Copyright's ambit has been pretty much defined and run by US for over a century.
You're holding out for some grace on this from the wrong venue. The right avenue would be lobbying for new laws to regulate and use LLMs, not try to find shelter in an archaic and increasingly irrelevant bit of legalese.
I don't disagree. However, just because your assertion of copyright being initially defined by US (which is not the fact. It was England that came up with it and was adopted by the Commonwealth which US was also a part of until its independence) does not mean jurisdiction is US. Even if US Supreme Court rules one way or the other, it doesn't matter as the rest of the World have its own definitions and legalese that need to be scrutinized and modernized.
Lawyer here. Its not. This article is highly confused. The case was about whether an AI could be considered an author for copyright purposes. Mainly as a way of arguing for robot rights, not copyright. The person listed the AI as the sole author: On the application, Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author and himself as just the
work’s owner.
This is not the first time someone tried to say a machine is the author. The law is quite clear, the machine cant be an author for copyright purposes. Despite all the confused news articles, this does not mean if claude writes code for you it is copyright free. It just means you are the author. Machines being used as tools to generate works is quite common, even autonomously. ill steal from the opinion here:
In 1974, Congress created the National Commission on
New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (“CONTU”)
to study how copyright law should accommodate “the creation
of new works by the application or intervention of such
automatic systems or machine reproduction.”
...
This understanding of authorship and computer
technology is reflected in CONTU’s final report:
On the basis of its investigations and society’s experience
with the computer, the Commission believes that there is
no reasonable basis for considering that a computer in any
way contributes authorship to a work produced through its
use. The computer, like a camera or a typewriter, is an
inert instrument, capable of functioning only when
activated either directly or indirectly by a human. When
so activated it is capable of doing only what it is directed
to do in the way it is directed to perform.
...
IE When you use a computer or any tool you are still the author.
The court confirms this later:
Contrary to Dr. Thaler’s assumption, adhering to the
human-authorship requirement does not impede the protection
of works made with artificial intelligence. Thaler Opening Br.
38-39.
First, the human authorship requirement does not prohibit
copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of
artificial intelligence. The rule requires only that the author of that work be a human being—the person who created,
operated, or used artificial intelligence—and not the machine
itself. The Copyright Office, in fact, has allowed the
registration of works made by human authors who use artificial
intelligence.
There are cases where the use of AI made something uncopyrightable, even when a human was listed as the author, but all of the ones i know are image related.
"the person who created, operated, or used artificial intelligence" so which one is it? because there the person(s) who created the ai is almost always different that the person who used it.
I did not refer to privacy rights. If you post a photo of yourselves online, you're giving up on a tiny part of your privacy rights. So my question still stands: would running your photos that you have taken of yourselves through a diffusion model rip your copyright of your photo?
This could be read as a reformulation of the old adage - "what's mine is mine, and what is yours, is mine too".
So, you can pilfer the commons ("public") but not stuff unavailable in source form.
If we expand your thought experiment to other forms of expression, say videos on YT or Netflix, then yes.
I don't think you can classify "public data in" as public domain. Public data could also include commercial licenses which forbid using it in any way other than what the license states. Just because the source is open for viewing does not necessarily mean it is OSL.
That's the core issue here. All models are trained on ALL source code that is publicly available irrespective of how it was licensed. It is illegal but every company training LLMs is doing it anyways.
> It is illegal
Only (?) in America. In the EU, scraping is legal by default unless explicitly opted out with machine-readable instructions like robots.txt. That covers "training input". For training output, the rule is: "if the output is unrecognizable to the input, the license of the input does not matter" (otherwise, any project X could sue project Y for copyright infringement even if the projects only barely resemble each other). The cases where companies actually got sued were where the output was a direct copy or repetition of the input, even if an LLM was involved.
There is, however, a larger philosophical divide between the US and the EU based on history and religion. The US philosophy is highly individualistic, capitalistic, and considers "first-order principles." Copyright is a "property right": "I own this string of bits, you used them, therefore you owe me" (principle of absolute ownership).
Continental philosophy is more social and considers "second-order / causal effects." Copyright is a "personality right" that exists within a social ecosystem. The focus is on the effect of the action rather than a singular principle like "intellectual property." If the new code provides a secondary benefit to society and doesn't "hurt" the original creator's unique intellectual stamp, the law is inclined to view it as a new work.
In terms of legal sociology, America and Britain are more "individual-property-atomistic" thanks to their Protestant heritage, focusing on the rights of the individual (sola me, and my property, and God). Meanwhile, Europe was, at least to a large part, Catholic (esp. France), which focuses more on works, results, and effects on society to determine morality. While the states are officially secular, the heritage of this echoes in different definitions of what is considered "legal" or "moral", depending on which side of the ocean you are on.
Copyright is not a blacklist but an allowlist of things kept aside for the holder. Everything else is free game. LLM ingestion comes under fair use so no worries. If someone can get their hand on it, nothing in law stops it from training ingestion.
We can debate if this law is moral. Like the GP I took agree public data in -> public domain out is what's right for society. Copyright as an artificial concept has gone on for long enough.
> LLM ingestion comes under fair use
I don't think so. It is no where "limited use". Entirety of the source code is ingested for training the model. In other words, it meets the bar of "heart of the work" being used for training. There are other factors as well, such as not harming owner's ability to profit from original work.
https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/07/fair-u...
Both Meta and Anthropic were vindicated for their use. Only for Anthropic was their fine for not buying upfront.
Alsup absolutely did not vindicate Anthropic as "fair use".
> Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies. [0]
It was only fair use, where they already had a license to the information at hand.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
This hasn't gone to Supreme Court yet. And this is just USA. Courts in rest of the World will also have to take a call. It is not as simple as you make it out to be. Developers are spread across the World with majority living outside USA. Jurisdiction matters in these things.
Copyright's ambit has been pretty much defined and run by US for over a century.
You're holding out for some grace on this from the wrong venue. The right avenue would be lobbying for new laws to regulate and use LLMs, not try to find shelter in an archaic and increasingly irrelevant bit of legalese.
I don't disagree. However, just because your assertion of copyright being initially defined by US (which is not the fact. It was England that came up with it and was adopted by the Commonwealth which US was also a part of until its independence) does not mean jurisdiction is US. Even if US Supreme Court rules one way or the other, it doesn't matter as the rest of the World have its own definitions and legalese that need to be scrutinized and modernized.
There are hardly any rulings/laws about the topic, and it quite obviously changes the picture of licenses.
Lawyer here. Its not. This article is highly confused. The case was about whether an AI could be considered an author for copyright purposes. Mainly as a way of arguing for robot rights, not copyright. The person listed the AI as the sole author: On the application, Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author and himself as just the work’s owner.
This is not the first time someone tried to say a machine is the author. The law is quite clear, the machine cant be an author for copyright purposes. Despite all the confused news articles, this does not mean if claude writes code for you it is copyright free. It just means you are the author. Machines being used as tools to generate works is quite common, even autonomously. ill steal from the opinion here:
In 1974, Congress created the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (“CONTU”) to study how copyright law should accommodate “the creation of new works by the application or intervention of such automatic systems or machine reproduction.”
...
This understanding of authorship and computer technology is reflected in CONTU’s final report: On the basis of its investigations and society’s experience with the computer, the Commission believes that there is no reasonable basis for considering that a computer in any way contributes authorship to a work produced through its use. The computer, like a camera or a typewriter, is an inert instrument, capable of functioning only when activated either directly or indirectly by a human. When so activated it is capable of doing only what it is directed to do in the way it is directed to perform.
...
IE When you use a computer or any tool you are still the author.
The court confirms this later:
Contrary to Dr. Thaler’s assumption, adhering to the human-authorship requirement does not impede the protection of works made with artificial intelligence. Thaler Opening Br. 38-39. First, the human authorship requirement does not prohibit copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The rule requires only that the author of that work be a human being—the person who created, operated, or used artificial intelligence—and not the machine itself. The Copyright Office, in fact, has allowed the registration of works made by human authors who use artificial intelligence.
There are cases where the use of AI made something uncopyrightable, even when a human was listed as the author, but all of the ones i know are image related.
"the person who created, operated, or used artificial intelligence" so which one is it? because there the person(s) who created the ai is almost always different that the person who used it.
The user in basically all cases
> Lawyer here. Its not. This article is highly confused.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? I was just saying I like the idea of AI-generated anything being public domain, not that it currently is/isn't.
What about doing that with movies and music?
The results would be the same: AI generated music and movies will be public domain.
So you’d lose all rights on pictures of yourselves if they were generated by AI? Would this be true even for nudes?
Copyright and privacy rights are different.
I did not refer to privacy rights. If you post a photo of yourselves online, you're giving up on a tiny part of your privacy rights. So my question still stands: would running your photos that you have taken of yourselves through a diffusion model rip your copyright of your photo?
Yes, anything AI-generated should be public domain including the AI-generated picture that used your photo as input.