On Fri, 24 Jul 2026, 18:41 The Wanderer, <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Whether or not that's a realistic concern (then or now, since IIRC there > may have been some rulings which could have gone that way but didn't?) > is a different matter, but that at least seems like a distinctly > different consideration from "can it be copyrighted at all?". > AFAIK Bartz v. Anthropic is one such landmark case - https://legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com/copyright-blog/the-bartz-v-anthropic-settlement-understanding-americas-largest-copyright-settlement/ has some analysis and background, for example. The key finding, for our case was the ruling from last year: "that Anthropic's use of legally acquired books for AI training was "quintessentially transformative" and protected as fair use". This basically is a bedrock decision that established that copyright of the training materials do NOT survive the transformation inherent in the learning process and thus the output of an LLM is NOT a derivative work of the training material in the legal sense. I see no reason why this would change in the future for three reasons: 1. Legally it makes no sense to distinguish actions done by software in learning from examples vs humans learning from examples. Law makes no distinction like this for violations, for example - if you draw a violating cartoon by hand or write software that draws violating cartoons, the result legally is the same. 2. AI and LLMs are big business and they have all the incentives to invest billions in making sure this interpretation remains the legal status quo. With both lobbying and crafting legal opinions. 3. Even if some legal wording were to be interpreted against LLM training process, the clear and massive benefits that theses systems already provide the society is a huge incentive to adjust the copyright law itself to make further development and use of these systems possible. This has happened before, for example in VHS context. Best Regards, Aigars Mahinovs. >
