4. Copyright, Licensing, & Access to Books for 
Training 
Even if books can be acquired, digitized, and made technically useful for AI training, the 
development of a books data commons would necessarily need to navigate and comply with 
copyright law.  
Out-of-Copyright Books: A minority of books are old enough to be in the public domain and 
out of copyright, and an AI developer could use them in training without securing any 
copyright permission. In the United States, all books published or released before 1929 are in 
the public domain. While use of these books provides maximal certainty for the AI developer 
to train on, it is worth noting that the status of whether a book is in the public domain can be 
diﬃcult to determine.  For instance, books released between 1929 and 1963 in the U.S. are 14
out of copyright if they were not subject to a copyright renewal; however, data on copyright 
renewals is not easily accessible.  
What’s more, copyright de ﬁnitions and term lengths vary among countries. Even if a work is 
in the public domain in the US, it may not be in other countries.  Countries generally use the 15
life of the last living author + “x” years to determine the term of copyright protection. For 
most countries, “x” is either 50 years (the minimum required by the Berne Convention) or 70 
years (this is the case for all member states of the European Union and for all works 
published in the U.S. after 1978). This approach makes it di ﬃcult to determine copyright 
terms with certainty because it requires information about the date of death of each author, 
which is often not readily available.  
In-Copyright Books: The vast majority of books are in copyright, and, insofar as the training 
process requires making a copy of the book, the use in AI training may implicate copyright 
law. Our workshop covered three possible paths for incorporating such works. 
Direct licensing 
One could directly license books from rightsholders. There may be some publishers who are 
willing to license their works for this purpose, but it is hard to determine the scale of such 
access, and, in any event, there are signi ﬁcant limits on this approach. Along with the 
challenge (and expense) of reaching agreements with relevant rightsholders, there is also the 
practical diﬃculty of simply identifying and ﬁnding the rightsholder that one must negotiate 
 For a sense of the complexity, see e.g. Melissa Levine, Richard C. Adler. Finding the Public Domain: 14
Copyright Review Management System Toolkit. 2016, quod.lib.umich.edu/c/crmstoolkit/
14616082.0001.001. Accessed 20 Mar. 2024.; Kopel, Matthew. “LibGuides: Copyright at Cornell Libraries: 
Copyright Term and the Public Domain.” guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain; 
Mannapperuma, Menesha, et al. Is It in the Public Domain? A HANDBOOK for EVALUATING the 
COPYRIGHT STATUS of a WORK CREATED in the UNITED STATES. 1923.
 See e.g. Moody, Glyn. “Project Gutenberg Blocks Access in Germany to All Its Public Domain Books 15
because of Local Copyright Claim on 18 of Them.” Techdirt, 7 Mar. 2018, www.techdirt.com/
2018/03/07/project-gutenberg-blocks-access-germany-to-all-public-domain-books-because-local-
copyright-claim-18-them/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2024.
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