text: ***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 
  out of copyright if they were not subject to a copyright renewal; however, data on copyright 
  renewals is not easily accessible. 
  
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  What’s more, copyright deﬁnitions 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 
  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 diﬃcult to determine copyright 
  terms with certainty because it requires information about the date of death of each author, 
  which is often not readily available. 
  
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