Constitutionality of the Copyright Office In the United States, a claim to ownership of a copyright must be registered with the copyright office before a civil lawsuit can be filed against a violator. (However, the violation could happen before the registration.) By law, the Copyright Office is a department within the Library of Congress. That means it is within the legislative branch of the federal government. Since its function is executive rather than legislative, could that situation be considered unconstitutional?
While the argument you make is straight forward, it is hard to imagine who would ever have standing to challenge the law. Who can legitimately argue that they are harmed in any way by having to register with an agency housed in the legislative branch rather than in the executive branch? Also, there is a legitimate argument that the Library of Congress should be in the legislative branch as a research tool for Congress, and there is a legitimate argument that the Copyright office should be in the Library of Congress because that is how the Library of Congress gets its comprehensive collection of research resources, which Congress in turns uses to make policy. The Executive branch does not have a monopoly on implementing U.S. laws and indeed, before the copyright registrar function was placed in the U.S. Congress, it was vested in the judicial branch with the clerks of the U.S. District courts, and not in the executive branch. Furthermore, the agency's director is appointed by the Librarian of Congress, who in turn is appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate despite its location within Congress on the organizational chart of the U.S. Government, so it does not violate the Appointments Clause of Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution. In substance, the Copyright Registrar is in the direct chain of command from the President in terms of appointment authority, despite being located in the legislative branch for purposes of day to day management of the Library of Congress and budget categorization.
Copyright law is not based on contracts, and does not require agreement. No one may distribute copies of a copyrighted work without permission from the copyright holder. For instance, in the US, both Persons A and F can be sued because Title 17, Section 501 of the US Code says: (a) Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner ... is an infringer of the copyright or right of the author, as the case may be. (b) The legal or beneficial owner of an exclusive right under a copyright is entitled ... to institute an action for any infringement of that particular right committed while he or she is the owner of it. Copyright infringement isn't an issue of violating terms you agreed to with a private entity. Your duty to not infringe copyright was imposed by your country's legislature, who does not require your personal agreement to do that.
united-states The flowchart included in the question is trying to summarize a rather large amount of legal uncertainty into one image. It must be emphasized that each decision point represents an unsettled area of law. Nobody knows which path through that flowchart the law will take, or even if different forms or implementations of AI might take different paths. The short and disappointing answer to your question is that nobody knows what is or isn't legal yet. To further elaborate on each decision point: The first point is asking whether the training process requires a license at all. There are two possible reasons to think that it does not: AI training is protected by fair use (see 17 USC 107). This is a case-by-case inquiry that would have to be decided by a judge. AI training is nothing more than the collection of statistical information relating to a work, and does not involve &quot;copying&quot; the work within the meaning of 17 USC 106 (except for a de minimis period which is similar to the caching done by a web browser, and therefore subject to a fair use defense). The second point is, I think, asking whether the model is subject to copyright protection under Feist v. Rural and related caselaw. Because the model is trained by a purely automated process, there's a case to be made that the model is not the product of human creativity, and is therefore unprotected by copyright altogether. Dicta in Feist suggest that the person or entity directing the training might be able to obtain a &quot;thin&quot; copyright in the &quot;selection or organization&quot; of training data, but no court has ever addressed this to my knowledge. This branch can also be read as asking whether the output of the model is copyrightable, when the model is run with some prompt or input. The Copyright Office seems to think the answer to that question is &quot;no, because a human didn't create it.&quot; The third decision point is, uniquely, not a legal question, but a practical question: Do you intend to distribute anything, or are you just using it for your own private entertainment? This determines whether you need to consult the rest of the flowchart or not. The final decision point is whether the &quot;output&quot; (i.e. either the model itself, or its output) is a derivative work of the training input. This would likely be decided on the basis of substantial similarity, which is a rather complicated area of law. To grossly oversimplify, the trier of fact would be shown both the training input and the allegedly infringing output, and asked to determine whether the two items have enough copyrightable elements in common that copying can reasonably be inferred.
There are three questions relevant to this issue: Who owned the copyright in the first place? Was the copyright transferred? If not, was a license given to the site to use the content? In general, under most countries' laws, the person who creates an original work owns the copyright. The person with the copyright has the right to copy and distribute the work, and the right to prevent others from doing so. In some cases, such as where a work is created as a "work for hire" by certain employees under certain circumstances, the initial copyright is held by a third party. You will need a lawyer familiar with your jurisdiction and your circumstances to determine if this is the case. Finally, even if you own the copyright, you can license others to use your content. This may be in an express written document, or it may be an implied license--implied, for instance, by the act of posting it on their blog. The existence and scope of such a license is, again, something that will have to be determined based on your country's specific laws and your specific situation. The bottom line is: if you submitted articles to that blog, you can't complain that they posted them. Depending on the license in effect, you might be able to get them taken down, or you might not. You need a lawyer, not the internet, to tell you what your rights are in this very specific case.
Copyright law treats computer files containing text as &quot;copies&quot; and computer files containing sound as &quot;phonorecords&quot;. Indeed it must, otherwise there would be no copyright protection for ebooks and for downloadable music. Thus, I would take 17 U.S. Code §121 to apply. The word &quot;material&quot; in copyright law has been held to include &quot;stored in electronic form on any storage device&quot; so that the key requirement for an initial copyright, that the work be &quot;fixed in a tangible form&quot; or &quot;fixed in any tangible medium of expression&quot; is satisfied by a computer file, see 17 USC 102 17 USC 121 reads: it is not an infringement of copyright for an authorized entity to reproduce or to distribute in the United States copies or phonorecords of a previously published literary work ... if such copies or phonorecords are reproduced or distributed in accessible formats exclusively for use by eligible persons. Note that the page &quot;Copyright and Digital Files&quot; describes computer files recorded in a computer or on disk as &quot;copies&quot; as in deed does 17 USC 117 This establishes that such files are copies, and thus consist of &quot;materiel objects&quot;. The official US copyright office page on &quot;Can I Use Someone Else's Work? Can Someone Else Use Mine?&quot; reads: Whether or not a particular work is being made available under the authority of the copyright owner is a question of fact. But since any original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium (including a computer file) is protected by federal copyright law upon creation, in the absence of clear information to the contrary, most works may be assumed to be protected by federal copyright law. (emphasis added) Copyright Office Circular 1: &quot;Copyright Basics&quot; reads: A work is “fixed” when it is captured (either by or under the authority of an author) in a sufficiently permanent medium such that the work can be perceived, reproduced, or communicated for more than a short time. A computer file is petty clearly &quot;sufficiently permanent&quot; for this purpose. Also consider Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc 886 F. 3d 1179 As this web page reports: In a 6-2 decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that Google's use of Oracle's software code in developing the Android operating system constituted a fair use under §107 of the Copyright Act. The use would not have been fair use unless the code was protected by copyright, and the code almost surely existed only in the form of computer files. Thus the US Supreme Court has treated computer files as &quot;materiel objects&quot; for purposes of copyright law. (Note also that the use was declared to be infringement unless fair use applied, which leads even more directly to the same conclusion.)
Almost all works recorded in some fixed way that are not a couple of hundred years old or created by a government agency are protected by copyright. In the absence of an exception to the general rule, copying a work that is protected by copyright is copyright infringement, which can be a basis for the copyright owner to sue the infringer. This can also be a basis for criminal liability is certain additional elements are proved and a prosecutor proves a case of copyright infringement in a criminal case. But, there are some important exceptions to this general rule of what constitutes legally sanctionable copyright infringement. The most important exceptions to the general rule have the character of affirmative defenses. In order words, if someone sued for copyright infringement and the person sued admits that they copied the copyright protected work, they can use these exceptions to avoid having legal liability. One of the exceptions is the permission from the copyright owner to use the copyright work. This can be either in the form of affirmatively given permission to use the copyrighted work in a particular way (called an &quot;express license&quot; to use the copyrighted work), or in the form of permission to use the copyrighted work that can be inferred from context (called an &quot;implied license&quot; to use the copyrighted work). Another of the main exceptions is &quot;fair use&quot;. If the way a copy of a copyrighted work is used constitutes fair use, the person using the copyrighted work without an express or implied license to do so it not liable for copyright infringement. Of course, while you don't need more than one exception to the general rule to avoid liability for copyright infringement, you can have more than one. For example, you can use copyrighted work in a way that would constitute &quot;fair use&quot; and not give rise to liability for that reason if you were sued, even if you can't be sued anyway because you already have been given permission by the owner of the copyright to use the copyright in the way that you did. It isn't a case of a contradiction. It is a case of a general rule that has exceptions.
Am I correct to infer that content/data created by a US city have an open license (public domain if created by US city employees or open license if created by a contractor)? No. For example, Larimer County, Colorado created election administration software in-house rather than using an outside contractor to do so, and it would be lawful for it to license that software to other governments in a manner that helps recover its development costs. There is an issue over whether a city or state can copyright its municipal ordinances or statutes or regulations in a legally enforceable way when people have a legal duty to comply with them. Some courts have held that state statutes that are binding upon people can't be protected in that manner. Efforts of the West Corporation to protect its page numbering system that was widely used by courts to refer to public domain case opinions were mostly invalidated in litigation. An open question is that most municipal governments incorporate by reference in their ordinances Uniform Building Codes that are subject to private copyrights and are not terribly cheap to obtain copies of. Yet, every person doing construction work is bound to follow the enacted ordinance including the parts incorporated by reference.
I assume you are talking about United States federal copyright law. You can freely use any: material published before 1923 material published between 1923 and 1963 for which the copyright was not renewed material explicitly placed in the public domain material not copyrightable (such as any US government publication) material whose copyright has been abandoned (for example the author died with no heir)