Every The AI Downside article filed under Copyright — the failures, dark patterns, price hikes and privacy grabs we've logged here, newest first. 4 and counting.
A plain-English guide to whether AI companies can legally train on your data — the US fair-use rulings, the UK Getty judgment, the EU opt-out and the US Copyright Office's warning — and why ‘legal’ is not the same as ‘you agreed to it’.
You typed the prompt, so you own the picture — right? In the US, no: works generated by AI alone aren't copyrightable, because copyright needs a human author. Here's what that means for the images, text and music you make with AI, what parts you can still protect, and why the UK is the awkward exception.
The US Copyright Office ruled that purely AI-generated material is not copyrightable and that prompts alone do not provide sufficient control. Code you wrote with heavy AI assistance sits in an uncertain middle — and no court has drawn the line for software.
Every large model was trained on someone’s work, usually without asking. The lawsuits testing whether that was legal are now producing real rulings and record settlements. This is a plain-English guide to where the line actually falls — and how much of it is still undrawn.
