Why AI Is Totally Okay for Copyright (And Not Illegal At All)

Learning Is Not A Crime

The big picture: When a human reads something and learns from it, nobody accuses them of copyright infringement.

So why does the equation change just because a computer is doing the learning?

It doesn’t. Learning isn’t infringement; it’s what we do. In the copyright world, this category is called “fair use”.

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But this one time….

Let’s tackle a common pushback:

“But I found this AI that can reproduce a copyrighted work or excerpt, word for word!”

Okay, imagine you have a very smart friend. He’s read that same article and memorized it, word for word. Is he violating copyright by remembering?

What if you ask him to recite an excerpt from that copyrighted work, word for word? Did he violate copyright? Again, no. Now if you reproduce and distribute it… or post it and claim it as your own, that would be a problem.

I grant one qualification: There is a corner case to be considered in which AI can be coerced to generate large quantities of copyirghted material, though in practice I haven’t seen this to be the case (yet). You can easily get an AI to tell you it’s quoting something, and it frequently turns out that those quotes are incorrect or entirely made up.

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What About Code?

This gets more interesting when we talk about code: A lot of code is what one might call “low entropy.” That is: there’s not much unique information in it.

If you ask an AI to write a function that returns Fibonacci numbers, chances are that code will look almost identical to someone else’s code. Why? Because the Fibonacci sequence is universal. There’s no creativity in the function itself—it’s just math.

Most code is that way. There is a curious practice among the natives of putting their name in a comment in every file of code they touch. Besides being a waste of time, this signals that people think of their code more like a work of art, while in reality it’s more like a work of framing, wiring, or plumbing.

Software engineers like to take pride in their work, and because they put in a lot of effort, they think there is a lot there to “copy”. But in reality, most code is just building blocks and somewhat obvious logical connections. While framing a house is a work of creativity, it’s not something we think of as a copyrightable work.

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Yeah but what does Bill Gates say?

Microsoft is so confident in this stance that they’ve put their legal team and wallet behind it, committing to indemnify users of their AI tools against copyright lawsuits.

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The Nutshell

Learning isn’t copyright infringement. That applies to humans and machines alike.

Whether it’s a human studying a novel or an AI processing code snippets, the act of learning is protected. It’s not just common sense; it’s the law.