Public domain
The public domain is the status of works or data free from applicable exclusive intellectual-property rights and generally usable without permission.
How Large Language Models Work
The public domain is the status of works and data that are not protected by applicable intellectual property rights and may generally be used without permission or compensation.
- How it is used
- Frames public-domain data as one possible source for training language models while emphasizing ethical and practical limits.
- How deep it goes
- Defines the status, lists routes into it, and examines age-related bias without resolving every legal-status question.
- Examples
- Uses old books, factual information, statistics, US federal work products, and older copyright timelines as examples.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate public-domain data as a training source while checking legal status, age, cultural fit, accuracy, and bias.
Read how How Large Language Models Work explains public domain →
The Complete Obsolete Guide to Generative AI
The status of creative work that is not protected by copyright or whose copyright restrictions have expired or been waived.
- How it is used
- Guides AI-assisted reuse of creative material while distinguishing public-domain sources from protected works.
- How deep it goes
- Defines practical reuse rights but defers jurisdiction-specific decisions about fair use, transformative work, and noncommercial use.
- Examples
- Uses Sherlock Holmes stories, a copied paragraph, and a revised no-verbatim-quotes prompt as concrete examples.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate AI-generated material for copying risk and research applicable rights before publishing or relying on it.
Read how The Complete Obsolete Guide to Generative AI explains public domain →
Related concepts
- copyrightconfigured by · Copyright is a legal protection granting rights holders exclusive rights over specified uses of original expressive works, subject to applicable limitations.
- language modeluses · A language model is a computational model that represents patterns in linguistic tokens to estimate sequence probabilities and predict or generate language from context.
- biasproduces · Bias is a systematic deviation or tendency in data, measurements, estimates, judgments, or outputs that skews them relative to a relevant target or impartial baseline.
- licensekind of · A license is a legal grant of permission to use, access, modify, copy, distribute, or perform an asset or activity under specified terms and conditions.
- plagiarismcontrasts with · Plagiarism is presenting another party’s words, ideas, or creative work as one’s own without appropriate attribution.
These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.