Unit 14: Copyright and attribution

Reading time: about 7 minutes. Activity: about 12 minutes.

Two questions people run together

Unit 17 is about disclosure: saying how a piece of work was made. This unit is about two different questions that sit beside it and are constantly confused with each other.

Rights. What may lawfully be done with this — copied, published, sold, built on. Attribution. Who should be credited, and what an honest account of the work says.

They come apart in both directions, which is the useful thing to know. Something can be entirely lawful to use and dishonest to present as your own. Something can be scrupulously credited and still an infringement. Neither question answers the other.

Add Unit 17's disclosure and there are three, and this module's position is that you owe all three separately.

What this module will not tell you

Copyright in generated output is genuinely unsettled, and it is unsettled differently in different countries.

That is not a hedge to avoid the question. It is the answer, and stating it plainly is more useful than a confident summary would be. A page that told you "generated output is not copyrightable" or "training on public material is fair" would be doing the thing this whole module trains you to catch: a confident claim in an area where the record does not support one, delivered in a register that does not distinguish the settled parts from the contested ones.

So this unit does two things instead. It separates what is broadly settled from what is not, so you know which of your questions has an answer. And it gives you a practice for attribution, which is not a legal question and which you can get right today.

What is broadly settled, and what is not

Reasonably settled.

• Copyright protects a particular expression, not an idea, a fact or a style.
• Material you feed into a system does not stop being covered by whatever covers it. A licence you are bound by still binds you.
• If generated output reproduces a substantial part of an existing protected work, the ordinary rules about that reproduction apply — the fact that a machine produced it does not create an exemption.
• Terms of service are a separate matter from copyright and bind you by agreement. A provider can grant or restrict commercial use of output regardless of what copyright says.

Not settled, and contested differently by jurisdiction.

• Whether generated output attracts copyright at all, and if so whose.
• Whether training on protected material without permission is lawful, and under what conditions.
• What obligations attach to output that resembles a particular existing work without copying it.

Notice which of these you actually need. Most practical questions — may I use this in my dissertation, may I publish this on a client's site — are answered by your institution's or client's rules and by the terms of service, both of which exist and are readable. The unsettled questions bite mainly when you need to assert a right over something, or when output resembles an identifiable work.

Attribution: the part you can get right

Nothing above prevents you from giving an honest account. Attribution is a practice, not a permission, and it has three parts.

Credit what a person made. If your work rests on someone's argument, data, figure or code, cite them. That obligation is entirely untouched by how you found the material. A generated summary that led you to a source does not make the source uncited — it makes it a source you found in an unusual way and have now read.

Never cite a source you have not opened. This is Unit 9, and it is the point where the two units meet: attribution rests on the citation being real, and a citation you have not opened is a claim you have not checked.

Say what you did, separately. How the work was made is Unit 17's disclosure. It answers a different question from "whose ideas are these", and running them together produces the two characteristic failures:

You owe both, and they belong in different places: citations where the claim is made, and a disclosure statement about the work as a whole.

Do not credit the system as an author. Not because of a rule about who counts as an author, but for a reason this module can defend: an author is someone answerable for the work. Naming a system as an author states that something can answer for the claims, and nothing in the system does. Record the tool the way you would record any other instrument — in the account of how the work was made.

A worked case

You are writing a literature review. You ask a system for an overview; it produces a summary with six citations. You read four of the six papers, use two of them substantially, and rewrite everything in your own words.

What you owe:

• Cite the two papers you used, at the claims they support. You read them; they are sources.
• Do not cite the four you did not read, and do not cite the two you read but did not use.
• Disclose that you used an AI system to produce an initial overview, that you retrieved and read the sources yourself, and that the text is your own.
• Say nothing about the system in the bibliography, because the bibliography answers "whose ideas", and the system did not have any.

The awkward case in that list is the one people ask about: what if the framing of your review came from the summary? Then say so in the disclosure. "The structure of section 2 follows an outline produced by an AI system, which I then revised" is a true sentence, it costs you nothing, and it is exactly the kind of thing a reader is entitled to know.

What this unit is not saying

It is not legal advice, and it is not your institution's rule. Both exist and govern; this gives you the categories to read them with.

It is not saying attribution is optional because rights are unsettled. The opposite: attribution is the part you can get right regardless of how the legal questions resolve, which is why it is where this unit spends its effort.

Summary

• Three separate obligations: rights (what may lawfully be done), attribution (whose ideas), and disclosure (how it was made). Each needs answering on its own.
• Copyright in generated output is genuinely unsettled and varies by jurisdiction. This module says so rather than summarising it confidently.
• What is settled: your inputs keep their licences, reproduction of a protected work is still reproduction, and terms of service bind you separately.
• Cite what a person made, never cite a source you have not opened, and keep credit and disclosure in their separate places.
• Do not name a system as an author — an author is someone answerable for the work.

Then answer cp14-three-obligations and cp14-settled-or-not at the foot of this page.