https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2026/7969...
Unless considerable amount of lobbying reverses it in a new directive/regulation, that's the case on model outputs - Originally I learnt of it from briefing prepared by lawyers regarding EU laws on AI.
>> The emerging consensus across different jurisdictions is that purely AI‑generated content with minimal to no human creativity does not qualify for copyright protection. By contrast, works created with the use of AI‑applications may still enjoy copyright protection, where substantial human creativity has been exercised. Whether this threshold is met must be assessed on a case‑by‑case basis.
This makes sense, I believe it will eventually become the clear case in the US as well. However, it does leave open the case where a human carefully crafts a series of prompts to produce an creative work that qualifies for copyright.
Further, this does not appear to be binding on courts within the EU?
This doesn't seem like an actual court decision? Also it specifically says "if you use AI as a tool... then you probably own it" which, how else can you use AI? It doesn't do anything without a human wielding it, which has been the basis for all copyright claims so far.
It seems basically that LLM output is public domain, but a bit of human-generated content can be mixed in (whatever is enough to pass the "threshold of originality") and then the overall work can be copyrighted. Much like republishing a public domain book and adding an introduction or a few footnotes (but harder to extract the public domain component.)
But this all says nothing about the original question, about whether the weights can be copyrighted.