Not sure to what extent current language translation should be considered "AI", but one can get a sense of the coming issues by searching on "copyright of materials generated by ai".

In USA, but not necessarily in other countries, current bias is against giving copyright where AI was the primary form of generation — but not if it is only used as a "tool" as part of a larger human-creative process.

I think one might be concerned of a coming mess of translations and other "AI" generation based on "risen to public domain" works — and of human beings claiming copyright on parts of that mess.

Jim Adcock


From: Lee Passey via gutvol-d <gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 6, 2026 1:51 PM
To: James Simmons via gutvol-d <gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org>
Cc: Lee Passey <lee@novomail.net>
Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Translation
 
Yes, possibly.

In recent conversations with Gemini I asked a very similar question
regarding ownership and copyright of generated code (which is still
pretty sub-standard, BTW). Its response was that it was only a tool, and
that Google could claim no ownership of content produced with that tool,
any more than Royal could claim rights to a manuscript typed on one of
its typewriters.

IANLAL, but as I mentioned earlier, U.S. law has an almost inescapable
bias towards applying copyright to everything, despite the wishes of its
creator. I believe that if one were to use a tool such as AI to perform
a translation, the copyright holder would be the one using the tool, not
the one owning the tool.

I believe that if you were to use Google Translate to create a
translation, you would have a new copyrighted work, and you would be the
copyright holder. You could then dedicate the work to the pubic domain.
Is it out of copyright at that point? Probably not, but you might be
barred by collateral estoppel from enforcing it in the future, and if
you can't enforce the copyright it will be essentially copyright free.

Maybe I'll ask Gemini for its opinion on the matter, knowing that it
will probably invent an answer 😉.

BTW. my earlier verbiage for dedicating something to the public domain
was a direct quote from the Creative Commons web site, as close to a
canonical answer as you can get in these uncertain times.

On 1/6/2026 11:26 AM, James Simmons via gutvol-d wrote:
> This email exchange suggests something that has been on my mind
> lately. There are several books in the PG collection where the
> original is in the public domain but there are no translations in the
> public domain. One of these is Le chateâu des Carpathes by Jules
> Verne. I had been wanting to read it and while I studied French for
> several years in high school it didn't "take" so I could have saved my
> teachers a lot of trouble by skipping those classes.
>
> I had experimented with Google Translate and found out something
> interesting. If you tell Google Translate to translate the whole novel
> by linking to the web page it does a terrible job, but if you feed it
> a few pages at a time it does a pretty good job. It might not be a
> perfect translation, but it's readable.
>
> I was planning on doing that with a few PG titles for my personal use.
> I've already done one of these, and it was quite tedious work but I
> ended up with a nice text file wrapped to 80 columns (using the
> roff utility) which I marked up with RST and used the pandoc utility
> to make a good EPUB from. It came out pretty well. Pandoc could just
> as easily make a web page.
>
> If there was a way to put a Google Translate translation into the
> public domain I could donate these to PG.
>
> Would that be possible?
>
> James Simmons
>
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