Does an open license always allow AI training?

No. "Open" covers a wide range — some licenses permit any use, others forbid commercial use, require attribution, or impose share-alike terms. The license name alone determines what you may do, and many open datasets are non-commercial.

What is a share-alike clause and why does it matter?

Share-alike (as in CC BY-SA or copyleft licenses) requires that derivatives be released under the same license. Depending on jurisdiction and how the data is used, this can arguably extend to model outputs or weights, creating commercial risk you must assess.

Is non-commercial data ever safe for a commercial product?

Generally no for training a product model. NC licenses explicitly prohibit commercial use, and training a model you monetise is widely treated as commercial. Treat NC sources as blocking unless you have separate permission.

Does this checker give legal advice?

No. It surfaces the standard obligations of each license so you know where to look, but license interpretation for AI training is unsettled and jurisdiction-specific. Use it to triage, then consult a lawyer on flagged sources.

What about attribution requirements?

Attribution-required licenses (like CC BY) usually permit commercial training but oblige you to credit the source appropriately. That is rarely blocking but must not be ignored — keep a record of required attributions in your data documentation.

What is the AI Training Data License Checker?

List your AI training data sources and check them against a database of open data license terms — flagging sources that prohibit commercial use, require attribution, or have share-alike clauses that affect your model's commercial status. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

AI Training Data License Checker

Name: AI Training Data License Checker
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

AI training data license checker

“Open” does not mean “free to do anything with.” A dataset under CC BY-NC cannot lawfully train a model you sell; a CC BY-SA corpus may drag share-alike obligations into your outputs; a CC BY source just needs proper credit. This checker lets you list every training source, pick its license, and instantly see which sources are clear, which need care, and which block commercial use.

How it works

For each source you select a license from the common open data and content licenses — public domain dedications, permissive licenses, attribution-only, non-commercial, and share-alike variants. The tool combines that with your use case (commercial vs. research, redistributed vs. internal) and applies the standard obligations of each license. Non-commercial licenses flag as blocking for a monetised product; share-alike licenses flag for attention because their reach into model weights and outputs is contested; attribution licenses flag as clear-with-obligations. The result is a per-source rating plus a summary so you know your overall exposure at a glance.

Understanding the license categories

The most common licenses you will encounter and what they mean for AI training:

Public domain and CC0 — No copyright restrictions apply. These are the cleanest training sources for any commercial use. Examples include much of Wikipedia (though check per-article licences) and many government dataset releases.

CC BY (Attribution) — Permits commercial use and derivatives, including training, but requires you to credit the source appropriately. Not blocking, but you must maintain an attributions record. The obligation is often overlooked until launch.

CC BY-SA (Attribution + Share-Alike) — Requires that derivatives be released under the same licence. The key question for AI training is whether model weights or outputs count as derivatives. This is genuinely unsettled law in most jurisdictions. Treat as needing specialist advice before commercial use.

CC BY-NC (Attribution + Non-Commercial) — Explicitly prohibits commercial use. Training a product model on NC data is widely considered commercial use, even if the training process itself is not the product being sold. Flag as blocking for commercial models.

CC BY-NC-SA — The most restrictive common variant: non-commercial plus share-alike. Blocking for commercial products.

Tips for compliance

Treat NC as blocking for products. The “non-commercial” restriction applies to the purpose of use, not just whether the dataset itself is sold.
Document required attributions in your data records immediately — not at launch, now. Attribution obligations are easy to satisfy but impossible to reconstruct six months later when you can no longer trace which content came from which source.
Segregate licensed and restricted sources. Keep clear-licensed and NC-licensed data in separate datasets or data lineage records so you can remove a restricted source later without unpicking a mixed corpus.
This is triage, not legal advice. AI-training copyright and licensing law is actively evolving in most jurisdictions. Use this tool to identify which sources need specialist legal review, then get that review before shipping.