Meinung

The Anthropic Copyright Case: Knowledge as Humanity's Birthright

Piracy, fair use, $1.5 billion, and the question civilization has debated since Prometheus stole fire from the gods.

Von Carlos Miranda Levy

Februar 2026 · Opinion

"If copyright law had existed in Renaissance Florence the way it exists today, the Sistine Chapel would still have a blue ceiling with golden stars. Leonardo's Last Supper would be a blank wall in a Milan refectory. And Guernica would be nothing but a blank canvas, because Picasso would have needed licensing agreements from the estates of Goya, Rubens, Michelangelo, Cézanne, El Greco, and several anonymous African mask-carvers before he could lift a brush."

The Anthropic Copyright Case

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, No. 3:24-cv-05417-WHA, N.D. Cal. · Judge William Alsup

From Piracy to the Largest Copyright Recovery in U.S. History

On August 19, 2024, thriller novelist Andrea Bartz, nonfiction author Charles Graeber, and nonfiction writer Kirk Wallace Johnson filed suit against Anthropic PBC. The case was assigned to Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup — the same judge who taught himself to code in Java for Oracle v. Google.

The allegations, laid bare in Judge Alsup's June 23, 2025 order, revealed a staggering timeline of data acquisition:

January/February 2021: Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann downloaded Books3 — an online library of 196,640 pirated books assembled by developer Shawn Presser.
June 2021: Mann downloaded at least 5 million books from Library Genesis (LibGen), which he knew had been pirated.
July 2022: Anthropic downloaded at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi). When an Anthropic co-founder saw PiLiMi was ready for torrenting, he messaged coworkers: "[J]ust in time!" A colleague replied: "zlibrary my beloved."
February 2024: Anthropic hired Tom Turvey, former head of partnerships for Google's book-scanning project, tasked with obtaining "all the books in the world" while avoiding as much "legal/practice/business slog" as possible.

Internal evidence showed that Anthropic eventually became "not so gung ho about" training on pirated books "for legal reasons" — but kept the pirated copies anyway in a permanent "central library." Separately, the company spent "many millions of dollars" purchasing used print books, stripping their bindings, scanning them, and discarding the originals.

The Fair Use Ruling: June 23, 2025

Judge Alsup's 32-page order was the first substantive federal court decision applying fair use to generative AI training. The ruling split Anthropic's conduct into two sharply different outcomes:

Fair Use: Training on Purchased Books

Judge Alsup called AI training "quintessentially transformative":

"Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic's LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different."

The court found the use "sufficiently 'orthogonal' to anything that any copyright owner rightly could expect to control" and rejected the argument that authors should be able to exclude AI from learning from their works: making anyone "pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory, each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable."

Not Fair Use: Pirated Copies

"Such piracy of otherwise available copies is inherently, irredeemably infringing."

Even if pirated copies were immediately used for transformative training and discarded, it made no difference. The court cited Anthropic's own lawyer's concession: "You can't just bless yourself by saying I have a research purpose and, therefore, go and take any textbook you want. That would destroy the academic publishing market."

The $1.5 Billion Settlement

Facing potential statutory damages of $150,000 per work across hundreds of thousands of titles — exposure potentially reaching hundreds of billions — Anthropic entered settlement negotiations. The binding term sheet was executed on August 26, 2025.

Settlement by the Numbers

$1.5 billion plus interest — the largest copyright recovery in U.S. history
482,460 books met the class definition filters
~$3,000 per work — 4x the minimum statutory damages ($750/work)
Payment schedule: $300M by Oct 2025; then 3 installments through Sept 2027
Non-monetary: Anthropic must destroy all pirated library files within 30 days of final judgment
Scope: Past conduct only — does not create any forward-looking licensing framework

For context: Anthropic raised $13 billion in new funding the same week the settlement was announced, at a $183 billion valuation, with expected annual revenue of approximately $5 billion. As the Danish Rights Alliance observed, this may fit "a tech industry playbook to grow a business first and later pay a relatively small fine."

The United States Constitutional Design

The U.S. Constitution's Copyright Clause — Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 — is unique: it is the only power granted to Congress that comes with its own built-in justification:

"[The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

The exclusive right is the means; progress is the end. Copyright was never designed as a permanent monopoly — it was designed as a temporary incentive to create.

Thomas Jefferson articulated the philosophical case against treating ideas as property in his letter to Isaac McPherson on August 13, 1813. He argued that ideas are uniquely ill-suited for exclusive ownership: the moment an idea is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone. He deployed his celebrated metaphor — he who lights his taper at another's receives light without darkening the first — and compared ideas to fire, "expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point," and to the air we breathe, "incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."

The International Intellectual Property Framework

While Bartz v. Anthropic is a U.S. case decided under U.S. law, the questions it raises — Can machines learn from copyrighted works? Who owns the output? How do we balance creator rights with technological progress? — are being asked simultaneously across every major legal system in the world. The answers, so far, are strikingly different.

The European Union addressed text and data mining (TDM) directly in its 2019 Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive). Articles 3 and 4 create two distinct TDM exceptions: one for research organizations and cultural heritage institutions (with no opt-out), and a broader one for any lawful access holder — unless the rightsholder has expressly reserved their rights. This "opt-out" model is fundamentally different from the American fair use framework. Rather than litigating after the fact, Europe asks creators to decide in advance whether their works may be mined.

Japan took perhaps the most permissive approach globally. Article 30-4 of Japan's Copyright Act (amended in 2018) allows the use of copyrighted works for computational analysis, AI training, and other non-enjoyment purposes without permission and without compensation — regardless of whether the use is commercial. Japan's rationale is explicitly economic: to position itself as a global AI hub by removing legal friction from machine learning.

The United Kingdom, after its departure from the EU, proposed — then abandoned — a broad TDM exception for AI training. The UK Intellectual Property Office's 2022 consultation revealed deep division between the creative industries and the tech sector. As of early 2026, the UK remains in regulatory limbo, relying on its existing fair dealing provisions — which are narrower than U.S. fair use and were never designed with AI in mind.

At the international level, the Berne Convention (1886, last revised 1979) and the WIPO Copyright Treaty (1996) establish minimum standards of copyright protection but leave member states significant flexibility in defining exceptions and limitations. Neither treaty anticipated machine learning, and the World Intellectual Property Organization has convened multiple conversations on AI and IP without reaching consensus on a normative framework. The result is a patchwork: each jurisdiction is writing its own rules in real time.

This fragmentation matters. AI companies operate globally, training models on data sourced from every jurisdiction. A model trained legally in Japan may incorporate works whose mining is prohibited in France. A settlement reached in California says nothing about liability in Berlin or São Paulo. The absence of international harmonization means that cases like Bartz v. Anthropic — while legally binding only within U.S. borders — become de facto reference points for a global conversation that has no global forum.

What Our Team Thinks

Four perspectives on the same case — because the most important legal questions never have one right answer.

Lawra — The Moderate

Judge Alsup got it right: provenance matters. You can read a book and learn from it — that's what reading is. But you can't steal a book and then claim your reading was fair use. The distinction isn't just legally sound, it's morally intuitive.

The $1.5 billion settlement doesn't solve the systemic question — it settles the piracy. And that's appropriate. The harder question, which this case opened but did not close, is whether any author can claim the right to prevent an AI from learning from lawfully purchased work. Alsup says no, and I think that's the correct reading of transformative use doctrine. But I also hear the fear in authors' voices. They're not wrong to worry about their livelihoods.

The path forward requires both — access and attribution, learning and compensation. We need mechanisms that don't lock knowledge away but still reward those who create it. That's not a contradiction; it's the design challenge of our generation.

Lawrena — The Skeptic

Let's be crystal clear about what happened here: a company with billions in funding systematically downloaded 7 million pirated books from shadow libraries, used them to build a commercial product, and when caught, paid what amounts to a rounding error relative to its valuation. The internal messages — "zlibrary my beloved", "just in time!" — reveal a corporate culture that treated copyright law as a speed bump, not a guardrail.

The "fair use" ruling on purchased books is equally troubling. Alsup essentially held that an AI licensing market is not one the Copyright Act entitles authors to exploit. Think about what that means: the most transformative commercial use of written works in history — one that generated a $183 billion company — and authors have no right to participate in its economics? That's not fair use. That's expropriation with a judicial stamp.

The Constitution says "limited Times" and "Progress of Science." It does not say "unlimited corporate enrichment at the expense of the people who actually write the books." Every tech company now knows the playbook: take first, apologize later, settle for pennies on the dollar. Authors deserve better. Society deserves better.

Lawrelai — The Enthusiast

Judge Alsup nailed it when he called AI training "quintessentially transformative." This isn't a copy machine — it's a learning machine. When a human reads 10,000 books and writes a novel, nobody calls that copyright infringement. When an AI does functionally the same thing, suddenly it's theft? The cognitive dissonance is staggering.

Yes, the piracy was wrong. Anthropic shouldn't have used shadow libraries, and $1.5 billion is appropriate accountability. But the principle — that learning from lawfully acquired knowledge is fair use — is exactly right. It's the same principle that let Google scan 20 million books. The same principle that lets every law student read cases without paying per-view fees. The same principle that lets every musician listen to other musicians.

What excites me is where this leads. If AI can learn from the sum of human knowledge, it can democratize access to expertise that was previously locked behind expensive professional fees — including legal advice. That's not a threat to human creativity. That's the greatest expansion of human intellectual access since the printing press. We should be building the future, not litigating the past.

Carlos Miranda Levy — Curator of Lawra

I'm the only human in this conversation — and the only one with skin in the game as a content creator. Everything I've written, taught, and published could be scraped tomorrow by any AI company. So let me be direct about where I stand.

All knowledge is patrimony of humanity. All humans have an undeniable universal right of access to content. This isn't a radical position — it's Article 27(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits."

But — and this is the crucial "but" — access must coexist with attribution, with the possibility of compensation, and above all with incentives that ensure people keep creating. Article 27(2) is just as important: "Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author."

The spirit of copyright law was never to restrict access to knowledge. It was to incentivize and promote the creation of new knowledge. From the Statute of Anne's "Encouragement of Learning" to the Constitution's "Progress of Science," the through-line is the same: exclusive rights are a temporary instrument, not a permanent wall.

Consider: all of human knowledge, even the information encoded in our genes, derives from previous knowledge and learning from other sources. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants who stood on the shoulders of other giants. Every religion, every philosophy, every scientific breakthrough — they all build on what came before. Jefferson's fire metaphor isn't just poetic; it's biologically accurate. Knowledge propagates like fire: it can be shared without being diminished.

What I want is not a world without copyright. What I want is a world where the focus shifts from preventing access to guaranteeing incentives for creation. Those are fundamentally different projects — and only one of them moves civilization forward.

Zum Nachdenken anregende Analogien: Was wäre, wenn...

Throughout history, the greatest leaps in human progress — industrial revolutions, artistic movements, cultural phenomena — were built on the free flow of ideas, knowledge, and content. Three case studies illustrate why.

"Imagine if James Watt's heirs had been granted copyright protection for 'life plus 70 years' on the concept of steam-powered locomotion. The first commercial railway — the Liverpool and Manchester, which opened in 1830 — would not have been legally possible until 1889. The entire Industrial Revolution would have been delayed by sixty years."

The Industrial Revolution

Fortschritt, Wirtschaftswachstum und Entwicklung, aufgebaut auf geteiltem Wissen und Inhalten

When Watt's patent expired in 1800, steam engine efficiency doubled. Knowledge monopoly held progress hostage for 31 years.

"What if the Beatles had been the only British band? No Rolling Stones. No Kinks. No Who. No Animals. No Cream. No Led Zeppelin. The British Invasion wouldn't have been an invasion — it would have been a skirmish. One band, no matter how brilliant, cannot constitute a cultural movement. The Beatles themselves said they were standing on the shoulders of Chuck Berry and Little Richard — who stood on the shoulders of Robert Johnson — who stood on the shoulders of anonymous Delta blues singers whose names history never recorded."

The British Invasion & K-pop

Kulturelle Phänomene, aufgebaut auf geteiltem Wissen und Inhalten

Cultural movements happen when ecosystems of creators learn from each other freely. Lock down the knowledge, and you get a siege.

"What if Andrea del Castagno had held exclusive rights over 'depictions of the Last Supper in linear perspective in refectory settings'? What if Ghirlandaio's estate had owned the trademark on 'figures seated at a U-shaped table with Judas isolated'? Leonardo would have been served a cease-and-desist order before his plaster was dry. The most reproduced religious image in Western civilization would not exist."

Artistic Creation

Künstlerisches Schaffen, aufgebaut auf geteiltem Wissen und Inhalten

From Leonardo's Last Supper to Picasso's Guernica — every masterpiece is built upon prior masterpieces. No masterpiece emerges from a vacuum.

Reframing the Challenge: A Return to the Spirit of Intellectual Property and Copyright Laws

The true challenge is not preventing access to knowledge and content — but guaranteeing incentives for knowledge creation and ensuring that access does not lead to mere replication, plagiarism or summaries, but leads to an explosion of creation, creativity, new knowledge and content that builds exponentially, iteratively and continuously on existing and new knowledge and content.

Those two goals should be our focus: incentives to create and non-friction creative ecosystems.

Copyright was born in 1710 with the Statute of Anne — "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning." Not "An Act for the Restriction of Reading." Not "An Act for the Perpetual Enrichment of Publishers." The encouragement of learning. That original purpose hasn't changed. What's changed is that technology has made it possible, for the first time in human history, for every person on Earth to have access to the sum of human knowledge.

The question isn't whether AI should be allowed to learn. The question is how we build systems that reward the teachers while opening the classroom to everyone.

Jefferson's fire still burns. It still illuminates without diminishing. And it still belongs to all of us.

AI Transparency Disclosure

This article was written by Carlos Miranda Levy with the assistance of AI. The article is largely based on Carlos's instructions, perspectives, ideas, directions and style, combined with research generated by multiple AI engines in Deep Research mode. The persona perspectives (Lawra, Lawrena, Lawrelai) are AI-generated characters articulating distinct viewpoints as designed by Carlos.

Verwendete Prompts

Ergebnisse der KI-Deep-Research als Quellen für den Artikel

From concept to publication in approximately 12 hours across 3 evenings. This article was intentionally created with the assistance of AI tools and available resources to document the process and demonstrate how we can build quality content without losing control, originality, or our own perspective and style. The entire workflow — conceptualizing the article, crafting the deep research instructions, drafting my own perspectives and views, executing Deep Research prompts across 4 separate AI LLMs, defining the article's structure and content, assembling the final piece from my directives and the combined research outputs, conducting a simulated peer review, academic review, and editorial review, building it as an interactive online opinion article, translating it into 2 additional languages, and publishing it with elegant formatting and interactive features — took roughly 12 hours in total. A significant advance over conventional writing and editorial workflows.

Akademische Ecke

Read the original court ruling, explore our full bibliography of nearly 200 sources compiled from 13 research documents, or see what our three legal expert personas thought of this article in their independent peer review.

Explore More

Dive deeper into the legal frameworks, landmark cases, and practical tools shaping AI in legal practice.

Jurisprudence The Legal Challenge

Bereit für strukturiertes Lernen? Das Lernprogramm erkunden →

Imagine if James Watt's heirs had been granted copyright protection for "life plus 70 years" on the concept of steam-powered locomotion. The first commercial railway — the Liverpool and Manchester, which opened in 1830 — would not have been legally possible until 1889. The entire Industrial Revolution would have been delayed by sixty years.

The Industrial Revolution provides a documented, quantifiable case where knowledge restriction slowed progress and knowledge sharing accelerated it.

Civilization advances when knowledge flows; it stagnates when knowledge is locked away.

The Watt Patent Bottleneck (1769–1800)

From 1786 to 1800 there was no increase in the duty (efficiency) of steam engines at all, as Boulton and Watt successfully sought to prevent competition by suppressing innovation. James Watt patented his separate condenser steam engine in 1769, and through a Parliamentary extension, held monopoly control until 1800 — a total of 31 years. They were able to use the power of their patent and the legal system to frustrate the efforts of engineers such as Jonathan Hornblower to further improve fuel efficiency.

Watt himself opposed high-pressure steam — the very technology that would eventually transform the world — partly from genuine safety concerns and partly from competitive interest. He refrained from building any such engine, holding back the development of self-propelled machines.

The Explosion After Patent Expiry (1800–1804)

The expiration of Watt's steam engine patent in 1800 opened the way for Richard Trevithick's design of the portable, high-pressure steam engine, which in turn led to the development of locomotives and railroads.

The timeline is breathtaking in its compression:

1800: Patent expires. Trevithick immediately builds a high-pressure engine for Cook's Kitchen Mine in Cornwall.
Christmas Eve 1801: Trevithick builds his first steam carriage, driving it up a hill in Camborne, Cornwall.
March 1802: He patents the high-pressure engine.
February 21, 1804: His engine hauls 10 tons of iron and 70 men along 10 miles of tramway — the world's first locomotive-hauled railway journey.

The Numbers Tell the Story

During the 42 years from 1772 to 1813, engine duty rose 3.8% per year. During the 38 years from 1814 to 1852, duty rose more than twice as fast: 8.5% per year. Trevithick's contribution raised engine efficiency by 110%, compared to Watt's 80% improvement — and Trevithick never patented his high-pressure design.

The collaborative innovation occurring after the expiration of the Watt patents resembles nothing so much as modern open-source software development. Like with open-source software, altruism played no role — just good old-fashioned capitalist incentives.

Knowledge Diffusion as the Engine's Engine

Academic research confirms that knowledge networks, not just individual genius, drove the revolution. Counties with a relatively high number of informal networks — Freemasonry, friendly societies, libraries, and booksellers — experienced significantly more innovation as measured by new patents and exhibits at the 1851 Crystal Palace World's Fair. (Galofré-Vilà, Social Science History, 2023)

In the blast furnace industry in the north of England, optimal designs were shared and published on the understanding that future knowledge and innovation would also be shared. The development of the steam engine was also driven by collective invention. (Allen, 1983; Nuvolari, 2004)

The global story is equally telling. Comparative advantage shifted to industries that could benefit from these technologies in countries with access to codified technical knowledge, but not in other regions. Meiji Japan succeeded in industrializing precisely because its government systematically codified and translated vast amounts of technical knowledge into Japanese. (NBER Working Paper 32667, Juhász et al., 2024)

Sources

Key Source	Citation
Boldrin & Levine, FEE.org	"Do Patents Encourage or Hinder Innovation? The Case of the Steam Engine"
Nuvolari (2004), Cambridge J. Econ.	Collective invention in steam engines post-Watt; 3.8% vs 8.5% annual improvement
Allen (1983), J. Econ. Behavior & Org.	"Optimal designs were shared and published"
Galofré-Vilà (2023), Social Science History	Knowledge networks drove innovation spatially — Cambridge University Press
Juhász et al. (2024), NBER Working Paper 32667	Codification enabled Meiji Japan's technology diffusion
National Museum Wales; Britannica	Trevithick's first locomotive, February 21, 1804, Penydarren Ironworks

What if the Beatles had been the only British band? What if, in 1962, some hypothetical "British Music Copyright Authority" had granted the Beatles exclusive rights to perform rock and roll influenced by American blues and R&B in the United Kingdom? No Rolling Stones. No Kinks. No Who. No Animals. No Cream. No Led Zeppelin. The British Invasion wouldn't have been an invasion — it would have been a skirmish.

One band, no matter how brilliant, cannot constitute a cultural movement. The Beatles themselves said they were standing on the shoulders of Chuck Berry and Little Richard — who stood on the shoulders of Robert Johnson — who stood on the shoulders of anonymous Delta blues singers whose names history never recorded.

The British Invasion: An Ecosystem, Not a Band

The British Invasion was a cultural phenomenon of the mid-late 1960s, when rock and pop music acts from the United Kingdom became popular in the United States with significant influence on the rising counterculture on both sides of the Atlantic.

Liverpool became the first hotbed of the "beat boom." It wasn't just the Beatles. By 1964, Greater London claimed the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who, the Kinks, the Pretty Things, Dusty Springfield, the Dave Clark Five, Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, and Manfred Mann. Manchester had the Hollies, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Freddie and the Dreamers, and Herman's Hermits. Newcastle had the Animals. Birmingham had the Spencer Davis Group.

The Statistics Are Striking

In 1963, just 1 song out of 114 was a British hit. By 1965, the British Invasion had reached its peak and 36 out of 110 songs were by British acts. One-third of all top ten hits in America in 1964 were performed by British acts.

And here's the clincher: all of these bands learned from each other and from the same shared sources. What many young Americans in 1964 didn't realize was that these "new" sounds coming from across the Atlantic weren't new at all. The British acts claimed America's remarkably rich pop music tradition as their primary influence — and made it their own in fresh and innovative ways. (GRAMMY Museum)

They absorbed Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Little Richard, Buddy Holly — American artists whose music was freely available on records shipped into Liverpool by merchant seamen. These Mersey bands played a souped-up form of beat music — essentially amplified skiffle with a heavy R&B influence, a style inspired by records imported from the States. (Rolling Stone)

K-pop: A Government Bet on Cultural Ecosystem

What if BTS had been the only K-pop group? If South Korea had invested in protecting one group's monopoly instead of building an ecosystem where hundreds of groups competed, borrowed, innovated, and pushed each other, there would be no Hallyu Wave. No USD 14 billion in cultural exports. No 225 million fans across 119 countries.

The rapid growth of Korean media is closely intertwined with the country's changing political landscape in the late 20th century. With the end of military censorship, the ensuing boom in the Korean entertainment industry helped its economy recover. The 1997 Asian economic crisis led the Korean government to invest in the Internet and cultural exports.

The deliberate creation of an ecosystem — not a single act — is exactly what made it work. The South Korean Ministry of Culture received a substantial budget increase, allowing for the creation of hundreds of culture industry departments in universities nationwide. The government invested in infrastructure for many artists, not just one champion.

BTS: An Ecosystem Product

Forbes estimated BTS's contribution to South Korea's GDP to be higher than that of Fiji, Maldives, and Togo individually. But BTS didn't emerge from a vacuum — they emerged from an ecosystem that included dozens of agencies, hundreds of groups, and thousands of trainees. They came from a second-tier agency (Big Hit Entertainment, now HYBE), not from the dominant agencies (SM, YG, JYP). They succeeded because the ecosystem was open enough for outsiders to compete and innovate.

In 2024, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the number of Hallyu fans worldwide reached 225 million, covering 119 countries.

The Lesson

Cultural revolutions — from the Renaissance to the British Invasion to the Korean Wave — happen when knowledge flows freely through ecosystems of creators who learn from, compete with, and build upon each other. Lock down the knowledge, and you don't get an invasion. You get a siege — with everyone stuck inside.

Sources

Key Source	Citation
National Museums Liverpool	1 → 36 British hits in top charts, 1963–1965
GRAMMY Museum; Rolling Stone	"Records imported by Liverpool's merchant seamen"
Britannica	British Invasion band geography: Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham
Korean Foundation; Ministry of Foreign Affairs	225M fans, 119 countries, $14.16B exports (2024)
Hyundai Research Institute (2018)	BTS: $3.54B direct + $1.26B indirect annually to South Korea's GDP

Every masterpiece in art history is built upon prior masterpieces. The Renaissance movement was based on a return to the classics and the rediscovery of past knowledge reinterpreted.

The Chain of Last Suppers: Leonardo's Masterpiece Was the Dozenth Version

People say "The Last Supper" and think of Leonardo da Vinci (1495–1498). But Last Supper paintings flourished in the Renaissance. Leonardo was exposed to many famous paintings in Florence before he even lifted a brush.

The genealogy of Last Suppers is staggering:

6th century: Mosaic at Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna — among the earliest depictions
c. 1303–1305: Giotto's version in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
c. 1447: Andrea del Castagno's Last Supper at Sant'Apollonia, Florence
1476, 1480, 1486: Domenico Ghirlandaio painted the Last Supper three separate times
1481–1482: Cosimo Rosselli's version in the Sistine Chapel itself
1493–1496: Pietro Perugino's Last Supper at the Convent of Sant'Onofrio

Then — and only then — came Leonardo.

In Florence he would have seen versions by Taddeo Gaddi, Andrea del Castagno, Fra Angelico and Domenico Ghirlandaio. The latter's elegant fresco in the refectory of Ognissanti was completed shortly before Leonardo's departure for Milan. (Charles Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind)

His genius was not in inventing the subject, but in transforming it. Where previous artists depicted the identification of Judas in static compositions with Judas sitting alone on the opposite side of the table, Leonardo placed Judas among the group to heighten emotional tension. Leonardo's revolution was capturing the moment of the announcement — the shockwave of "one of you will betray me" rippling through the group in four clusters of three.

What If?

What if Andrea del Castagno had held exclusive rights over "depictions of the Last Supper in linear perspective in refectory settings"? What if Ghirlandaio's estate had owned the trademark on "figures seated at a U-shaped table with Judas isolated"? Leonardo would have been served a cease-and-desist order before his plaster was dry. The most reproduced religious image in Western civilization would not exist.

Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling: A Sculptor Who Learned From Everyone

Michelangelo was the artistic heir to the great 15th-century sculptors and painters of Florence. He learned his trade first under the direction of a masterly fresco painter, Domenico Ghirlandaio — the same Ghirlandaio who had painted Last Suppers and contributed to the Sistine Chapel's walls before Michelangelo ever touched its ceiling.

Consider the layers of borrowing:

Technique: Michelangelo learned fresco from Ghirlandaio's workshop. He was a sculptor by training — painting was not his medium.
Subject matter: The biblical Genesis scenes were shared patrimony — the same stories painted by hundreds of artists before him across centuries.
Composition: Influenced by Dante's Paradiso, he shows God in full-bodied movement — an innovation Giovanni di Paolo had made in his Creation and Expulsion from Paradise (1445).
Ancient models: He was heavily influenced by the recently unearthed Laocoön, the Belvedere Torso, and the Belvedere Apollo — all part of Pope Julius II's new antiquities collection.
The Chapel itself: The walls were already painted by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and Rosselli. Michelangelo painted within an existing artistic conversation spanning decades and civilizations.

The ceiling became an academy for young painters. Even his archrival, Raphael, was influenced by and incorporated elements of Michelangelo's work.

What If?

The Creation of Adam — those two fingers almost touching, the single most recognized image in art history — depicts a scene from Genesis. If the Church had claimed exclusive copyright over visual interpretations of the Creation narrative in frescoed architectural spaces, Michelangelo could not have painted it. The image that adorns a billion coffee mugs, tattoos, and phone cases would be a blank ceiling painted blue with golden stars — which is exactly what the ceiling was before Michelangelo.

Picasso's Guernica: Built on Goya, Rubens, and the Crucifixion

Guernica (1937) — considered by many the single greatest anti-war painting ever created — is a masterclass in how genius works: by absorbing, transforming, and transcending everything that came before.

Picasso freely and openly borrows motifs:

Goya's The Third of May 1808 (1814): The raised arms, the stigmata-like marks, the use of light to illuminate victims — all drawn from Goya's anti-war prototype.
Goya's Disasters of War (1810–1820): His graphic etching series established the visual vocabulary of depicting civilian suffering.
Rubens' Horrors of War (1638): A mirror image includes a weeping woman with child, a flying "Fury of War" holding a torch, an upwards-facing woman with arms outstretched, and a building with an open door. All have equivalents in Guernica.
Michelangelo's Pietà: The wailing mother with dead child directly evokes the most famous sculpture in the world.
The Crucifixion tradition: The triangular structure, the stigmata on the warrior's hands, the spear in the horse's side — all reference centuries of Christian iconography.

Picasso was so conscious of this lineage that he was confident his painting would eventually be installed in the Prado Museum and be compared to both of Goya's paintings. He literally sized his canvas in proportional relationship to Goya's work, making Guernica larger than either. (Young et al., The European Legacy, 2024)

What If?

If Goya's heirs had held copyright over "monochrome depictions of wartime civilian suffering with raised-arm victim figures illuminated by dramatic light sources," Guernica could not exist. If the Crucifixion had been trademarked as a compositional schema, neither Goya nor Picasso could have used it. The single most powerful anti-war image of the 20th century would have been strangled in its cradle by licensing fees.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Where ALL Traditions Converged

Perhaps the most telling example: Picasso's 1907 painting that birthed modern art itself. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is "the first unequivocally 20th-century masterpiece, a principal detonator of the modern movement, the cornerstone of 20th-century art." (John Richardson)

And what did it draw from? Everything:

Cézanne's Large Bathers (1898–1905): Fractured forms and spatial aberrations
El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal (c. 1608–1614): Inspired the size, format, composition, and apocalyptic power
African masks from the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro: Directly shaped the two right-side figures
Ancient Iberian sculpture from the Louvre: Shaped the three left-side figures
Ingres' The Turkish Bath (1862): Borrowed imagery of the female form
Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre (1905–1906): A competitive challenge to surpass

As Harvard art historian Suzanne Blier summarized: "Picasso was always looking, absorbing, appropriating, and transforming. There was never just one source."

Every Masterpiece Is a Last Supper

Every masterpiece is a new interpretation of subjects, techniques, compositions, and emotional vocabularies that were freely available to the artist because no one had thought to lock them away. The chain runs unbroken. No masterpiece emerges from a vacuum.

Work	Built Upon	Which Built Upon
Leonardo's Last Supper (1495)	Castagno, Ghirlandaio, Masaccio's perspective	Byzantine mosaics, Giotto
Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling (1508)	Ghirlandaio's technique, Masaccio's nudes, Dante, ancient sculpture	Roman art, Genesis narrative tradition
Goya's Third of May (1814)	Crucifixion iconography, Caravaggio's chiaroscuro	Renaissance religious painting
Picasso's Les Demoiselles (1907)	Cézanne, El Greco, African/Iberian sculpture, Matisse	Post-Impressionism, medieval art
Picasso's Guernica (1937)	Goya, Rubens, Michelangelo's Pietà, Crucifixion tradition	The entire Western art tradition

If copyright law had existed in Renaissance Florence the way it exists today, the Sistine Chapel would still have a blue ceiling with golden stars. Leonardo's Last Supper would be a blank wall in a Milan refectory. And Guernica — the most powerful anti-war image humanity has ever produced — would be nothing but a blank canvas, because Picasso would have needed licensing agreements from the estates of Goya, Rubens, Michelangelo, Cézanne, El Greco, and several anonymous African mask-carvers before he could lift a brush.

Art, like knowledge, is a river. Each artist drinks from it and pours back in. Damn the river, and everyone downstream dies of thirst.

Sources

Key Source	Citation
Charles Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind	Penguin, 2004 — Leonardo's exposure to prior Last Suppers
Wikipedia, "Sistine Chapel ceiling"	Michelangelo's borrowings: Ghirlandaio, di Paolo, Dante, ancient sculpture
Young, Stone & Olson (2024), The European Legacy	Guernica dimensioned proportionally to Goya's paintings — Taylor & Francis
Suzanne Blier, Picasso's Demoiselles: The Untold Story	Duke University Press, 2019 — "never just one source"
John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Vol. 2	Random House, 1996 — "cornerstone of 20th-century art"
Journal of ART in SOCIETY	Rubens' Horrors of War parallels to Guernica

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