The push to expand repressive copyright laws because machines can learn from human produced text, code and art is going to hurt us all in the long run.
People usually say contemporary media sucks because of commercial pressures, but those commercial pressures and conditions wouldn't exist without the expansion of copyright.
Yes, giant studios are struggling to introduce new ideas like 1993's Jurassic Park. But that doesn't mean Shane Carruth (of Primer fame) can't. And he could have if Jurassic Park had been released any time between 1790 and 1900.
Our stilted media landscape is directly downstream of prior legislation expanding copyright.
Expanding copyright even more so that text / art that looks stylistically similar to another work is counted as infringing will, in the long run, give Disney's lawyers the power to punish folks for making content that even looks anything like Disney's many, many, many IP assets.
The "infringement" in this case was a diamond encrusted Steamboat Willie style Mickey pendant.
Questionable taste aside, I think it's good for society if people are able to make diamond encrusted miniature sculptures of characters from a 1928 movie in 2025. But Disney clearly disagrees.
Disney (and other giant corps) will use every tool in their belt to go after anyone who comes close to their money makers. There has been a long history of tension between artists and media corps. But that's water under the bridge now. AI art is apparently so bad that artists are willing to hand them the keys to their castle.
> Expanding copyright even more so that text / art that looks stylistically similar to another work is counted as infringing will, in the long run, give Disney's lawyers the power to punish folks for making content that even looks anything like Disney's many, many, many IP assets.
Legal doctrines like the "Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test", "total concept and feel," "comprehensive non-literal similarity," and "sequence, structure and organization" have systematically ascended the abstraction ladder. Copyright no longer protects expression but abstractions and styles.
The ugly part is the asymmetry at play - a copyright holder can pick and choose the level of abstraction on which to claim infringement, while a new author cannot possibly avoid all similarities on all levels of abstraction for all past works. The accuser can pick and choose how to frame infringement, the accused has to defend from all possible directions.
The idea that copyright holders are at the better end of a legal asymmetry here is kind of a baffling one.
I guess if the copyright holder's name is Disney that might be true. But the vast, vast majority of the time it is way too expensive to enforce any kind of copyright claim to be worth even bothering.
> Expanding copyright even more so that text / art that looks stylistically similar to another work is counted as infringing will, in the long run, give Disney's lawyers the power to punish folks for making content that even looks anything like Disney's many, many, many IP assets.
This made me wonder about an alternate future timeline where IP law is eventually so broad and media megacorporations are so large that almost any permutation of ideas, concepts or characters could be claimed by one of these companies as theirs, based on some combination of stylistic similarities and using a concept similar to what they have in their endless stash of IP. I wonder what a world like that would look like. Would all expression be suppressed and reduced to the non-law-abiding fringes and the few remaining exceptions? Would the media companies mercifully carve out a thin slice of non-offensive, corporate-friendly, narrow ideas that could be used by anyone, putting them in control of how we express ourselves? Or would IP violation become so common that paying an "IP tax" be completely streamlined and normalized?
The worst thing is that none of this seems like the insane ramblings that it would've probably been several decades ago. Considering the incentives of companies like Disney, IP lawyers and pro-copyright lawmakers, this could be a future we get to after a long while.
The scenario you've described is essentially neo feudalism. A small group who own everything and control all power and wealth and everyone else who struggles to survive on whatever the owners deem sufficient.
There is a weird interaction here and I am not a ip lawyer and do not know how to resolve it But I will try to explain.
There is steamboat willie(the work) it is in public domain and you are able to distribute it and modified copied of it freely, the weird interaction is where and how it conflicts with mickey mouse which is still a registered trademark of disney. And items bearing that mark are protected as such.
So I think legally to distribute a variant of steamboat willie you would also have to prove how your use of mickey mouse does not infringe on disney's trademark. You have to show how your product can not be confused with a disney product. Put a big "Not a disney product" on the back?
While Chinese models train on all Western cultural output, our own models are restricted. And in the corporate world the models of choice for finetuning are DeepSeek and Qwen, wonder why.
> AI art is apparently so bad that artists are willing to hand them the keys to their castle.
Because - believe or not - a lot of artists benefit from Disney and other giants. By directly getting hired by them, building social media followers with fanart of their IP, taking questionable commissions of their characters, etc.
Is this a fair and healthy relationship? Perhaps not. But it's indefinitely better than what "AI artists" brought to human artists.
Of course Disney is not artists' friend and we all know what will happen: artists will end up being squeezed from the both sides, AI and big IP holders (who deploy their own AIs while suing open weights) anyway.
Corporates can't have it both ways - the Hollywood corporates lobbied intensively to extend copyright for as long as 75+ years (if I recall right) because that's what would benefit them. Many have protested about this. Some tech corporates (namely search and AI companies) now feel encumbered by this, and even indulge in piracy to circumvent copyright (without any meaningful consequences), and we are now supposed to feel sorry for them? Are any of these Tech corporates also lobbying for changes to copyright laws? (I don't believe so, as many of them are now also trying to become media moghuls themselves!)
> The push to expand repressive copyright laws because machines can learn from human produced text, code and art is going to hurt us all in the long run.
Exactly. I always thought it was hilarious that, ever since LLMs and image generators like Stable Diffusion came online a few years ago, HN suddenly seemed to shift from the hacker ethos, of moving fast and breaking things, and using whatever you could for your goals, to one of being an intense copyright hawk, all because computers could now "learn."
> People usually say contemporary media sucks because of commercial pressures, but those commercial pressures and conditions wouldn't exist without the expansion of copyright.
I think this is a pretty bold assertion. Copyright protection exists because of what you call "commercial pressures", and what I would call "the desire of content producers to pay their bills". Sure, it leads to self-reinforcing pathologies that seek to expand the scope of the protections, but for every Disney, there are millions of small-scale creators who get to make a living because there are at some legal hinderances to third parties selling copies of their music, books, and so forth.
I don't think we can assume that if copyright did not exist, we'd live in an utopia where all the same content is still available and we get some additional liberties to write Mickey Mouse erotica. More likely, we'd see a significant drop in certain types of creative activity, because in the absence of royalties, you need a wealthy patron to pay your bills, and wealthy patrons are in short supply. I'd also wager that media empires would still be built, just structured around barriers less pleasant than copyright. A Disney-operated cinema with metal detectors and patdowns for all guests. Maybe a contract you need to sign to enter, too.
> there are millions of small-scale creators who get to make a living because there are at some legal hinderances to third parties selling copies of their music, books, and so forth.
They may be benefiting from copyright’s existence, but with rare exceptions they are not benefiting from its expansion, which is the topic in what you were responding to. And its expansion probably harms them.
Abolishing copyright altogether is almost never what is being proposed, though some will suggest tearing it all down to replace it with something much more restricted, often more like the Statute of Anne.
The implication here of course that if we allow AI to be taken down by copyright then it could also take down Wikipedia. I am not even sure this is close to being true despite the article trying to suggest otherwise.
Perhaps a section on what the differences are might be helpful. For example what role does style play in the summary. I dont think that the summary of wiki is in the style of George R Martin.
I'm confused. There's an entire paragraph in the article where the author compares the two summaries and finds that they differ only in their structuring. I can't find any part of the article saying that the LLM summary was written "in the style of George R.R. Martin", as far as I understand both summaries are conceptually very similar. That's the main problem. If the scope of substantial similarity to a novel is pushed down from hundreds of pages of writing to a summary that's a couple paragraphs long, then all these summaries are in potential danger. To my knowledge there's no criteria that lets you only find LLM summaries infringing without leaving an opening for the lawyers to expand the reach to target all summaries of copyrighted content.
Even if true wiki would escape via fair use and AI would not.
It is possible that the laws and judgements are inconsistent nonsense but assuming they are not the fact that wiki has been around for decades suggests at least one key difference.
Yes, I think the crux of the matter is what constitutes fair use and what doesn't. And I would say that a summary in an encyclopedia article about a copyrighted work is not only fair use, but also in the work's own interest, while being ingested and regurgitated by an LLM isn't, so... The article only mentions that twice, in passing.
The issue becomes there's little to no way to tell the difference between the two.
Additionally, if human summaries aren't copyright infringement, you can train LLMs on things such as the Wikipedia summaries. In this situation, they're still able to output "mechanical" summaries - are those legal?
> The issue becomes there's little to no way to tell the difference between the two.
If you and I write the exact same sentence, but we can prove that we did not know each other or have inspiration from each other, we both get unique copyright over the same sentence.
It has never been possible to tell the copyright status of a work without knowing who made it and what they knew when they made it.
Also, the human produced summary is likely to have been produced by people who have read purchased books (i.e. legally distributed) whereas the algorithmic production of a summary has probably been fed dubious copies of books.
Also there is fair use gray area. Unlike Wikipedia, ClosedAI is for profit to make money from this stuff and people using generated text do it for profit.
Are you religious? If not, you should assume that your cognition is a product of your body, a magnificent machine.
I don't think LLMs are sapient, but your argument implies that creativity is something unique to humans and therefore no machine can ever have it. If the human body IS a machine, this is a contradiction.
Now, there's a very reasonable argument to be made concerning the purpose of copyright law, but "machines can't be creative" isn't it.
Creativity is not unique to humans, but legal rights to protect creativity is unique to humans (or human-represented organizations). Humans are always special case in law.
Selling human livers and selling cow livers are never treated the same in terms of legality. Even the difference between your liver and that of a cow is much, much smaller than the difference between your brain and Stable Diffusion. I'm sure there isn't single biochemical reaction that is unique to humans.
Converting a raw 8k video down to 1080p is a full of creative solutions and its perfectly fine to see it as the machine doing some form of creativity when optimizing performance and file size. In similar way, compilers are marvelous and in many cases ingeniously when building and compiling binaries from source code.
It is however general agreed on those do not create independent original works. At the most generous interpretation they get defined as derivatives, and at the more common interpretation they are plain copies. The creativity is also usually not given to the machine, but those who built the machine. Even if the programmer is unable to predict all outcomes of creative written code, a unpredictable outcome is still attributed to the programmer.
It was ruled that our Copyright Law does require that a Human create the work, and that only a Human can hold copyright. The monkey was not given copyright over the image it took.
Monkeys obviously can be creative. However, our law has decided that human creativity is protected by copyright, and human creativity is special within the law. I don't see any contradictions or arguments about sapience that are relevant here.
The ruling never said summaries are infringing. It just said the authors’ claims about some AI outputs were "plausible" enough to get past a motion to dismiss, which is basically the lowest hurdle. The judge isn’t deciding what actually counts as infringement, just that the case can move forward. IMHO the title of the article is reading more into the opinion than what the judge actually decided.
The author already fully addressed this in the article. They just think that even the fact that this was allowed to move forward is a worrying sign:
> Judge Stein’s order doesn’t resolve the authors’ claims, not by a long shot. And he was careful to point out that he was only considering the plausibility of the infringement allegation and not any potential fair use defenses. Nonetheless, I think this is a troubling decision that sets the bar on substantial similarity far too low.
From what I understood, the case against OpenAI wasn't about the summarisation. It was the fact that the AI was trained on copyrighted work. In case of Wikipedia, the assumption is that someone purchased the book, read it, and then summarised it.
They’re sort of separate. In a sense you could say that the ChatGPT model is a lossily compressed version of its training corpus. We acknowledge that a jpeg of a copyrighted image is a violation. If the model can recite Harry Potter word for word, even imperfectly, this is evidence that the model itself is an encoding of the book (among other things).
You hear people saying that a trained model can’t be a violation because humans can recite poetry, etc, but a transformer model is not human, and very philosophically and economically importantly, human brains can’t be copied and scaled.
That doesn't really make sense . Just because you purchased a book, does not mean the copyright goes away (for new works based on the book. For the physical book you bought, the doctrinevof first sale gives you some rights but only in that specific physical copy ). If openAI pirated material, that would be a separate issue from if the output of the LLM is infringing.
Entertaining that the article about copyright-infringing similarity of AI-generated summaries is illustrated with a picture of an animated skeleton labelled "White Walker", which is neither what White Walkers are nor what they look like.
> Entertaining that the article about copyright-infringing similarity of AI-generated summaries is illustrated with a picture of an animated skeleton labelled "White Walker", which is neither what White Walkers are nor what they look like.
Also "reading Wikipedia" by staring at the back of a tablet.
There is a world of difference between a corporation ingesting original works for the purposes of automatically, at scale generating derivative works for profit and a community of unpaid human volunteers working for a non-profit maintaining a public benefit encyplopedia.
Saying that merely denying the motion to dismiss claims that ChatGPT outputs infringed the rights of authors such as George R.R. Martin and David Baldacci is a “fundamental assault” on the idea-expression distinction as applied to works of fiction, and especially that it puts Wikipedia in crosshairs is beyond a stretch.
A motion to dismiss amounts is saying “come on, that’s ridiculous”. Denying the motion says “no, it’s not ridiculous; we may still decide it’s wrong, but it’s not ridiculous”.
If you consider it outrageous, as OP does (and I’m inclined to agree), the fact that the judge isn’t willing to laugh it out of court is an assault on your interpretation of copyright law.
Exactly. To call it so ridiculous that it doesn’t even warrant court time is a massive stretch, considering strong public concern on that exact question, as well as the spirit and goals of IP law.
Like with personal data privacy, it is not likely to be of consequence to big tech with lobby power, but dismissing it outright would show shameless levels of corruption.
That image caption says "A white walker in a desolate field reading Wikipedia", but the (backwards for some reason) Wikipedia article says "White Waleers". Forgive me for thinking this person might not have the necessary braincells to commentate on legal issues.
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People usually say contemporary media sucks because of commercial pressures, but those commercial pressures and conditions wouldn't exist without the expansion of copyright.
Yes, giant studios are struggling to introduce new ideas like 1993's Jurassic Park. But that doesn't mean Shane Carruth (of Primer fame) can't. And he could have if Jurassic Park had been released any time between 1790 and 1900.
Our stilted media landscape is directly downstream of prior legislation expanding copyright.
Expanding copyright even more so that text / art that looks stylistically similar to another work is counted as infringing will, in the long run, give Disney's lawyers the power to punish folks for making content that even looks anything like Disney's many, many, many IP assets.
Even though Steamboat Willie has entered the public domain, Disney has been going after folks using the IP, https://mickeyblog.com/2025/07/17/disney-is-suing-a-hong-kon... / https://mickeyblog.com/2025/07/17/disney-is-suing-a-hong-kon...
The "infringement" in this case was a diamond encrusted Steamboat Willie style Mickey pendant.
Questionable taste aside, I think it's good for society if people are able to make diamond encrusted miniature sculptures of characters from a 1928 movie in 2025. But Disney clearly disagrees.
Disney (and other giant corps) will use every tool in their belt to go after anyone who comes close to their money makers. There has been a long history of tension between artists and media corps. But that's water under the bridge now. AI art is apparently so bad that artists are willing to hand them the keys to their castle.
Legal doctrines like the "Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test", "total concept and feel," "comprehensive non-literal similarity," and "sequence, structure and organization" have systematically ascended the abstraction ladder. Copyright no longer protects expression but abstractions and styles.
The ugly part is the asymmetry at play - a copyright holder can pick and choose the level of abstraction on which to claim infringement, while a new author cannot possibly avoid all similarities on all levels of abstraction for all past works. The accuser can pick and choose how to frame infringement, the accused has to defend from all possible directions.
I guess if the copyright holder's name is Disney that might be true. But the vast, vast majority of the time it is way too expensive to enforce any kind of copyright claim to be worth even bothering.
This made me wonder about an alternate future timeline where IP law is eventually so broad and media megacorporations are so large that almost any permutation of ideas, concepts or characters could be claimed by one of these companies as theirs, based on some combination of stylistic similarities and using a concept similar to what they have in their endless stash of IP. I wonder what a world like that would look like. Would all expression be suppressed and reduced to the non-law-abiding fringes and the few remaining exceptions? Would the media companies mercifully carve out a thin slice of non-offensive, corporate-friendly, narrow ideas that could be used by anyone, putting them in control of how we express ourselves? Or would IP violation become so common that paying an "IP tax" be completely streamlined and normalized?
The worst thing is that none of this seems like the insane ramblings that it would've probably been several decades ago. Considering the incentives of companies like Disney, IP lawyers and pro-copyright lawmakers, this could be a future we get to after a long while.
There is steamboat willie(the work) it is in public domain and you are able to distribute it and modified copied of it freely, the weird interaction is where and how it conflicts with mickey mouse which is still a registered trademark of disney. And items bearing that mark are protected as such.
So I think legally to distribute a variant of steamboat willie you would also have to prove how your use of mickey mouse does not infringe on disney's trademark. You have to show how your product can not be confused with a disney product. Put a big "Not a disney product" on the back?
Nor should they.
Because - believe or not - a lot of artists benefit from Disney and other giants. By directly getting hired by them, building social media followers with fanart of their IP, taking questionable commissions of their characters, etc.
Is this a fair and healthy relationship? Perhaps not. But it's indefinitely better than what "AI artists" brought to human artists.
Of course Disney is not artists' friend and we all know what will happen: artists will end up being squeezed from the both sides, AI and big IP holders (who deploy their own AIs while suing open weights) anyway.
Exactly. I always thought it was hilarious that, ever since LLMs and image generators like Stable Diffusion came online a few years ago, HN suddenly seemed to shift from the hacker ethos, of moving fast and breaking things, and using whatever you could for your goals, to one of being an intense copyright hawk, all because computers could now "learn."
I think this is a pretty bold assertion. Copyright protection exists because of what you call "commercial pressures", and what I would call "the desire of content producers to pay their bills". Sure, it leads to self-reinforcing pathologies that seek to expand the scope of the protections, but for every Disney, there are millions of small-scale creators who get to make a living because there are at some legal hinderances to third parties selling copies of their music, books, and so forth.
I don't think we can assume that if copyright did not exist, we'd live in an utopia where all the same content is still available and we get some additional liberties to write Mickey Mouse erotica. More likely, we'd see a significant drop in certain types of creative activity, because in the absence of royalties, you need a wealthy patron to pay your bills, and wealthy patrons are in short supply. I'd also wager that media empires would still be built, just structured around barriers less pleasant than copyright. A Disney-operated cinema with metal detectors and patdowns for all guests. Maybe a contract you need to sign to enter, too.
They may be benefiting from copyright’s existence, but with rare exceptions they are not benefiting from its expansion, which is the topic in what you were responding to. And its expansion probably harms them.
Abolishing copyright altogether is almost never what is being proposed, though some will suggest tearing it all down to replace it with something much more restricted, often more like the Statute of Anne.
If there's any good thing to come out of AI, it is this.
Perhaps a section on what the differences are might be helpful. For example what role does style play in the summary. I dont think that the summary of wiki is in the style of George R Martin.
OpenAI outputs are an algorithm compressing text.
A jpeg thumbnail of an image is smaller but copyright-wise identical.
An OpenAI summary is a mechanically generated smaller version, so new creative copyright does not have a chance to enter in
Additionally, if human summaries aren't copyright infringement, you can train LLMs on things such as the Wikipedia summaries. In this situation, they're still able to output "mechanical" summaries - are those legal?
If you and I write the exact same sentence, but we can prove that we did not know each other or have inspiration from each other, we both get unique copyright over the same sentence.
It has never been possible to tell the copyright status of a work without knowing who made it and what they knew when they made it.
Also there is fair use gray area. Unlike Wikipedia, ClosedAI is for profit to make money from this stuff and people using generated text do it for profit.
I don't think LLMs are sapient, but your argument implies that creativity is something unique to humans and therefore no machine can ever have it. If the human body IS a machine, this is a contradiction.
Now, there's a very reasonable argument to be made concerning the purpose of copyright law, but "machines can't be creative" isn't it.
Selling human livers and selling cow livers are never treated the same in terms of legality. Even the difference between your liver and that of a cow is much, much smaller than the difference between your brain and Stable Diffusion. I'm sure there isn't single biochemical reaction that is unique to humans.
It is however general agreed on those do not create independent original works. At the most generous interpretation they get defined as derivatives, and at the more common interpretation they are plain copies. The creativity is also usually not given to the machine, but those who built the machine. Even if the programmer is unable to predict all outcomes of creative written code, a unpredictable outcome is still attributed to the programmer.
Remember the monkey selfie thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
It was ruled that our Copyright Law does require that a Human create the work, and that only a Human can hold copyright. The monkey was not given copyright over the image it took.
Monkeys obviously can be creative. However, our law has decided that human creativity is protected by copyright, and human creativity is special within the law. I don't see any contradictions or arguments about sapience that are relevant here.
> Judge Stein’s order doesn’t resolve the authors’ claims, not by a long shot. And he was careful to point out that he was only considering the plausibility of the infringement allegation and not any potential fair use defenses. Nonetheless, I think this is a troubling decision that sets the bar on substantial similarity far too low.
One is a large volume of pirated content used to train models.
Another is models reproducing copyrighted materials when given prompts.
In other words there's the input issue and the output issue and those two issues are separate.
You hear people saying that a trained model can’t be a violation because humans can recite poetry, etc, but a transformer model is not human, and very philosophically and economically importantly, human brains can’t be copied and scaled.
Deleted Comment
https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/wh...
Also "reading Wikipedia" by staring at the back of a tablet.
Saying that merely denying the motion to dismiss claims that ChatGPT outputs infringed the rights of authors such as George R.R. Martin and David Baldacci is a “fundamental assault” on the idea-expression distinction as applied to works of fiction, and especially that it puts Wikipedia in crosshairs is beyond a stretch.
If you consider it outrageous, as OP does (and I’m inclined to agree), the fact that the judge isn’t willing to laugh it out of court is an assault on your interpretation of copyright law.
Like with personal data privacy, it is not likely to be of consequence to big tech with lobby power, but dismissing it outright would show shameless levels of corruption.