>> Every year, I ask students in my copyright class why the children’s versions of classic novels in Colting were found to be infringing but a Wikipedia summary of the plots of those same books probably wouldn’t be.
Not a lawyer, but the answer seems to obviously be that one is a commercial reproduction and the other is not. Seems like it would be a tougher questiom if the synopsis was in a set of Encyclopedia Britannica or something.
AI is clearly reproducing work for commercial purposes... ie reselling it in a new format. LLMs are compression engines. If I compress a movie into another format and sell DVDs of it, that's a pretty obvious violation of copyright law. If I publish every 24th frame of a movie in an illustrated book, that's a clear violation, even if I blur things or change the color scheme.
If I describe to someone, for free, what happened in a movie, I don't see how that's a violation. The premise here seems wrong.
Something else: Even a single condensation sold for profit only creates one new copyright itself. LLMs wash the material so that they can generate endless new copyrighted material that's derivative of the original. Doesn't that obliterate the idea of any copyright at all?
Good guess, but no. The most salient difference in that case is that an abridged children's version of a novel acts as a direct market substitute for the original, whereas a plot summary does not. (A secondary reason is that an abridged edition is likely to represent a much larger portion of the original work than would appear in a summary.)
Consider this - if I wanted to read A Game of Thrones, then I would read A Game of Thrones, not some bootleg LLM approximation. It is faster, more exact an cheaper to infringe by copying, a LLM is a terrible tool for infringement, it is slow, expensive and doesn't actually reproduce perfectly. The fact that some are using AI means they want something different, not the original.
Yes of course as a reader you would read the original. The major infringement isn't the LLM directly spitting out parts of the book to an end user (a reader). It occurs when the LLM injects parts of the book into a new text, without attribution, which some other writer will go on and sell thousands of copies of. The LLM acts as the washing machine.
Not a lawyer, but the answer seems to obviously be that one is a commercial reproduction and the other is not. Seems like it would be a tougher questiom if the synopsis was in a set of Encyclopedia Britannica or something.
AI is clearly reproducing work for commercial purposes... ie reselling it in a new format. LLMs are compression engines. If I compress a movie into another format and sell DVDs of it, that's a pretty obvious violation of copyright law. If I publish every 24th frame of a movie in an illustrated book, that's a clear violation, even if I blur things or change the color scheme.
If I describe to someone, for free, what happened in a movie, I don't see how that's a violation. The premise here seems wrong.
Something else: Even a single condensation sold for profit only creates one new copyright itself. LLMs wash the material so that they can generate endless new copyrighted material that's derivative of the original. Doesn't that obliterate the idea of any copyright at all?