Copyright winter is coming (to Wikipedia?)

> 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.

> 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.

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."

It's a moot point, at least as far as AI is concerned, because nobody in China gives a mouse's behind about any of this.

Nor should they.

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.

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.

There are separate issues.

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.

I think we have no evidence someone bought the book and summarized. And what if an ai bought the book and summarized, is it fine now?

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?

To add to your points, Wikipedia also generally cites its sources, whereas LLMs do not. I believe this is a significant distinction.

This.

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.