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Comment by 93po | Hacker News Reader

Looking forward to the day AI is used to generate billions of books and then compare them to every new release by a human. Then the patent/copyright trolls come out and sue human authors for copyright infringement because their awful AI book that is 50% gibberish has all the same elements and character names as the human author's book

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Those billions of books probably violate the copyright of other books themselves.

I don't think this is the caveat you think it is.

That's not how copyright works. In your example, the human author did not copy anything, and are thus legally in the clear.

In practice it is my understanding that this is how copyright works in the US. There doesn't need to be any intentional infringement - just the fact that it infringes is enough. If someone came up with "Harry Potter" as a main character name on their own they still wouldn't be able to publish a novel with that title.

This is copyright, not patent or registered mark. Copyright, by definition, restricts redistribution and copying, not independent recreation.

How does one prove independent recreation? It seems virtually impossible.

Simple: You do not presume guilt, hence independent recreation is the default assumption and it is copying/redistribution which needs to be proven.

Copyright is a tort, the usual measure of proof is "balance of probabilities", you don't have to prove it, the plaintiff has to show that on balance the most likely truth is that the defendant copied.

Keeping workshop notes, early revisions; getting works notarised; defensive publication; et cetera -- these are all means people use to guard against false allegations of tortuous infringement.

So are you saying that J.K. Rowling could be sued by the copyright holders of the 1969 film "Carry On Camping"?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064133/trivia?item=tr2738534

FWIW there's no copyright in names.

Suing her under that premise would be almost certainly unsuccessful.

A billion is probably a very small number when compared to the cardinality of the set of all possible/reasonable books.

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