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Comment by kordlessagain | Hacker News Reader

Copyrights are toast with AI. Consider a corporation with integrated legal defense teams powered by AI agents. They will chew up resources until people give up. Think patent trolls on acid.

We seriously need to rethink IP ownership. It's likely an AI trained on a certain amount of IP might be useful in and of itself, perhaps earning a living being good at that particular thing, and maybe that is what will let us ease restrictions of use in other places.

I'm just spitballing here. I could be completely wrong.

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They’d just be blackballed by the courts.

It’s already trivial for law firms to generate mountains of bullshit, and seeing the output of some firms first hand, I’d even call it the primary business model for a few of them.

But if they don’t stick within certain bounds of sanity, they get sanctioned by the court or can even be disbarred. Judges really don’t like references to non-existent precedence, or making arguments based on laws that don’t actually exist.

And opposing council, unlike random ignorant member of the public, has both the incentive and resources to identify bullshit like that.

Decreasing the cost to generate bullshit while removing any human checks on it may sound interesting, and might even work for a short period of time, but is going to meet the brick wall of reality pretty quickly. It’s already started to do so in many cases.

> Copyrights are toast with AI.

Copyrights are toast for regular people who are up against companies laundering their work through AIs.

Copyrights for the megacorps are a different story. If you've ever wanted to see a clash of titans, wait until Microsoft's lawyers meet Disney's.

Microsoft has the cash on hand to buy a controlling stake in Disney. Disney is about 5-6% of Microsoft considering market cap. We’d need an Apple v Microsoft battle that’s important enough for boards to demand full litigation.

> Microsoft has the cash on hand to buy a controlling stake in Disney

This is interesting, because it’s the M&A equivalent of people who think they can spend a bad candidate to elected office. I don’t know what the technical equivalent is, bigger-team fallacy?

TL; DR money can buy power, but with diminishing marginal returns. Were Microsoft to try and control Disney, it would likely break first.

You think Disney has the wherewithal to win a fight against Microsoft?

There won't be a clash of lawyers. They'll come up with a settlement and cut will be paid, or they'll just put up special blocker just for them, like they already do with Tim Burton for image generation. Regular people will be essentially defenseless of course.

Given what existing models can do right now, that moment might come sooner than you think.

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