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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

> at this point even Disney is accusing AI of violating their copyrights

"even" is odd there, of course Disney is accusing them of violating copyright, that's what Disney does.

> AI is getting better at data laundering and hiding evidence of infringement, but ultimately it's collecting and regurgitating copyrighted content.

That's not the standard for copyright infringement; AI is a transformative use.

Similarly, if you read a book and learn English or facts about the world by doing that, the author of the book doesn't own what you just learned.

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Facts aren't copyrightable. Expression is. LLMs reproduce expression from the works they were trained on. The way they are being trained involves making an unlicensed reproduction of works. Both of those are pretty straightforwardly infringement of an exclusive right.

Establishing an affirmative defense that it's transformative fair use would hopefully be an uphill battle, given that it's commercial, using the whole work, and has a detrimental effect on the market for the work.

> AI is a transformative use.

Reproducing a movie still well enough that I honestly wouldn't know which one is the original is transformative?

The still is not transformative but the model reproducing it is obviously transformative. Other general purpose tools can be used to infringe and yet are non-infringing as well.

If I watch a movie, then draw a near perfect likeness of the main character from my very good memory, put it on a tshirt and sell the t-shirt. That is grounds for violation of copyright if the source isn't yet in the public domain (not guaranteed but open to a lawsuit).

If I download all content from a website that has a use policy stating that all content is owned by that website and can't be resold. Then allow my users to query this downloaded data and receive a detailed summary of all related content, and sell that product. Perhaps this is a violation of the use policy.

All of this hasn't been properly tested in the courts yet.. large payments have already been made to Reddit to avoid this, likely because Reddit has the means to fight this in court.. my little blog though, fair game because I can't afford to engage.

For sure, it's rich people playing rules for thee not for me. What's interesting is we'll discover on which side of the can-afford-to-enforce-its-copyright boundary the likes of NYTimes fall.

That’s not “data laundering and hiding evidence of infringement” though.

You’re talking about overt infringement, the GP was talking about covert infringement. It’s difficult to see how something could be covert yet not transformative.

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