Copyright winter is coming (to Wikipedia?)
authorsalliance.substack.com
authorsalliance.substack.com
People usually say contemporary media sucks because of commercial pressures, but those commercial pressures and conditions wouldn't exist without the expansion of copyright.
Yes, giant studios are struggling to introduce new ideas like 1993's Jurassic Park. But that doesn't mean Shane Carruth (of Primer fame) can't. And he could have if Jurassic Park had been released any time between 1790 and 1900.
Our stilted media landscape is directly downstream of prior legislation expanding copyright.
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.
Even though Steamboat Willie has entered the public domain, Disney has been going after folks using the IP, https://mickeyblog.com/2025/07/17/disney-is-suing-a-hong-kon... / https://mickeyblog.com/2025/07/17/disney-is-suing-a-hong-kon...
The "infringement" in this case was a diamond encrusted Steamboat Willie style Mickey pendant.
Questionable taste aside, I think it's good for society if people are able to make diamond encrusted miniature sculptures of characters from a 1928 movie in 2025. But Disney clearly disagrees.
Disney (and other giant corps) will use every tool in their belt to go after anyone who comes close to their money makers. There has been a long history of tension between artists and media corps. But that's water under the bridge now. AI art is apparently so bad that artists are willing to hand them the keys to their castle.
Nor should they.
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."
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.
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.
I guess if the copyright holder's name is Disney that might be true. But the vast, vast majority of the time it is way too expensive to enforce any kind of copyright claim to be worth even bothering.
I think this is a pretty bold assertion. Copyright protection exists because of what you call "commercial pressures", and what I would call "the desire of content producers to pay their bills". Sure, it leads to self-reinforcing pathologies that seek to expand the scope of the protections, but for every Disney, there are millions of small-scale creators who get to make a living because there are at some legal hinderances to third parties selling copies of their music, books, and so forth.
I don't think we can assume that if copyright did not exist, we'd live in an utopia where all the same content is still available and we get some additional liberties to write Mickey Mouse erotica. More likely, we'd see a significant drop in certain types of creative activity, because in the absence of royalties, you need a wealthy patron to pay your bills, and wealthy patrons are in short supply. I'd also wager that media empires would still be built, just structured around barriers less pleasant than copyright. A Disney-operated cinema with metal detectors and patdowns for all guests. Maybe a contract you need to sign to enter, too.
They may be benefiting from copyright’s existence, but with rare exceptions they are not benefiting from its expansion, which is the topic in what you were responding to. And its expansion probably harms them.
Abolishing copyright altogether is almost never what is being proposed, though some will suggest tearing it all down to replace it with something much more restricted, often more like the Statute of Anne.
Because - believe or not - a lot of artists benefit from Disney and other giants. By directly getting hired by them, building social media followers with fanart of their IP, taking questionable commissions of their characters, etc.
Is this a fair and healthy relationship? Perhaps not. But it's indefinitely better than what "AI artists" brought to human artists.
Of course Disney is not artists' friend and we all know what will happen: artists will end up being squeezed from the both sides, AI and big IP holders (who deploy their own AIs while suing open weights) anyway.
There is steamboat willie(the work) it is in public domain and you are able to distribute it and modified copied of it freely, the weird interaction is where and how it conflicts with mickey mouse which is still a registered trademark of disney. And items bearing that mark are protected as such.
So I think legally to distribute a variant of steamboat willie you would also have to prove how your use of mickey mouse does not infringe on disney's trademark. You have to show how your product can not be confused with a disney product. Put a big "Not a disney product" on the back?
If there's any good thing to come out of AI, it is this.
Perhaps a section on what the differences are might be helpful. For example what role does style play in the summary. I dont think that the summary of wiki is in the style of George R Martin.
The issue here is, what are creators allowed to own and control. It’s about the fundamental question of what copyright gives the creators control over.
Does creating a picture mean you own the right to its description? And you have the right to prevent anyone else from describing your picture?
In general i think fair use serves as a good balance for these types of questions.
Go to imdb and see some of plot summaries there. Is that what you call "novelization"? Are you going to sue that site?
No, because that's not what the definition of novelization is. By novelization i mean when someone makes a novel version of a movie.
The point im trying to make here is we regularly expect translations from one medium to another to be copyrighted, so why is this different?
> Are you going to sue that site?
No, because i believe it to be a pretty text book example of fair use.
Fair use in usa is based on 4 factors - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors
I think LLM summarizing a work would largely meet the traditional test.
Im also not sure why llm summarizing the work wouldnt be in the interest of the work. It seems like it would to me to the same extent a wikipedia summary would be.
OpenAI outputs are an algorithm compressing text.
A jpeg thumbnail of an image is smaller but copyright-wise identical.
An OpenAI summary is a mechanically generated smaller version, so new creative copyright does not have a chance to enter in
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?
If you and I write the exact same sentence, but we can prove that we did not know each other or have inspiration from each other, we both get unique copyright over the same sentence.
It has never been possible to tell the copyright status of a work without knowing who made it and what they knew when they made it.
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.
I don't think LLMs are sapient, but your argument implies that creativity is something unique to humans and therefore no machine can ever have it. If the human body IS a machine, this is a contradiction.
Now, there's a very reasonable argument to be made concerning the purpose of copyright law, but "machines can't be creative" isn't it.
Remember the monkey selfie thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
It was ruled that our Copyright Law does require that a Human create the work, and that only a Human can hold copyright. The monkey was not given copyright over the image it took.
Monkeys obviously can be creative. However, our law has decided that human creativity is protected by copyright, and human creativity is special within the law. I don't see any contradictions or arguments about sapience that are relevant here.
Selling human livers and selling cow livers are never treated the same in terms of legality. Even the difference between your liver and that of a cow is much, much smaller than the difference between your brain and Stable Diffusion. I'm sure there isn't single biochemical reaction that is unique to humans.
It is however general agreed on those do not create independent original works. At the most generous interpretation they get defined as derivatives, and at the more common interpretation they are plain copies. The creativity is also usually not given to the machine, but those who built the machine. Even if the programmer is unable to predict all outcomes of creative written code, a unpredictable outcome is still attributed to the programmer.
> 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.
https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/wh...
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.
You hear people saying that a trained model can’t be a violation because humans can recite poetry, etc, but a transformer model is not human, and very philosophically and economically importantly, human brains can’t be copied and scaled.
Also worth noting that, if a person performs a copyrighted work from memory - like a poem, a play, or a piece of music - that can still be a copyright violation. "I didn't copy anything, I just memorized it" isn't the get-out-of-jail-free card some people think it is.
The means of reproduction are immaterial; what matters is whether a specific use is permitted or not. That a reproduction of a work is found to be infringing in one context doesn't mean it is always infringing in all contexts; conversely, that a reproduction is considered fair use doesn't mean all uses of that reproduction will be considered fair.
And as AI companies are commercial entities. I would lean towards direction where they doing it in general, even if not for repeating specific works, it could be infringement too.
Also "reading Wikipedia" by staring at the back of a tablet.
Saying that merely denying the motion to dismiss claims that ChatGPT outputs infringed the rights of authors such as George R.R. Martin and David Baldacci is a “fundamental assault” on the idea-expression distinction as applied to works of fiction, and especially that it puts Wikipedia in crosshairs is beyond a stretch.
If you consider it outrageous, as OP does (and I’m inclined to agree), the fact that the judge isn’t willing to laugh it out of court is an assault on your interpretation of copyright law.
Like with personal data privacy, it is not likely to be of consequence to big tech with lobby power, but dismissing it outright would show shameless levels of corruption.
Wikipedia is careful to cite their sources. Is OpenAI as careful?
The article (in English, anyway) is a summary of the plot of the book and there is not a footnote nor any external reference - and why would there be? It’s a summary of the plot, not a commentary or a critique of it. In this case, there’s no need to cite a source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Thrones
I open article. I see am image of a skeleton staring at a tablets back. I am left to wonder what author meant by that metaphor. The text after image states that "a white walker id reading Wikipedia" but I can plainly see that its not a white walker, the tablet is turned away from him, and the styling of the site is paroding New York Times.
After reading the article I still do not understand what this image is meant to communicate. And then I suddenly remember that alt text exist, and surely the text description would be useful to understand the intentions of the author. There isn't any alt description. And the bottom text is lying.
As I stare at the image looking at the teeth fused and ages lines on the skull, I suddenly understand that I might be the only person who looked at the image for more than 2 seconds.
Which is shite, because images are such a good way to communicate complex ideas simply or to illustrate a point. I shouldn't be expected to just skip it entirely. Yet all the time I spend trying to understand it was a time wasted.
You don't have to put illustrations in, if you don't know what you want them to mean! You especially don't have to put illustrations that have "high effort" appearance to them, because people would assume that it MEANS to illustrate something! And if you choose to generate something, it doesn't sound as a bad idea to check if that image conveys what you want to convey.
I love illustrations. I love pictures. There are great illustrations in my favorite manuals. It's saddening that people nowdays choose to add illustrations that create confusion, not even because better illustrations would be preferable, but because no illustration would be preferable to that.
Personally i'm not worried.
Courts and captured international processes have made an absolute mockery of the original intent, and they're not going to turn around and fix it.
Not holding my breath, mind you... market religion is strong out there, and so is the more self-serving "there need to be big concentrations of money that are easily plundered".
First it was library genesis and z-lib when meta torrented 70TB of books and then pulled off the ladder, recently it was Anna's archive and how they are coming for it (google and others), weird behaviors with some other torrent sites, now also Wikipedia is being used as a tool to defend LLMs breaking any semblance of copyright "law" unpunished.
All these actions will end up with very bad repercusions once the bubble bursts, there will be a lot of explaining to do.
Non for profit just means there is no dividends to owners but they can very well get huge salaries. So actually non for profit is a very bad name.
Should be called non dividend company.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/open-ai-for-profit-microsoft...
One of them is the purpose or character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
As a reminder, the 4 factors of "fair use" in the United States:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
There would be no problem if they open-sourced everything including the model weights. That was their original mission which they have abandoned.
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?
For further reading, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors