Comment by aeon_ai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aeon_ai | Hacker News Reader

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GenAI changes the dynamics of information systems so fundamentally that our entire notion of intellectual property is being upended.

Copyright was predicated on the notion that ideas and styles can not be protected, but that explicit expressive works can. For example, a recipe can't be protected, but the story you wrap around it that tells how your grandma used to make it would be.

LLMs are particularly challenging to wrangle with because they perform language alchemy. They can (and do) re-express the core ideas, styles, themes, etc. without violating copyright.

People deem this 'theft' and 'stealing' because they are trying to reconcile the myth of intellectual property with reality, and are also simultaneously sensing the economic ladder being pulled up by elites who are watching and gaming the geopolitical world disorder.

There will be a new system of value capture that content creators need to position for, which is to be seen as a more valuable source of high quality materials than an LLM, serving a specific market, and effectively acquiring attention to owned properties and products.

It will not be pay-per-crawl. Or pay-per-use. It will be an attention game, just like everything in the modern economy.

Attention is the only way you can monetize information.

No. The idea-expression dichotomy is a common myth about copyright law, right up there with "if I already own the physical cartridge, downloading this game ROM is OK".

The ONLY things that matter when determining whether copyright was infringed are "access" and "substantial similarity". The first refers to whether the alleged infringer did, or had a reasonable opportunity to, view the copyrighted work. The second is more vague and open-ended. But if these two, alone, can be established in court, then absent a fair use or other defense (for example, all of the ways in which your work is "substantially similar" to the infringed work are public domain), you are infringing. Period. End of story.

The Tetris Company, for example, owns the idea of falling-tetromino puzzle video games. If you develop and release such a game, they will sue you and they will win. They have won in the past and they can retain Boies-tier lawyers to litigate a small crater where you once stood if need be. In fact, the ruling in the Tetris vs. Xio case means that look-and-feel copyrights, thought dead after Apple v. Microsoft and Lotus v. Borland, are now back on the table.

It's not like this is even terribly new. Atari, license holders to Pac-Man on game consoles at the time, sued Philips over the release of K.C. Munchkin! on their rival console, the Magnavox Odyssey 2. Munchkin didn't look like Pac-Man. The monsters didn't look like the ghosts from Pac-Man. The mazes and some of the game mechanics were significantly different. Yet, the judge ruled that because it featured an "eater" who ate dots and avoided enemies in a maze, and sometimes had the opportunity to eat the enemies, K.C. Munchkin! infringed on the copyrights to Pac-Man. The ideas used in Pac-Man were novel enough to be eligible for copyright protection.

This is one of those fun "achsully" responses I get the privilege to refute.

It's a foundational principle of copyright law, codified in 17 U.S.C. § 102(b): "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery"

Now, we can quibble over what qualifies there, but the dichotomy itself is pretty clear.

This goes back to Baker v. Selden (1879) and remains bedrock copyright doctrine.

The Tetris case is overstated. Tetris v. Xio did not establish that The Tetris Company "owns the idea of falling-tetromino puzzle video games." The court explicitly applied the idea-expression dichotomy and found Xio copied specific expressive choices (exact dimensions, specific visual style, particular piece colors). Many Tetris-like games exist legally, and it is the specific expressive elements that were considered in the Xio case.

K.C. Munchkin is old and criticized. That 1982 ruling predates major developments like Computer Associates v. Altai, which established more rigorous methods for filtering out unprotectable elements. The Munchkin decision continues to be debated.

"Substantial similarity" analysis itself incorporates idea-expression filtering. Courts use tests specifically designed to separate protectable expression from unprotectable ideas, especially when considering the four factors of fair use (when applied as a defense.)

I think what you'll find is that most aren't happy with the current copyright law anyway (I include myself in that group) or don't understand it or don't agree with it, and thus will just shrug.

For example, copyright duration is far longer than most people think (life of author plus seventy (or plus ninety-five years if corporation). Corporations treat copyright as a way to create moats for themselves and freeze competitors than as a creative endeavor. Most creative works earn little to nothing anyway, while a tiny minority generate the most revenue. And it's not easy to get a copyright or atleast percieved to be easy, so again it incentivises those that can afford lawyers to navigate the legal environment. Also, enforcement of copyright law requires surviellance and censorship.

Truthfully I think there will be a time when people will look at current copyright law the same way we now look at guilds in the middleages.

It's incoherent to be anti-copyright because it's used to freeze out competition by corporations and be pro-AI (which is exactly that, at vastly greater scale).

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