Yeah, the way the courts decide is unlikely to turn on a detail of how the technology works, so it's difficult for non-legal experts to predict the outcome on t

Yeah, the way the courts decide is unlikely to turn on a detail of how the technology works, so it's difficult for non-legal experts to predict the outcome on the technical merits (since the law has very different priorities). Music has ended up in a place where short audio snippets are protected by copyright and must be licensed; but for short snippets of text the precedent has generally been that the copying needs to be more substantial. Distributed microplagarism of short phases might end up being ruled to be legal, even if wholesale reproduction is not. Which may not give copyright protection to the generated works, of course, as the question of machine authoring is entirely distinct.