6 ms·

Copyright winter is coming (to Wikipedia?)

84 points by the-mitr 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
area51org 11mo ago
One fundamental difference: Wikipedia is not a for-profit corporation. OpenAI is. That probably matters.
- throwaway-0001 11mo ago
  Non for profit does not equal to no salaries for executives- they still have highly inflated salaries. 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.
  - cwillu 11mo ago
    It should be called exactly what it is called, because that is the correct term for benefits accrued to an owner.
- charcircuit 11mo ago
  OpenAI is a nonprofit.
  - CGamesPlay 11mo ago
    Non-profit OpenAI ("OpenAI Foundation") holds a 26% interest in for-profit OpenAI ("OpenAI Group PBC"). https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/open-ai-for-profit-microsoft.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/open-ai-for-profit-microsoft...
  - nightshift1 11mo ago
    not since oct28
- mmooss 11mo ago
  I've never heard that non-profits can violate intellectual property laws. Otherwise, that might give advantages to Sci-hub, shadow libraries, etc.
  - hxtk 11mo ago
    The "Fair Use" doctrine has four major pillars that a sibling comment enumerated and you can officially find here: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ 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.
- o11c 11mo ago
  Another fundamental difference: OpenAI explicitly markets their tool as a replacement for the copyrighted material it was trained on. This is most explicit for image generation, but applies to text as well. 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.
- txrx0000 11mo ago
  Yeah, it does matter, though the issue is not exactly just monetary profit. The fundamental problem is OpenAI has made the GPT model weights artificially scarce. But at the same time they claim that other artificially scarce information such as books should not be scarce and instead belong to the intellectual commons. The latter part which I agree with, but they took from the commons and are claiming what they took as exclusively their own. That is just evil. There would be no problem if they open-sourced everything including the model weights. That was their original mission which they have abandoned.
chupchap 11mo ago
From what I understood, the case against OpenAI wasn't about the summarisation. It was the fact that the AI was trained on copyrighted work. In case of Wikipedia, the assumption is that someone purchased the book, read it, and then summarised it.
- throwaway-0001 11mo ago
  I think we have no evidence someone bought the book and summarized. And what if an ai bought the book and summarized, is it fine now?
  - jen729w 11mo ago
    Yes. Anthropic won that one. https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/what-authors-need-to-know-about-the-anthropic-settlement/ https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/wh...
- colechristensen 11mo ago
  There are separate issues. 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.
  - cameldrv 11mo ago
    They’re sort of separate. In a sense you could say that the ChatGPT model is a lossily compressed version of its training corpus. We acknowledge that a jpeg of a copyrighted image is a violation. If the model can recite Harry Potter word for word, even imperfectly, this is evidence that the model itself is an encoding of the book (among other things). 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.
    - 11mo ago
petermcneeley 11mo ago
The implication here of course that if we allow AI to be taken down by copyright then it could also take down Wikipedia. I am not even sure this is close to being true despite the article trying to suggest otherwise. 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.
- tavavex 11mo ago
  I'm confused. There's an entire paragraph in the article where the author compares the two summaries and finds that they differ only in their structuring. I can't find any part of the article saying that the LLM summary was written "in the style of George R.R. Martin", as far as I understand both summaries are conceptually very similar. That's the main problem. If the scope of substantial similarity to a novel is pushed down from hundreds of pages of writing to a summary that's a couple paragraphs long, then all these summaries are in potential danger. To my knowledge there's no criteria that lets you only find LLM summaries infringing without leaving an opening for the lawyers to expand the reach to target all summaries of copyrighted content.
  - petermcneeley 11mo ago
    Even if true wiki would escape via fair use and AI would not. It is possible that the laws and judgements are inconsistent nonsense but assuming they are not the fact that wiki has been around for decades suggests at least one key difference.
    - tavavex 11mo ago
      Just because Wikipedia has persisted for 20+ years doesn't mean that a key decision later down the line can't make it into an open season for all IP owners. AI-related lawsuits are a great opportunity for copyright owners to greatly shake up the status quo under the (fairly legitimate) guise of protecting themselves from LLM copying. Even if Wikipedia in particular could skirt it through fair use, the fact that hundred-word long summaries would be found "similar" to full novels would represent a large encroachment of copyright that would allow many other lawsuits to open up with entities who may not be as lucky as Wikipedia. Changing the answer to "Is something as brief as this notably similar to a full work?" from "what? Of course not" to "well... do you have a fair use reason?" would mean that many people will need to start looking both ways and triple-checking whatever they create/summarize/report on as to avoid tipping off anyone hungry for some settlement money.
noduerme 11mo ago
>> Every year, I ask students in my copyright class why the children’s versions of classic novels in Colting were found to be infringing but a Wikipedia summary of the plots of those same books probably wouldn’t be. 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?
- duskwuff 11mo ago
  Good guess, but no. The most salient difference in that case is that an abridged children's version of a novel acts as a direct market substitute for the original, whereas a plot summary does not. (A secondary reason is that an abridged edition is likely to represent a much larger portion of the original work than would appear in a summary.) For further reading, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors
- visarga 11mo ago
  Consider this - if I wanted to read A Game of Thrones, then I would read A Game of Thrones, not some bootleg LLM approximation. It is faster, more exact an cheaper to infringe by copying, a LLM is a terrible tool for infringement, it is slow, expensive and doesn't actually reproduce perfectly. The fact that some are using AI means they want something different, not the original.
  - noduerme 11mo ago
cm2012 11mo ago
This is my favorite article on HN since the one on solar panels in Africa. Love to see a subject matter expert making a case at the bleeding edge of their field.
wzdd 11mo ago
Entertaining that the article about copyright-infringing similarity of AI-generated summaries is illustrated with a picture of an animated skeleton labelled "White Walker", which is neither what White Walkers are nor what they look like.
- palmotea 11mo ago
  > Entertaining that the article about copyright-infringing similarity of AI-generated summaries is illustrated with a picture of an animated skeleton labelled "White Walker", which is neither what White Walkers are nor what they look like. Also "reading Wikipedia" by staring at the back of a tablet.
jrflowers 11mo ago
I like that the author saw a cartoon of a skeleton looking at the back of a tablet and thought “this is good enough to describe as a white walker reading Wikipedia”
dev1ycan 11mo ago
"AI" keeps destroying free sources of information. 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.
- spudlyo 11mo ago
  For those of us who hate both intellectual property and OpenAI, it's hard to pick a side on this one. Hopefully there is a way both sides can lose.
varenc 11mo ago
The ruling never said summaries are infringing. It just said the authors’ claims about some AI outputs were "plausible" enough to get past a motion to dismiss, which is basically the lowest hurdle. The judge isn’t deciding what actually counts as infringement, just that the case can move forward. IMHO the title of the article is reading more into the opinion than what the judge actually decided.
- tavavex 11mo ago
  The author already fully addressed this in the article. They just think that even the fact that this was allowed to move forward is a worrying sign: > 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.
bawolff 11mo ago
Honestly, i always thought this was how it always worked. A summary is by neccesisty a derrivative of the thing being summarized, but it is also very vert clearly fair use. Its transformational, its for an educational purpose, it contains only a tiny portion of the original work and it does not compete with the original work. I can't imagine anything more fair use then that. Personally i'm not worried.
TheDong 11mo ago
To me the key difference is that Wikipedia summaries are written by a human, and so creativity imbues them with new copyright. 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
- jjcm 11mo ago
  The issue becomes there's little to no way to tell the difference between the two. 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?
  - TheDong 11mo ago
    > The issue becomes there's little to no way to tell the difference between the two. 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.
- throwaway290 11mo ago
  This. 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.
  - Robotbeat 11mo ago
    So if OpenAI stayed a non-profit, they'd be okay?
    - throwaway290 11mo ago
      yes?
areoform 11mo ago
The push to expand repressive copyright laws because machines can learn from human produced text, code and art is going to hurt us all in the long run. 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-kong-company-over-their-mickey-mouse-line-of-jewelry/ https://mickeyblog.com/2025/07/17/disney-is-suing-a-hong-kon... / https://mickeyblog.com/2025/07/17/disney-is-suing-a-hong-kong-company-over-their-mickey-mouse-line-of-jewelry/ 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.
- CamperBob2 11mo ago
  It's a moot point, at least as far as AI is concerned, because nobody in China gives a mouse's behind about any of this. Nor should they.
  - visarga 11mo ago
    While Chinese models train on all Western cultural output, our own models are restricted. And in the corporate world the models of choice for finetuning are DeepSeek and Qwen, wonder why.
CuriouslyC 11mo ago
The high seas are going to be crowded soon.
novemp 11mo ago
That image caption says "A white walker in a desolate field reading Wikipedia", but the (backwards for some reason) Wikipedia article says "White Waleers". Forgive me for thinking this person might not have the necessary braincells to commentate on legal issues.
chris_wot 11mo ago
This is going to make anyone who does a college assignment explaining the general plot of a novel liable to copyright infringement. That’s absurd. Wikipedia is careful to cite their sources. Is OpenAI as careful?
- docdeek 11mo ago
  Absurdity aside, in thie specifc example Wikipedia doesn’t cite any sources. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Thrones
  - chris_wot 11mo ago
    Yeah, that's a decent point. The example is a terrible example of a well written Wikipedia article. The problem with the plot summary is that it is technically original research, and whilst this is not banned from Wikipedia, it is at least frowned upon.
txrx0000 11mo ago
If a piece of information can be produced and consumed using general purpose computers, then there's no good reason for it to be made scarce under copyright. It should have a reciprocal copyleft license like AGPL or CC-BY-SA instead. This goes for digital drawings, writings, source code, AI model weights, and pretty much everything on the Internet. Forcing copyright on information that don't need to be scarce just creates extra problems.
palmotea 11mo ago
Look at that useless AI generated image "A white walker in a desolate field reading Wikipedia (an AI Image by Gemini)." It's not reading Wikipedia, it's staring at the back of a tablet.
strogonoff 11mo ago
There is a world of difference between a corporation ingesting original works for the purposes of automatically, at scale generating derivative works for profit and a community of unpaid human volunteers working for a non-profit maintaining a public benefit encyplopedia. 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.
- chrismorgan 11mo ago
  A motion to dismiss amounts is saying “come on, that’s ridiculous”. Denying the motion says “no, it’s not ridiculous; we may still decide it’s wrong, but it’s not ridiculous”. 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.
  - strogonoff 11mo ago
    Exactly. To call it so ridiculous that it doesn’t even warrant court time is a massive stretch, considering strong public concern on that exact question, as well as the spirit and goals of IP 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.
lesostep 11mo ago
--- a rant about using illustatration in articles --- 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.
- BigTTYGothGF 11mo ago
  It's as if the author thinks illustrations are just background noise, a garnish that you have to put in but serves no other purpose.
Hizonner 11mo ago
Copyright needs to be pared back legislatively (and via treaty renegotiations). More like "aggressively pruned with a chainsaw". 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".

84 points by the-mitr 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

area51org 11mo ago

One fundamental difference: Wikipedia is not a for-profit corporation. OpenAI is. That probably matters.

throwaway-0001 11mo ago
Non for profit does not equal to no salaries for executives- they still have highly inflated salaries. 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.
- cwillu 11mo ago
  It should be called exactly what it is called, because that is the correct term for benefits accrued to an owner.
charcircuit 11mo ago
OpenAI is a nonprofit.
- CGamesPlay 11mo ago
  Non-profit OpenAI ("OpenAI Foundation") holds a 26% interest in for-profit OpenAI ("OpenAI Group PBC"). https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/open-ai-for-profit-microsoft.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/open-ai-for-profit-microsoft...
- nightshift1 11mo ago
  not since oct28
mmooss 11mo ago
I've never heard that non-profits can violate intellectual property laws. Otherwise, that might give advantages to Sci-hub, shadow libraries, etc.
- hxtk 11mo ago
  The "Fair Use" doctrine has four major pillars that a sibling comment enumerated and you can officially find here: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ 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.
o11c 11mo ago
Another fundamental difference: OpenAI explicitly markets their tool as a replacement for the copyrighted material it was trained on. This is most explicit for image generation, but applies to text as well. 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.
txrx0000 11mo ago
Yeah, it does matter, though the issue is not exactly just monetary profit. The fundamental problem is OpenAI has made the GPT model weights artificially scarce. But at the same time they claim that other artificially scarce information such as books should not be scarce and instead belong to the intellectual commons. The latter part which I agree with, but they took from the commons and are claiming what they took as exclusively their own. That is just evil. There would be no problem if they open-sourced everything including the model weights. That was their original mission which they have abandoned.

chupchap 11mo ago

From what I understood, the case against OpenAI wasn't about the summarisation. It was the fact that the AI was trained on copyrighted work. In case of Wikipedia, the assumption is that someone purchased the book, read it, and then summarised it.

throwaway-0001 11mo ago
I think we have no evidence someone bought the book and summarized. And what if an ai bought the book and summarized, is it fine now?
- jen729w 11mo ago
  Yes. Anthropic won that one. https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/what-authors-need-to-know-about-the-anthropic-settlement/ https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/wh...
colechristensen 11mo ago
There are separate issues. 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.
- cameldrv 11mo ago
  They’re sort of separate. In a sense you could say that the ChatGPT model is a lossily compressed version of its training corpus. We acknowledge that a jpeg of a copyrighted image is a violation. If the model can recite Harry Potter word for word, even imperfectly, this is evidence that the model itself is an encoding of the book (among other things). 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.
  - 11mo ago

petermcneeley 11mo ago

The implication here of course that if we allow AI to be taken down by copyright then it could also take down Wikipedia. I am not even sure this is close to being true despite the article trying to suggest otherwise. 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.

tavavex 11mo ago
I'm confused. There's an entire paragraph in the article where the author compares the two summaries and finds that they differ only in their structuring. I can't find any part of the article saying that the LLM summary was written "in the style of George R.R. Martin", as far as I understand both summaries are conceptually very similar. That's the main problem. If the scope of substantial similarity to a novel is pushed down from hundreds of pages of writing to a summary that's a couple paragraphs long, then all these summaries are in potential danger. To my knowledge there's no criteria that lets you only find LLM summaries infringing without leaving an opening for the lawyers to expand the reach to target all summaries of copyrighted content.
- petermcneeley 11mo ago
  Even if true wiki would escape via fair use and AI would not. It is possible that the laws and judgements are inconsistent nonsense but assuming they are not the fact that wiki has been around for decades suggests at least one key difference.
  - tavavex 11mo ago
    Just because Wikipedia has persisted for 20+ years doesn't mean that a key decision later down the line can't make it into an open season for all IP owners. AI-related lawsuits are a great opportunity for copyright owners to greatly shake up the status quo under the (fairly legitimate) guise of protecting themselves from LLM copying. Even if Wikipedia in particular could skirt it through fair use, the fact that hundred-word long summaries would be found "similar" to full novels would represent a large encroachment of copyright that would allow many other lawsuits to open up with entities who may not be as lucky as Wikipedia. Changing the answer to "Is something as brief as this notably similar to a full work?" from "what? Of course not" to "well... do you have a fair use reason?" would mean that many people will need to start looking both ways and triple-checking whatever they create/summarize/report on as to avoid tipping off anyone hungry for some settlement money.

noduerme 11mo ago

>> Every year, I ask students in my copyright class why the children’s versions of classic novels in Colting were found to be infringing but a Wikipedia summary of the plots of those same books probably wouldn’t be. 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?

duskwuff 11mo ago
Good guess, but no. The most salient difference in that case is that an abridged children's version of a novel acts as a direct market substitute for the original, whereas a plot summary does not. (A secondary reason is that an abridged edition is likely to represent a much larger portion of the original work than would appear in a summary.) For further reading, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors
visarga 11mo ago
Consider this - if I wanted to read A Game of Thrones, then I would read A Game of Thrones, not some bootleg LLM approximation. It is faster, more exact an cheaper to infringe by copying, a LLM is a terrible tool for infringement, it is slow, expensive and doesn't actually reproduce perfectly. The fact that some are using AI means they want something different, not the original.
- noduerme 11mo ago

cm2012 11mo ago

This is my favorite article on HN since the one on solar panels in Africa. Love to see a subject matter expert making a case at the bleeding edge of their field.

wzdd 11mo ago

Entertaining that the article about copyright-infringing similarity of AI-generated summaries is illustrated with a picture of an animated skeleton labelled "White Walker", which is neither what White Walkers are nor what they look like.

palmotea 11mo ago
> Entertaining that the article about copyright-infringing similarity of AI-generated summaries is illustrated with a picture of an animated skeleton labelled "White Walker", which is neither what White Walkers are nor what they look like. Also "reading Wikipedia" by staring at the back of a tablet.

jrflowers 11mo ago

I like that the author saw a cartoon of a skeleton looking at the back of a tablet and thought “this is good enough to describe as a white walker reading Wikipedia”

dev1ycan 11mo ago

"AI" keeps destroying free sources of information. 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.

spudlyo 11mo ago
For those of us who hate both intellectual property and OpenAI, it's hard to pick a side on this one. Hopefully there is a way both sides can lose.

varenc 11mo ago

The ruling never said summaries are infringing. It just said the authors’ claims about some AI outputs were "plausible" enough to get past a motion to dismiss, which is basically the lowest hurdle. The judge isn’t deciding what actually counts as infringement, just that the case can move forward. IMHO the title of the article is reading more into the opinion than what the judge actually decided.

tavavex 11mo ago
The author already fully addressed this in the article. They just think that even the fact that this was allowed to move forward is a worrying sign: > 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.

bawolff 11mo ago

Honestly, i always thought this was how it always worked. A summary is by neccesisty a derrivative of the thing being summarized, but it is also very vert clearly fair use. Its transformational, its for an educational purpose, it contains only a tiny portion of the original work and it does not compete with the original work. I can't imagine anything more fair use then that. Personally i'm not worried.

TheDong 11mo ago

To me the key difference is that Wikipedia summaries are written by a human, and so creativity imbues them with new copyright. 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

jjcm 11mo ago
The issue becomes there's little to no way to tell the difference between the two. 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?
- TheDong 11mo ago
  > The issue becomes there's little to no way to tell the difference between the two. 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.
throwaway290 11mo ago
This. 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.
- Robotbeat 11mo ago
  So if OpenAI stayed a non-profit, they'd be okay?
  - throwaway290 11mo ago
    yes?

areoform 11mo ago

The push to expand repressive copyright laws because machines can learn from human produced text, code and art is going to hurt us all in the long run. 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-kong-company-over-their-mickey-mouse-line-of-jewelry/ https://mickeyblog.com/2025/07/17/disney-is-suing-a-hong-kon... / https://mickeyblog.com/2025/07/17/disney-is-suing-a-hong-kong-company-over-their-mickey-mouse-line-of-jewelry/ 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.

CamperBob2 11mo ago
It's a moot point, at least as far as AI is concerned, because nobody in China gives a mouse's behind about any of this. Nor should they.
- visarga 11mo ago
  While Chinese models train on all Western cultural output, our own models are restricted. And in the corporate world the models of choice for finetuning are DeepSeek and Qwen, wonder why.

CuriouslyC 11mo ago

The high seas are going to be crowded soon.

novemp 11mo ago

That image caption says "A white walker in a desolate field reading Wikipedia", but the (backwards for some reason) Wikipedia article says "White Waleers". Forgive me for thinking this person might not have the necessary braincells to commentate on legal issues.

chris_wot 11mo ago

This is going to make anyone who does a college assignment explaining the general plot of a novel liable to copyright infringement. That’s absurd. Wikipedia is careful to cite their sources. Is OpenAI as careful?

docdeek 11mo ago
Absurdity aside, in thie specifc example Wikipedia doesn’t cite any sources. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Thrones
- chris_wot 11mo ago
  Yeah, that's a decent point. The example is a terrible example of a well written Wikipedia article. The problem with the plot summary is that it is technically original research, and whilst this is not banned from Wikipedia, it is at least frowned upon.

txrx0000 11mo ago

If a piece of information can be produced and consumed using general purpose computers, then there's no good reason for it to be made scarce under copyright. It should have a reciprocal copyleft license like AGPL or CC-BY-SA instead. This goes for digital drawings, writings, source code, AI model weights, and pretty much everything on the Internet. Forcing copyright on information that don't need to be scarce just creates extra problems.

palmotea 11mo ago

Look at that useless AI generated image "A white walker in a desolate field reading Wikipedia (an AI Image by Gemini)." It's not reading Wikipedia, it's staring at the back of a tablet.

strogonoff 11mo ago

There is a world of difference between a corporation ingesting original works for the purposes of automatically, at scale generating derivative works for profit and a community of unpaid human volunteers working for a non-profit maintaining a public benefit encyplopedia. 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.

chrismorgan 11mo ago
A motion to dismiss amounts is saying “come on, that’s ridiculous”. Denying the motion says “no, it’s not ridiculous; we may still decide it’s wrong, but it’s not ridiculous”. 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.
- strogonoff 11mo ago
  Exactly. To call it so ridiculous that it doesn’t even warrant court time is a massive stretch, considering strong public concern on that exact question, as well as the spirit and goals of IP 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.

lesostep 11mo ago

--- a rant about using illustatration in articles --- 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.

BigTTYGothGF 11mo ago
It's as if the author thinks illustrations are just background noise, a garnish that you have to put in but serves no other purpose.

Hizonner 11mo ago

Copyright needs to be pared back legislatively (and via treaty renegotiations). More like "aggressively pruned with a chainsaw". 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".