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[return to "A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books"]
1. Fluore+bN[view] [source] 2025-06-24 20:51:07
>>moose4+(OP)
I'm surprised we never discuss a previous case of how governments handled a valuable new technology that challenged creative's ability to monetise their work:

Cassette Tapes and Private Copying Levy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

Governments didn't ban tapes but taxed them and fed the proceeds back into the royalty system. An equivalent for books might be an LLM tax funding a negative tax rate for sold books e.g. earn $5 and the gov tops it up. Can't imagine how to ensure it was fair though.

Alternatively, might be an interesting math problem to calculate royalties for the training data used in each user request!

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2. bonobo+VP[view] [source] 2025-06-24 21:07:04
>>Fluore+bN
Surely this would require the observation that the public is actually using LLMs as a substitute for purchasing the book, ie they sit down and type "Generate me the first/second/third chapter of The Da Vinci Code" and then read if from there. Because it was easy to observe in the cassette tape era that people copied the store bought music and films and shared it among each other. I doubt that this is or will be a serious use case of LLMs.
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3. cmiles+U01[view] [source] 2025-06-24 22:33:31
>>bonobo+VP
This strikes me as a weak example, I think it's clear that it's way too cumbersome to read an entire novel by asking an LLM to dictate it.

IMHO, a better example would be the AI generated summaries provided by Google. Often these summaries have sufficient information and detail that people do not read the source article. The authors aren't getting paid (perhaps through on-page ads, which are not viewed) and then go out of business.

This strikes me as a good fit for the tax-on-cassette metaphor.

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4. bonobo+821[view] [source] 2025-06-24 22:42:34
>>cmiles+U01
It's not a copyright violation to summarize (in different words).
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5. cmiles+F31[view] [source] 2025-06-24 22:53:47
>>bonobo+821
A quick Google search will reveal that this not the case. Summaries of books or movies have no particular legal protection and the authors of those summaries may be sued by the owners of that content.

https://1minutebook.com/are-book-summaries-legal/

Fair use is a defense often cited in those cases but it's just that: a defense. Cliff Notes are often cited here but they actually license the content in many cases.

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6. bonobo+841[view] [source] 2025-06-24 22:57:44
>>cmiles+F31
I mean, have you actually read the text at the link you provided? Or just remembered something, googled quickly and sent a random hit without reading it? The quotes under "What do lawyers say? Listen to what a several Intellectual Property Lawyers are saying on “Are book summaries legal?”:" certainly seem to be closer to what I was claiming.

> If you want to write a summary of any novel, without quoting from it, you are free to do it

> Copyright does not protect ideas, only a particular expression of those ideas

> You would likely get in trouble only if your summary contained long excerpts directly from the book

> As long as you do not quote directly from the book, or copy any of the content, then writing a unique summary is not illegal. You can mention the title, you can even quote sentences from the book as long as they are cited, you just can’t reproduce chunks of the content

etc

(I'm also not sure whether this article is just blogspam or itself AI generated)

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