<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/18/book-reports-potentially-copyright-infringing-thanks-to-court-attacks-on-llms/>
"A federal judge just ruled that computer-generated summaries of novels are
“very likely infringing,” which would effectively outlaw many book reports.
That seems like a problem.
The Authors Guild has one of the many lawsuits against OpenAI, and law
professor Matthew Sag has the details on a ruling in that case that, if left in
place, could mean that any attempt to merely summarize any copyright covered
work is now possibly infringing. You can read the ruling itself here.
This isn’t just about AI—it’s about fundamentally redefining what copyright
protects. And once again, something that should be perfectly fine is being
treated as an evil that must be punished, all because some new machine did it.
But, I guess elementary school kids can rejoice that they now have an excuse
not to do a book report.
To be clear, I doubt publishers are going to head into elementary school
classrooms to sue students, but you never know with the copyright maximalists.
Sag highlights how it could have a much more dangerous impact beyond getting
kids out of their homework: making much of Wikipedia infringing."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
