Comment by klustregrif

5 months ago

It will hold up in court. The line of argument of “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite” doesn’t hold up in court, it doesn’t either when when you put AI in the mix. It doesn’t matter if the result is slightly different, a judge will rule based on the fact that this even is literally what the law is intended to prevent, it’s not a case of which incantation or secret sentence you should utter to free the work of its existing license.

> “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite”

This is not a good analogy.

A "rewrite" in context here is not a reproduction of the original work but a different work that is functionally equivalent, or at least that is the claim.

  • Possibly important is that it’s largely api compatible but it’s not functionally equivalent in that its performance (as accuracy not just speed) is different.

  • To stay with the analogy, Harry Potter is not a rewrite of A Wizard of Earthsea, even if they both contain schools that teach magic.