by martin-t | 2026-01-11 15:26:01+00:00
Thanks for the links, I'll read them in more detail later.

There's a couple issues I see:

1) All of the concepts were developed with the idea that only humans are capable of certain kinds of work needed for producing IP. A human would not engage in highly repetitive and menial transformation of other people's material to avoid infringement if he could get the same or better result by working from scratch. This placed, throughout history, an upper limit on how protective copyright had to be.

Say, 100 years ago, synonym replacement and paraphrasing of sentences were SOTA methods to make copies of a book which don't look like copies without putting in more work than the original. Say, 50 years ago, computers could do synonym replacement automatically so it freed up some time for more elaborate restructuring of the original work and the level of protection should have shifted. Say, 10 years ago, one could use automatic replacement of phrases or translation to another language and back, freeing up yet more time.

The law should have adapted with each technological step up and according to your links it has - given the cases cited. It's been 30 years and we have a massive step up in automatic copying capabilities - the law should change again to protect the people who make this advancement possible.

Now with a sufficiently advanced LLM trained on all public and private code, you can prompt them to create a 3D viewer for Quake map files and I am sure it'll most of the time produce a working program which doesn't look like any of the training inputs but does feel vaguely familiar in structure. Then you can prompt it to add a keyboard-controlled character with Quake-like physics and it'll produce something which has the same quirks as Quake movement. Where did bunny hopping, wallrunning, strafing, circlejumps, etc. come from if it did not copy the original and the various forks?

Somebody had to put in creative work to try out various physics systems and figure out what feels good and what leads to interesting gameplay.

Now we have algorithms which can imitate the results but which can only be created by using the product of human work without consent. I think that's an exploitative practice.

2) It's illegal to own humans but legal to own other animals. The USA law uses terms such as "a member of the species Homo sapiens" (e.g. [0]) in these cases.

If the legality of tech in question was not LLMs but remixing of genes (only using a tiny fraction of human DNA) to produce a animals which are as smart as humans with chimpanzee bodies which can be incubated in chimpanzee females but are otherwise as sentient as humans, would (and should) it be legal to own them as slaves and use them for work? It would probably be legal by the current letter of the law but I assure you the law would quickly change because people would not be OK with such overt exploitation.

The difference is the exploitation by LLM companies is not as overt - in fact, mane people refer to LLMs as AIs and use pronouns such as "he" or "she", indicating them believe them to be standalone thinking entities instead of highly compressed lossy archives of other people's work.

3) The goal of copyright is progress, not protection of people who put in work to make that progress possible. I think that's wrong.

I am aware of the "is" vs "should" distinction but since laws are compromises between the monopoly in violence and the people's willingness to revolt instead of being an (attempted) codification of a consistent moral system, the best we can do is try to use the current laws (what is) to achieve what is right (what should be).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unborn_Victims_of_Violence_Act