[aftbit]

More interesting to me is the "derivative work" concept. If a human sits down with a novel, reads it cover to cover, then writes their own novel which broadly has the same characters following the same plot in the same setting, but with slight differences in names and word choice, is that new work a derivative of the first for copyright purposes? What if they do the same thing for code? What if an AI does either or both of those?

IP courts will have some truly novel questions before them this century.

[dahart]

Copyright does not cover ideas, period. If you write your own novel and use your own word choices, even if you copy the plot structure exactly and the same character names while writing a new book, it’s not even considered a derivative work under the law, it’s a new work. Copyright covers copying the fixed work itself. You aren’t in violation of copyright unless you copy the words themselves.

The flip side is that this is why the article’s discussion about randomness and monkeys on typewriters is irrelevant to copyright law. It’s a copyright violation to produce the same “fixation” no matter how you do it. If you generated a random sequence of characters, and it happened to match a NYT best selling book, you violate the book author’s copyrights, and claiming it was random isn’t a viable defense. Intent to copy can make it worse, but lack of intent does not absolve. There is precedent for people coming up independently with the same songs and one being successfully sued.

Do note that there are other laws that might cover plagiarism of ideas, trademarks, code, etc., copyright isn’t the only consideration, but copyright seems to be often misunderstood. We definitely have some novel questions because of the scale of AI’s copying, the nature of training and the provenance of the training data, and because of AI’s growing ability to skirt copyright law while actually copying.

[zarzavat]

That's not really true. Copyright protects named characters if they are sufficiently distinctive, though there's nothing to stop you from creating an identical character with a different name.

[aftbit]

You still seem to be ignoring derived works a bit. For example, if I downloaded a copy of "Harry Potter" and replaced every "Harry" with "Harvey" and every "Potter" with "Plumber", my new book "Harvey Plumber" would be a derived work from the original, meaning I would not have the right to sell or distribute the new work, even though it wouldn't be exactly the same.

What if I did something similar, but rather than a simple Ctrl-H replacement, I asked an LLM to rewrite each paragraph in different words? What if I did the rewrite myself, by hand? Is there a difference? If so, why? If not, why not?