[taixhi]

What our algorithm does is, we convolute the text from the textbooks to create questions such as "How did Hitler die?" from texts like "In August 1945, Hitler killed himself." from the textbook. So usually, that ends up being significantly different to the original texts in the textbook.

[fncypants]

Copyright laws typically prohibit both identical copies, which appear to be done here by users during image processing / OCR even if only transitory, as well as derivatives of the copy. So the question then becomes, is this "fair use"?

If the use case for the app is personal use by the possessors of the textbook, very likely no problem. For all other uses you should consult a lawyer to make sure you're in the clear.

[tylerhou]

> as well as derivatives of the copy

Shouldn't this imply that it's illegal for me to make quizzes on my own from information I found in a textbook? If this app is implemented correctly, what it does should be indistinguishable from a human. It makes no sense to change the infringement status of a work based on how the work was produced.

Also, generally hard facts (like when Hitler died or how Hitler killed himself) are not copyrightable.

[LeanderK]

I don't know how you are doing this, but with NNs there's still be the chance that result contains significant parts of the text-books. I am not a lawyer, but because you are only interested in the syntactic equality (the sematic being the same) i think a simple algorithm like something based on edit-distance may be able to exclude such cases.