[_Understated_]

I thought I understood fair use but turns out I was wrong...

That being said, creating a transformative work from something else is considered fair use. So, for example, if I read a whole bunch of books and then, heavily influenced by them, create my own, similar book, that would be fair use I suppose... that makes sense.

But, where does the derivative works come in? Where do you draw the line?

If I am heavily influenced by billions of lines of other people's GPL code (ala Copilot!), then I create my own tool from it and keep my code hidden, does that not mean I am abusing the GPL license?

[schneidmaster]

That's what I meant by the devil being in the details -- these gray area questions hinge on the specific facts. Lawyers on both sides will argue which factors apply based on past caselaw and available evidence, and the court renders a decision. For example, from the Stanford webpage I previously linked: "the creation of a Harry Potter encyclopedia was determined to be “slightly transformative” (because it made the Harry Potter terms and lexicons available in one volume), but this transformative quality was not enough to justify a fair use defense in light of the extensive verbatim use of text from the Harry Potter books". So you might be okay creating a Harry Potter encyclopedia in general, but not if your definitions are copy/pasted from the books, but you might still be okay quoting key lines from the books if the quotes are a small portion of your encyclopedia. The caselaw just doesn't lend itself to firm lines in the sand.

[saurik]

If you read a bunch of books and then create a similar book, that isn't transformative; transformative is like, you read a bunch of books and then create a machine translation service. The point of transformative is like "isn't going to conflict with the market or compete in any way with the original thing".