The released draft report seems merely to be a litany of copyright holder complaints repeated verbatim, with little depth of reasoning to support the conclusions it makes.
The required reasoning is not very deep though: If an AI reads 100 scientific papers and churns out a new one, it is plagiarism.
If a savant has perfect recall, remembers text perfectly and rearranges that text to create a marginally new text, he'd be sued for breach of copyright.
Plagiarism is not an issue of copyright law, it's an entirely separate system of rules maintained by academia. The US Copyright Office has no business having opinions about it.
If a AI^W human reads 100 papers and then churns out a new one this is usually called research.
> Plagiarism is not an issue of copyright law, it's an entirely separate system of rules maintained by academia. The US Copyright Office has no business having opinions about it. If a AI^W human reads 100 papers and then churns out a new one this is usually called research.
If you draw a Venn Diagram of plagiarism and copyright violations, there's a big intersection. For example: if I take your paper, scratch off your name, make some minor tweaks, and submit it; I'm guilty of both plagiarism and copyright violation.
Having actually done research and published scientific papers, the key limitation is experimentation. Review papers are useful, and AI is useful, but creating new knowledge is more useful. I haven't had much luck using LLMs to extrapolate well beyond their knowledge domain.
I certainly don't see much value in AI generated papers myself, I just object to the claim that the mere act of reading a large number of existing papers before writing yours is inherently plagiarism.
You were supposed to keep reading past the first sentence, instead of trying to refute the first thing you saw that you found disagreeable. By doing so, you missed the point that plagiarism is substantively different from copyright infringement.
> If a savant has perfect recall, remembers text perfectly and rearranges that text to create a marginally new text, he'd be sued for breach of copyright.
Any suits would be based on the degree the marginally new copy was fair use. You wouldn't be able to sue the savant for reading and remembering the text.
Using AI to creat marginally new copies of copyrighted work is ALREADY a violation. We don't need a dramatic expansion of copyright law that says that just giving the savant the book to real is a copyright violation.
Plagarism and copyright are two entirely different things. Plagarism is about citations and intellectual integrity. Copyright is a about protecting economic interests, has nothing to to with intellectual integrity, and isn't resolved by citing the original work. In fact most of the contexts where you would be accused of plagarism, would be places like reporting, criticism, education or research goals make fair use arguments much easier.
Einstein once said "the key to genius is to hide your sources well"
And honestly there is truth to it. Some people (at work, in rea life, wherever) might come off very inteligent but the moment they say "oh I just read that relevant fact on reddit/twitter/news site 5 minutes ago" you realize they are just like you and repeating relevant information that was consumed recently.
Is reading and memorizing a copyrighted text a breach of copyright? I.e. is creating a copy of the text in your mind a breach of copyright or fair fair use? Is it a breach of copyright if a digital “mind” similarly memorizes copyrighted text? Or is it only a breach of copyright to output and publish that memorized text?
What about loosely memorizing the gist of a copyrighted text. Is that a breach or fair use? What if a machine does something similar?
This falls under a rather murky area of the law that is not well defined.
"Filthy eidetics. Their freeloading had become too much for our society to bear. Something had to be done. We found the mutation in their hippocampus and released a new CRISPR-mRNA-based gene suppression system.
Those who were immune were put under the scalpel."
That's not logical. If the savant has perfect recall and makes minor edits they are like a digital copy and aren't really like a human, neural network or by extension any other ML model that isn't over-fitted.
If AI really could "churn out a new scientific paper" we would all be ecstatically rejoicing in the dawning of an age of AGI. We are nowhere near that.
Not only does it read like a litany[0]. It seems like the copyright holders are not happy with how the meta case is working through court and are trying to sidestep fair use entirely.
Copywriter holders have always hated fair use, and often like to pretend it doesn’t exist.
The average copywrite holder would like you to think that the law only allows use of their works in ways that they specifically permit, i.e. that which is not explicitly permitted is forbidden.
But the law is largely the reverse; it only denies use of copyright works in certain ways. That which is not specifically forbidden is permitted.
That used to be how it worked. Then the DMCA 1201 provisions arrived and so now anything not expressly permitted by the enumerated exceptions is forbidden. Even talking about how it works is punishable as a felony (upheld by SCOTUS in like 2000 or 2001, they basically said the Copyright clause is in the constitution so the government can censor information on how to defeat DRM).
If a savant has perfect recall, remembers text perfectly and rearranges that text to create a marginally new text, he'd be sued for breach of copyright.
Only large corporations get away with it.