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by klustregrif 107 days ago
It will hold up in court. The line of argument of “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite” doesn’t hold up in court, it doesn’t either when when you put AI in the mix. It doesn’t matter if the result is slightly different, a judge will rule based on the fact that this even is literally what the law is intended to prevent, it’s not a case of which incantation or secret sentence you should utter to free the work of its existing license.
1 comments

> “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite”

This is not a good analogy.

A "rewrite" in context here is not a reproduction of the original work but a different work that is functionally equivalent, or at least that is the claim.

Possibly important is that it’s largely api compatible but it’s not functionally equivalent in that its performance (as accuracy not just speed) is different.
To stay with the analogy, Harry Potter is not a rewrite of A Wizard of Earthsea, even if they both contain schools that teach magic.