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consptoday at 9:42 AM3 repliesview on HN

> You lose half or more of your traffic to AI summaries trained on your own content.

Wouldn't this be the reason for not calling it transformative but simple copyright theft?


Replies

fc417fc802today at 10:17 AM

For the millionth time, piracy isn't theft. It's copyright violation, not copyright theft.

No, a reduction in traffic is not sufficient to conclude that a copyright violation has occurred. Sure, it might have. Alternatively it might have produced a lossy summary in which case the reduction in traffic raises some difficult questions about the value of the original work.

In other cases an LLM can synthesize a genuinely useful explanation of a subject that is precisely tailored to the needs of the asker. In those cases the machine output might well prove more useful to the asker than any single original reference would have.

For something like news where what you're paying for is timely delivery it makes sense to restrict automated (not just LLM) access for the first few days because a similarly timely summary will capture the majority of the value proposition of your service.

That's not typical though. For example, I'm certainly not going to be satisfied with a summary of the plot of a book I'm interested in. Would you want to watch a 10 minute highlights reel in place of a 2 hour feature length film?

show 1 reply
Valodimtoday at 12:00 PM

Normalizing copyright theft is transformative, that's the trick

Saline9515today at 10:15 AM

Summarizing content is not copyright theft.