30. A US federal district court just ruled that paraphrases or summaries by the #AI tool #Cohere might infringe publisher copyrights on the original full texts.
https://copyrightlately.com/court-rules-ai-news-summaries-may-infringe-copyright/
Here's the Nov 17 decision by the federal district court for the Southern District of NY.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69636122/59/advance-local-media-llc-v-cohere-inc/
PS: This could undermine my thesis in this thread. But it doesn't undermine it yet. As I pointed out in the second post, "If a paraphrase doesn't use the original expression or track it too closely, then it doesn't infringe. If it does track the original too closely, it might count as a derivative work." The question in this case is whether some Cohere summaries were too close to the originals. Cohere lost a motion to dismiss, and now the court will investigate the "substantial similarity" claims on the merits. If the publishers win, we'll learn more about where the line is, not that there is no line.
31. Another US federal judge has ruled (Oct 27) that AI-generated summaries might infringe the copyrights on the original works.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.606655/gov.uscourts.nysd.606655.716.0.pdf
Again, the AI company (in this case #OpenAI) has merely lost a motion to dismiss. The court has not yet ruled on the merits.
Again, I acknowledge that if this result survives, it would undermine my thesis in this thread.
My take is that it won't survive because it disregards the idea/expression distinction fundamental to copyright law. Or if it does survive, it will overturn the fundamentals of copyright law.
Here are some comments that support my take.
From @mmasnick:
https://matthewsag.com/copyright-winter-is-coming-to-wikipedia/
From @mmasnick:
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/18/book-reports-potentially-copyright-infringing-thanks-to-court-attacks-on-llms/
From @drewwilsonfl:
https://www.freezenet.ca/judge-rules-summaries-are-copyright-infringement-because-common-sense-is-over-rated/