AI Didn't Break Copyright Law, It Just Exposed How Broken It Was
by at1as on 2/3/2026, 3:52:42 PM
https://www.jasonwillems.com/technology/2026/02/02/AI-Copyright/
Comments
by: lp4v4n
In the past, many developers were against copyright law because they saw it as a way for big corps to stifle competition and curb creativity in order to increase their profits. A lot of people right now invoke the violation of the same copyright law because the tide has changed and now companies, by ignoring copyright law, are hurting artists/smaller companies and/or not contributing back or unlawfully closing the code in the case of GPL.<p>I don't see any kind of hypocritical stance here honestly. All this time the criticism of the enforcement of copyright law or now the lack of it just reflects the fact that some people are genuinely concerned that bad actors(big corps) are using the law to damage society in order to pursue their own interests.
2/3/2026, 6:00:34 PM
by: sharkjacobs
Most people in my social circles are various flavours of anti-AI, and it drives me crazy how many of them, who were once stridently anti-copyright, are now using copyright as one of the great pillars of AI opposition
2/3/2026, 5:24:25 PM
by: klustregrif
Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry, that is until they started doing it themselves at scale and now they are claiming it’s the law that’s broken, it’s crazy.
2/3/2026, 5:30:19 PM
by: falloutx
Basically a rage bait. If the law was bad, does it make it okay to violate it? In fact Anthropic is literally paying $1.5B on the copyright settlement, that indicates its completely a settled issue that AI companies have been violating this law. Some have been caught and fined, others are been lucky or that influence over the government.<p>> Copyright Law Was Built for Human Scale<p>No where in the law it has this kinda scoped limits. It has a time limit and scale doesnt not matter. Scale matter in a way that its gets harder to enforces buts that not the fault of copyright law. If you steal at a big scale, its still stealing.
2/3/2026, 5:35:26 PM
by: Altern4tiveAcc
Always have been broken.<p>Hopefully, future legislation will cater less to publishers and copyright trolls. I'm not optimistic though. While certain kinds of publishers are indeed becoming less powerful, sports-related media conglomerates are successfully lobbying for more surveillance.<p>The general population will likely get the worst of both worlds, with copyright trolls getting to enforce unjust laws against regular people, while big tech gets to pay their way out.
2/3/2026, 5:59:38 PM
by: vibedev
IMHO AI generated content should be treated the same way with how human generated content and I don't see the problem. However as with technology the problem is a bit different, e.g.: When subletting your apartment requires manual effort, this is not a problem. Automated, it became an industry and that's a huge headache. I think this is the key point where the derived work has unlimited possibility that they want to curb it early on. In a way it's a fair effort to keep human's competitiveness but may prove to be futile.
2/3/2026, 5:28:15 PM
by: ppqqrr
copyright is not “broken,” it was always a two-faced scam designed to protect “owners” at the expense of creators. don’t expect this blatant hypocrisy to kill copyright, either - death of copyright is a slippery slope leading straight to communist utopia, and the death of the global acqui-parasite class
2/3/2026, 5:41:36 PM
by: realusername
Personally I feel that the excessive duration of copyright just weakens authors arguments against AI.<p>If even WWII-era documents are still under copyright, building a model respecting that would be impossible.
2/3/2026, 5:29:24 PM
by: infermore
laws that were already broken can still be broken. AI exposed how broken copyright law was. AI companies also broke (and continue to break) that law
2/3/2026, 5:40:50 PM
by: excalibur
Copyright law has always been excessively restrictive, and is long overdue for reform. The informal practices that people have been following (i.e. free creation and distribution but no monetization and no confusion with official releases) are pretty close to what a reasonable law would state.
2/3/2026, 5:53:54 PM
by: wtetzner
> If you paint a picture of Sonic the Hedgehog in your living room, you are technically creating an unauthorized derivative work<p>Is this even true? It might violate a trademark, but I don't think it would violate copyright law unless it was a copy of an existing picture.
2/3/2026, 5:28:40 PM