Post #2430518
2026-04-21 21:52 UTC
@plagiarismtoday@mastodon.world
Nice piece!
Years ago, while diving into US copyright law for an undergraduate research paper, I learned to appreciate the rights of ownership and attribution that come with authorship and claiming copyright.
Since then, I've seen some interesting interpretations of the "fair use" doctrine. For example, search engines copying everything anyone publishes on the web qualifies because they don't republish the material used for their searches (at least not material amounts), and cite their sources.
But today's "large language model" systems obfuscate their sources, many of which I'm sure are protected by copyright and not subject to their injestion under "fair use" claims.
Replies (1)
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@plagiarismtoday@mastodon.world 2026-04-21 22:16
@johnlogic@sfba.social It's actually amazing how little attribution is considered when looking at fair use. In the US, it's mostly been a question about how "transformative" the use is. That changed with the recent Warhol ruling: https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2023/05/23/what-the-warhol-ruling-may-mean-for-ai/ The ruling is less than three years old, so we are still in the process of figuring out what it means. But attribution still matters incredibly little when it comes to fair use, it's now more about how the work competes with the original.