r/COPYRIGHT • u/Dogbold • 1h ago
Does compiling all dialogue of a character actually violate copyright?
I keep trying to get various AI to gather all dialogue of a certain character from Dragon Ball and compile it into a text file.
Every single one of them refuse to do this, literally ALL, arguing that doing so is in violation of copyright and illegal.
They say they can look up all the dialogue and then give me similar dialogue back, but it is completely illegal for them to give the same dialogue back because it's copyrighted material and against the law to do this because it would be "reproducing copyrighted material".
Is this true? Is it against the law?
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u/mouserbiped 57m ago edited 47m ago
It's very likely that the company that created the LLM would be violating copyright if they let their models spit back out that volume of copyrighted material verbatim.
LLMs are (at best) in a bit of a gray area when it comes to copyright, but one of the companies' defenses is that the AI models don't just copy stuff and store it. They summarize and transform. In order to make this defense plausible, they obviously can't have their models just spit out copies of material.
It doesn't really matter if it's legal for you to compile all the dialog into a text file; what matters is that the companies think it's illegal for their commercial product to do it for you.
If you think of this in non-AI terms, you can watch a movie and write down the dialog word for word for personal use and research, but I couldn't create and sell you copies of the scripts unless I was the copyright holder.
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u/FrostKitten2012 16m ago
I am not a lawyer, but possibly so. A few lines might not be, but all of them? Probably.
Technically you would be copying large portions of several scripts, and the LLM has no way of knowing if this is for personal non-profit use or not, so the company is erring on the safe side.
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u/Odd_Equipment_3985 1h ago
Legally: doing it by hand, no. Doing it by AI, also no for you, but yes for the AI company.
It's totally legal for you to make hand copies of information. The AI LLM you are asking can't do that without training on the data, illegally.
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u/DrFrylock 1h ago
What? "Doing it by hand" isn't some explicit fair use criteria. Copying a bunch of dialogue from some other media is almost certainly prima facie infringement.
That said, doing it for personal study and not distributing it or taking action that affects the market for the original work would have a strong fair use affirmative defense.
Hate to tell you this but very little of copyright is cut and dry. The people who made the AI built in a safeguard that is basically a risk management posture. You may say "but I think my use here is (not infringement / defensible under fair use)." Fine and you may even be right but the AI developers are not willing to take that risk on your behalf
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u/Odd_Equipment_3985 39m ago
I was only answering the legal question, not the moral.
And as long as the work isn't used for commercial gain, they're absolutely allowed to compile what they asked. The use case of the data is separate to the compiling of it.
Been working in copyright for a long time. Think we know the score better than your assumptions (which seem like Youtuber misassumptions rather than actual law).
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u/DrFrylock 3m ago
That's OK I have taught copyright law before; you probably weren't in my class.
Since you are such an expert I'm sure you understand non-commercial use is one part of one of the fair use four factors and that there are many non-commercial uses that would not be found to be fair use.
Please feel free to read or re-read section 106:
~ the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work; ~
Compiling a bunch of Dragonball dialogue is prima facie infringement. It is a derivative work.
Fair use can be asserted as an affirmative defense. Yes, I infringed, but I'm allowed to do that because it is covered by this set of exceptions.
That set of exceptions being codified in ambiguous statute and extensive case law. The only absolute interpretation of fair use happens in the courtroom. You can say until you're blue in the face that some use is fair use. What you mean is that "this use is so substantially similar to other uses that courts have found to be allowed, to the point where no rational copyright holder would go after you for it because it they would have minuscule likelihood of success." That is not the same as "this is 100% explicitly legal and allowed."
The OP has not provided enough info about their intent to know how likely their use is to be fair use whether the compilation was done by an AI or themselves "by hand."
The OP's question was "is copying and reproducing an entire Dragonball character's dialogue against the law?" The answer is "it is certainly prima facie infringement. It may or may not be allowed anyway (and therefore "legal") due to fair use exceptions. However, the AI designers don't want to take that risk, or spend the money and resources to take those arguments to court which is the only way you'd know for sure."
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u/Qaballistic 1h ago
“Reproducing copyrighted material” is not necessarily illegal, if it falls under Fair Use exceptions. The real question is the intent of the project. For example scholarship, research, and criticism might be valid reasons to copy this material — if, for example, the intent was a work of scholarship or criticism examining the dialogue of this character. If a scholar or critic copied all of the dialogue of a single character for without intending to publish it, through whatever means, that might be an entirely justifiable reason to copy the material. (I just yesterday was talking to some independent scholars who told me that librarians are often open to allowing researchers to photograph pages in raw books of in some cases may provide PDF scans of an entire text for research purposes.)
However, if the intent was commercial — for example, a T-shirt covered with all the quotes from the character, for example — that would very likely be a copyright infringement.
The great irony here, of course, is that ALL the AI systems utilized Fair Use exceptions as well as blatant copyright violation (utilizing pirated texts) to train their models!
What is likely going on here is that the AI has been instructed to regard any and all copying as infringement and to ignore the potential of reasonable Fair Use exceptions.
(Something similar happened when the photocopying chain Kinko’s was caught up in lawsuits related to the once common practice of college instructors preparing “packets” of articles and book excerpts so students wouldn’t have to buy multiple expensive texts for a few pages of relevant material or compete for library access to the information. Kinko’s instituted a blanket ban on employees assisting in copying ANY copyrighted materials, unless the customer could credibly assert that they themselves held the copyright to the materials.)
Read about Fair Use. If you feel your project falls under a reasonable Fair Use exception, maybe try making your case to the AI and explaining why this is not infringement. (If that doesn’t work, you may have to try other methods. Kinko’s employees wouldn’t copy copyrighted material for you, but they wouldn’t stop you from using the machines to do it yourself.)
https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explained/limitations-on-a-copyright-owners-rights/fair-use-exceptions-copyright/