I would say this is a gray area of law. It hasn’t been tested yet. There are a few factors in determining “fair use”. One of those factors is commercialization, which could nullify fair use. Another is the amount you’re using.
Commercial parody is commonplace fair use. If it surpasses the original… oh well.
The amount being used becomes negligible as the corpus grows. Filtering a billion webpages into one gigabyte means their average contribution is one byte. Play with the numbers all you like, it’s gonna come out to less than a paragraph.
If we went full copyright maximalist, and criminally banned using anything but public-domain / BSD / CC0 works, the commercial impact would not be much different. The technology itself shifts the economics of text, images, video, and code.
Quoting one sentence from a book is fair use even if you shoplifted that book.
I would say this is a gray area of law. It hasn’t been tested yet. There are a few factors in determining “fair use”. One of those factors is commercialization, which could nullify fair use. Another is the amount you’re using.
Commercial parody is commonplace fair use. If it surpasses the original… oh well.
The amount being used becomes negligible as the corpus grows. Filtering a billion webpages into one gigabyte means their average contribution is one byte. Play with the numbers all you like, it’s gonna come out to less than a paragraph.
If we went full copyright maximalist, and criminally banned using anything but public-domain / BSD / CC0 works, the commercial impact would not be much different. The technology itself shifts the economics of text, images, video, and code.