this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Keep in mind that you cannot copyright ideas. You copyright the specific implementation of those ideas. So simply mentioning Zaphod Beeblebrox doesn't trigger anything to do with copyright, but if you had a word for word introduction of Zaphod Beeblebrox copied straight from Hitchhiker's Guide that would be a problem.
Then after that you can normally have "de minimus" use, where you can use a small portion (think quotes, short phrases etc). As long as your work can't be used as a replacement for the original then you are normally in the clear (legally speaking, as far as copyright goes).
But none of this goes into trademark law, but that's a whole other thing and are generally easier to avoid too (e.g. don't use the word "coke" to sell your drink).
TL;DR: As long as the AI doesnt spit out a verbatim copy of the original, and then if you copied it verbatim from the AI, then you'd be in trouble.
I am not a lawyer, just a dude interested in copyright law.
I don’t know about US law, but in Europe you certainly can, and it’s an issue over and over again ending up in courts.
Yes it does. Fanfiction e.g. is considered infringement of the creator’s right, and that doesn’t extend to the exact verbatim text but to general plots, names, etc. It’s even infringement if you write a story about „Härrie Pötter“, since it’s immediately obvious that it’s based on Harry Potter.
Some years ago a German discounter sold a costume that was an obvious reference to the TV depiction „Pipi Langstrumpf“, a famous character by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. Mind you, in essence it was just a really cheap wig and a dress somewhat resembling a tv character. The company owning the rights on the character sued and won.
Edit: oh! I missed the part where there were two courts that decided it was infringement but in the end the highest court overruled that and said it’s not: https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/bgh-urteil-pippi-langstrumpf-romanfigur-urheberrecht/
Which only proves that all of it is completely arbitrary and just a matter of opinion. /Edit
In another case, someone took a photo of a soldier, cut out the soldier, turned it into an outline, and printed and sold t-shirts of that. If you took the shirt and put the photo next to it, it was immediately obvious it was based on the photo. Here the court had no issues, because in their opinion it was too far away from the original work to be compared with it. 🤷♀️
So, it’s quite impossible to draw a line between an idea and an implementation, and that’s why thousands and thousands of infringement cases are ending in front of courts, and in the end the only relevant factor is the opinion of the court.
It's a bit more complicated than that, as evidenced by the fact that J. K. Rowling was not the first person to write a story about a magic user named Harry Potter.