Book Reports Potentially Copyright Infringing, Thanks to Court Attacks on LLMs (www.techdirt.com)

A federal judge in Authors Guild v. OpenAI (S.D.N.Y., Oct. 27, 2025) denied OpenAI’s motion to dismiss claims that ChatGPT outputs infringed novels by authors including George R.R. Martin and David Baldacci, concluding that computer‑generated summaries are “very likely infringing.” Judge Sidney Stein flagged a ~580‑word ChatGPT summary of A Game of Thrones as conveying the book’s “tone and feel” and “parroting” plot, characters and themes—calling it akin to abridgment. The opinion leans on prior decisions (e.g., Twin Peaks, Colting) and leaves open that fair use might save defendants, but only after costly litigation. The ruling matters beyond this lawsuit: it challenges long‑standing boundaries between idea and expression and could sweep ordinary summaries—from Wikipedia plot synopses to student book reports—into copyright exposure. For the AI/ML community the implications are practical and legal: LLM outputs that distill copyrighted narratives may now be subject to infringement claims, increasing compliance risk for downstream products and raising the stakes for safe‑output design, labeling, and content filtering. Because the decision comes at motion‑to‑dismiss stage, it’s not final law, but it signals a potential chilling effect on automated summarization, downstream publishing, and public discourse unless courts clarify how fair use and summary‑style transformation apply to generative systems.