Daily Archives: November 19, 2025

Summarising a Book is now Potentially Copyright Infringing

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A federal judge just ruled that computer-generated summaries of novels are “very likely infringing,” which would effectively outlaw many book reports. That seems like a problem.

The Authors Guild has one of the many lawsuits against OpenAI, and law professor Matthew Sag has the details on a ruling in that case that, if left in place, could mean that any attempt to merely summarize any copyright covered work is now possibly infringing. You can read the ruling itself here.

This isn’t just about AI—it’s about fundamentally redefining what copyright protects. And once again, something that should be perfectly fine is being treated as an evil that must be punished, all because some new machine did it.

But, I guess elementary school kids can rejoice that they now have an excuse not to do a book report.

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Sag highlights how it could have a much more dangerous impact beyond getting kids out of their homework: making much of Wikipedia infringing.

A new ruling in Authors Guild v. OpenAI has major implications for copyright law, well beyond artificial intelligence. On October 27, 2025, Judge Sidney Stein of the Southern District of New York denied OpenAI’s motion to dismiss claims that ChatGPT outputs infringed the rights of authors such as George R.R. Martin and David Baldacci. The opinion suggests that short summaries of popular works of fiction are very likely infringing (unless fair use comes to the rescue).

This is a fundamental assault on the idea, expression, distinction as applied to works of fiction. It places thousands of Wikipedia entries in the copyright crosshairs and suggests that any kind of summary or analysis of a work of fiction is presumptively infringing.

Short summaries of copyright-covered works should not impact copyright in any way. Yes, as Sag points out, “fair use” can rescue in some cases, but the old saw remains that “fair use is just the right to hire a lawyer.” And when the process is the punishment, saying that fair use will save you in these cases is of little comfort. Getting a ruling on fair use will run you hundreds of thousands of dollars at least.

Copyright is supposed to stop the outright copying of the copyright-protected expression. A summary is not that. It should not implicate the copyright in any form, and it shouldn’t require fair use to come to the rescue.

Sag lays out the details of what happened in this case:

Judge Stein then went on to evaluate one of the more detailed chat-GPT generated summaries relating to A Game of Thrones, the 694 page novel by George R. R. Martin which eventually became the famous HBO series of the same name. Even though this was only a motion to dismiss, where the cards are stacked against the defendant, I was surprised by how easily the judge could conclude that:

“A more discerning observer could easily conclude that this detailed summary is substantially similar to Martin’s original work, including because the summary conveys the overall tone and feel of the original work by parroting the plot, characters, and themes of the original.”

The judge described the ChatGPT summaries as:

“most certainly attempts at abridgment or condensation of some of the central copyrightable elements of the original works such as setting, plot, and characters”

He saw them as:

“conceptually similar to—although admittedly less detailed than—the plot summaries in Twin Peaks and in Penguin Random House LLC v. Colting, where the district court found that works that summarized in detail the plot, characters, and themes of original works were substantially similar to the original works.” (emphasis added).

To say that the less than 580-word GPT summary of A Game of Thrones is “less detailed” than the 128-page Welcome to Twin Peaks Guide in the Twin Peaks case, or the various children’s books based on famous works of literature in the Colting case, is a bit of an understatement.

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As Sag makes clear, there are few people out there who would legitimately think that the Wikipedia summary should be deemed infringing, which is why this ruling is notable. It again highlights how lots of people, including the media, lawmakers, and now (apparently) judges, get so distracted by the “but this new machine is bad!” in looking at LLM technology that they seem to completely lose the plot.

And that’s dangerous for the future of speech in general. We shouldn’t be tossing out fundamental key concepts in speech (“you can summarize a work of art without fear”) just because some new kind of summarization tool exists.

Source: Book Reports Potentially Copyright Infringing, Thanks To Court Attacks On LLMs | Techdirt

Switzerland plans surveillance worse than US

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In Switzerland, a country known for its love for secrecy, particularly when it comes to banking, the tides have turned: An update to the VÜPF surveillance law directly targets privacy and anonymity services such as VPNs as well as encrypted chat apps and email providers. Right now the law is still under discussion in the Swiss Bundesrat.

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While Swiss privacy has been overhyped, legislative rules in Switzerland are currently decent and comparable to German data protection laws. This update to the VÜPF, which could come into force by 2026, would change data protection legislation in Switzerland dramatically.

Why the update is dangerous

If the law passes in its current form,

  • Swiss email and VPN providers with just 5,000 users are forced to log IP addresses and retain the data for six months – while data retention in Germany is illegal for email providers.
  • ID or driver’s license, maybe a phone number, are required for the registration process of various services – rendering the anonymous usage impossible.
  • Data must be delivered upon request in plain text, meaning providers must be able to decrypt user data on their end (except for end-to-end encrypted messages exchanged between users).

What is more, the law is not introduced by or via the Parliament, but instead the Swiss government, the Federal Council and the Federal Department of Justice and Police (FDJP), want to massively expand internet surveillance by updating the VÜPF – without Parliament having a say. This comes as a shock in a country proud of its direct democracy with regular people’s decisions on all kinds of laws. However, in 2016 the Swiss actually voted for more surveillance, so direct democracy might not help here.

History of surveillance in Switzerland

In 2016, Swiss Parliament updated its data retention law BÜPF to enforce data retention for all communication data (post, email, phone, text messages, ip addresses). In 2018, the revision of the VÜPF translated this into administrative obligations for ISPs, email providers, and others, with exceptions in regard to the size of the provider and whether they were classified as telecommunications service providers or communications services.

This led to the fact that services such as Threema and ProtonMail were exempt from some of the obligations that providers such as Swisscom, Salt, and Sunrise had to comply with – even though the Swiss government would have liked to classify them as quasi network operators and telecommunications providers as well. The currently discussed update of the VÜPF seems to directly target smaller providers as well as providers of anonymous services and VPNs.

The Swiss surveillance state has always sought a lot of power, and had to be called back by the Federal Supreme Court in the past to put surveillance on a sound legal basis.

But now, article 50a of the VÜPF reform mandates that providers must be able to remove “the encryption provided by them or on their behalf”, basically asking for backdoor access to encryption. However, end-to-end encrypted messages exchanged between users do not fall under this decryption obligation. Yet, even Swiss email provider Proton Mail says to Der Bund that “Swiss surveillance would be much stricter than in the USA and the EU, and Switzerland would lose its competitiveness as a business location.”

Because of this upcoming legal change in Switzerland, Proton has started to move its server from Switzerland to the EU.

Source: Switzerland plans surveillance worse than US | Tuta

Free Tool Adds Eye-Tracked Foveated Rendering To Many SteamVR Games

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A free tool for Windows PCs with modern Nvidia GPUs adds eye-tracked foveated rendering to a huge number of SteamVR games.

Called PimaxMagic4All, the tool re-implements a feature Pimax ships in its Pimax Play software used to set up and adjust its headsets. As such, if you already own a Pimax headset, you don’t need it.

PimaxMagic4All should work with any SteamVR-compatible headset that exposes a low-level public API to retrieve eye tracking data, or which has third-party software that does so

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The developer, by the way, is Matthieu Bucchianeri, a name you may recognize if you’re a regular UploadVR reader.

Bucchianeri is a very experienced developer, having worked on the PS4 and original PlayStation VR at Sony, Falcon 9 and Dragon at SpaceX, and HoloLens and Windows MR at Microsoft, where he currently works on Xbox. At Microsoft he contributed to OpenXR, and in his spare time he developed OpenXR Toolkit, VDXR (Virtual Desktop’s OpenXR runtime), and most recently Oasis, the native SteamVR driver that revived Windows MR headsets.

PimaxMagic4All has a simple graphical interface with three levels of foveated rendering: Maximum, Balanced, and Minimum. You can choose between prioritizing increasing performance, achieving a result where you shouldn’t notice the difference, or a balance of the two.

The tool can inject foveated rendering into any title that uses the DirectX 11 graphics API and OpenVR, Valve’s deprecated API for SteamVR. The game also needs to not have an anti-cheat system, since those will prevent code injection. And remember, you need to have an Nvidia graphics card, specifically a GTX 16 series or RTX card.

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PimaxMagic4All is available on GitHub, where you’ll find both the source for the code added around Pimax’s core as well as compiled releases.

Source: Free Tool Adds Eye-Tracked Foveated Rendering To Many SteamVR Games

Planned Obsolescence: this is something the EU should care about

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Manufacturers are making things to deliberately break just outside of warranty and also making it hard or impossible to repair components that should be easy to repair. The video below shows this clearly with washing machines.

As an appliance expert with over 40 years in the industry, I am exposing the undeniable evidence of planned obsolescence in modern domestic appliances from major brands like Bosch, Siemens, Hotpoint, AEG, Beko, Hoover, Indesit, and Zanussi. This isn’t just speculation as I use hard numbers and component costs to prove that manufacturers are designing machines to break just outside the warranty period, making them uneconomic to repair. That’s why we are fighting against Planned Obsolescence, and the main culprit is the Sealed Washing Machine Drum. Manufacturers are welding the two halves of the drum together, making it impossible to replace simple, affordable parts like the drum bearings or the spider. This isn’t poor design; it’s a calculated strategy to force you to buy a new machine, creating mountains of e-waste and putting honest repair businesses out of work.