In your parent comment, you argued what people would do in practice. Now you have shifted to talking about what is legal or not to do.
I'm not a legal scholar, so I'm not qualified or interested in arguing about whether Cliff Notes is fair use. But I do care about how people behave, and I'm pretty sure that Cliff Notes and LLMs lead to fewer books being purchased, which makes it harder for writers to do what they do.
In the case of Cliff Notes, it probably matters less because because the authors of 19th century books in your English 101 class are long dead and buried. But for authors of newer technical material, yes, I think LLMs will make it harder for those people to be able to afford to spend the time thinking, writing, and sharing their expertise.
It surely matters whether people actually use the thing for copyright violations or not. Summaries are not even copyright violations so that's irrelevant. Long verbatim copies would be, but one would have to demonstrate that this use case is significant, convenient enough to provide a viable alternative to otherwise obtaining the particular text chunk etc.
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> But for authors of newer technical material, yes, I think LLMs will make it harder for those people to be able to afford to spend the time thinking, writing, and sharing their expertise.
Alright, you're now arguing for some new regulations though, since this is not a matter for copyright.
In that context, I observe that many academics already put their technical books online for free. Machine learning, computer vision, robotics etc. I doubt it's a hugely lucrative thing in the first place.
I'm not a legal scholar, so I'm not qualified or interested in arguing about whether Cliff Notes is fair use. But I do care about how people behave, and I'm pretty sure that Cliff Notes and LLMs lead to fewer books being purchased, which makes it harder for writers to do what they do.
In the case of Cliff Notes, it probably matters less because because the authors of 19th century books in your English 101 class are long dead and buried. But for authors of newer technical material, yes, I think LLMs will make it harder for those people to be able to afford to spend the time thinking, writing, and sharing their expertise.