After uncertainly clicking the submit button with only 10 minutes remaining before the deadline, I finally breathed a sigh of relief. Despite my endless self-promises to avoid procrastinating an assignment until the eleventh hour, I still pulled an all-nighter to finish an essay for college. 

A surge of relief and thrill accompanied me in narrowly avoiding the deadline. The relief was short-lived, however, as the next day, the professor bashed me for plagiarizing my essay. To say I was baffled would be an understatement. I had written everything in the essay as ingeniously as I could. Then how could this have happened? Surely he was mistaken. When I looked into it, I found that my professor was indeed correct. I had plagiarized my essay...unknowingly.

While I wrote the essay by myself, some parts of my essay were almost identical to an essay by a famous author. I think this is what happened: I read snippets of the author's work online, and then those passages were burrowed in my subconscious. While in a caffeine-induced frenzy late that night, my mind uncovered those passages and presented them as my own.

This experience led me to question the complexities of copyright law—how do we define originality in an era where so much content is recycled?

With the rapid advancement in technology, content is being created, shared, and reshaped at an extremely fast pace. The existing content on social media is being used, often without permission from the original creator, to generate new content, and the cycle goes on. From YouTube videos to blogs, from TikTok videos to research journals, all content is built upon pre-existing information available on the internet. However, a legal question pops up in this context: at what point does copyright infringement happen?

Copyright law exists to protect people’s original creative work. However, the fair use doctrine allows people to reproduce others’ content without seeking permission at all. Whether something counts as fair use depends on several factors, including the purpose, nature, and character of use. How much of the content is used and whether your use could harm the original creator’s ability to earn money from it also play an important role.

Creative works (novels, art, movies, and songs) have stronger copyright protection as compared to factual works (news, reports, or historical documents). The latter is often used for analytic and educational purposes and is more likely to be protected under fair use. Furthermore, any reproduction of creative works for the sole reason of criticism or commentary also falls under the domain of fair use. However, uploading content with the intention of commercial gain could be considered as copyright infringement. 

The amount of work reproduced can be a crucial factor in determining copyright infringement. Using a small portion of work just to prove the argument amounts to fair use; whereas, using a small portion that is undeniably the central or most significant part of the original work does qualify for copyright infringement. This is how a lot of your favorite YouTubers can get a copyright strike. Reaction videos are especially susceptible to a strike because they are often using clips with minimal added commentary and passing it off as their own. Ultimately, the ball is in the court’s hands to determine whether the particular piece of work passes the necessary threshold or not. Or in the case of YouTubers, it is in the hands of the company to determine whether a video deserves to get a strike.

It is important to mention that copyright protection is not confined to formal registration. Instead, an original work automatically gets protection as soon as it is written, published, or recorded. In this way, the real owner has the protection of the rights to his creation, which in due course prevents others from infringing their right by unauthorized use. However, utilizing the unpublished work of someone without prior permission, especially pre-publication material, can lead to serious legal consequences.  Knowing this, you can see why YouTubers are worried sick about getting a strike. 

With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the complications are increasing day by day. AI is capable of generating content by combining information from various original sources of content. Therefore, AI-generated content may be infringing the IP rights of multiple original creators at once. Furthermore, courts still haven’t settled who owns AI-generated content. But the biggest question remains: who gets held responsible if it crosses the line into unfair use?

Imagine prompting an AI image generator for 'comic book cover art,' and it spits out something nearly identical to a famous Marvel cover, like Spider-Man swinging through the city in that iconic pose. That’s bound to happen because these AIs are trained on tons of existing Marvel comics, so they naturally copy the style. If someone sells that image, Marvel could sue for copyright infringement. Now, who do you think takes the blame: the AI developer, the person who typed the prompt, or both? That’s the puzzle that needs to be solved, and it's one heck of a puzzle.

Indeed, the fair use doctrine serves as an essential tool in allowing certain works to be reproduced for educational, critical, or transformative purposes, ultimately enriching creative and academic discourse. However, there is a very thin line between fair use and copyright infringement, which must not be blurred by giving value to the fair use guidelines and creating meaningful content without infringing the IP rights of other creators. Yet, modern courts must develop new precedents to tackle these emerging challenges

So here's the conclusion I derived from this whole fiasco: today’s copyright law punishes outcomes, not intentions—even subconscious ones, which is just human nature. The law could consider leniency for these innocent human lapses over deliberate theft. But AI takes this to another level, training on massive datasets that remix existing works at scale. Without redefining originality for the AI age, more creators risk the same fate I did, and we're all walking that line now