A Stand-Up Act for the Ages: You probably know the old publishing joke: What’s the difference between a writer and a large pizza? A large pizza can actually feed a family of four. What was once funny is now prophetic.
When Copyright meets Comedy
Enter Sarah Silverman, comedian, writer, provocateur—and now, reluctant copyright crusader. In an act that blends copyright law with stand-up rebellion, comedian Sarah Silverman is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for allegedly delivering her hard-earned, controversy-drenched content to artificial intelligence models without so much as a tip, a credit, or even a cheap laugh. Her case, along with others from authors and publishers, may be the last great stand against the Silicon Valley stage dive into creative theft. Or, as Rodney Dangerfield might’ve put it, “Copyright law – I tell ya’. It gets no respect.”
Is Silverman the savior of publishing? Or is she just the first comic to walk into a courtroom and say, “Take my content, please… but bring a checkbook”?
Worse than every “Hack”… Combined
If you’ve ever trained for a marathon, written a novel, or even just made it through an episode of Black Mirror without checking Twitter, you understand effort. I’m talking about real human effort. The kind of effort that includes sweat, tears, deadlines, and a stack of rejection letters thicker than the Manhattan phone book. (How old am I?)
Now, imagine that human effort being strip-mined by AI models that read everything, regurgitate anything, and credit… well, nothing.
Welcome to the LLM “Open Mike Night”, where Big Tech (OpenAI, Google, and Meta) are copying entire libraries faster than Milton Berle stole jokes. (Am I really that old?) LLM’s are on a mission to recreate the entire internet before the midnight show.
And what are LLMs copying? Your Journal articles.Your books. Your blog posts. Your scripts. Your jokes. All of it, whether you offered it up or not. It’s like someone stealing Eddie Murphy’s entire Delirious stand up act, adding bit about Donald Trump, and calling it their own, with a disclaimer of “fair use.”
Silverman’s lawsuit isn’t just a legal spat. It’s the equivalent of yelling, “Hey! That’s my joke!” into a concert hall where the audience is already laughing.
The Kings have Abdicated their Kingdoms
Here’s the punchline that really hurts: publishers, those guardians of content, defenders of authors, titans of the printed word are folding faster than a card table at a garage sale.
Instead of rallying against this AI land grab, many are accepting laughably low licensing deals. We’re talking $16 million here, $50 million there – couch cushion money in Silicon Valley terms.
These companies spent decades building catalogs, vetting authors, nurturing stories. Now they’re selling off the rights to teach AI how to write like the very people they’re supposed to protect. If irony had a PR team, it couldn’t craft a more brutal tagline: “Publishing – training tomorrow’s AI to replace today’s writers.”
It’s like getting paid in drink tickets to teach someone your job, only to watch them do it faster, cheaper, and with no bathroom breaks.
Enter Silverman – Jokes as Juris Prudence
Silverman isn’t just punching up. She’s taking on Muhammad Ali, George Foreman and Mike Tyson all at once in the same ring.
Alongside authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, she filed lawsuits in 2023 against OpenAI and Meta, alleging that these companies trained their models on their books without permission. I’m not talking about pirated PDFs from some high school kid’s hard drive. These are full-fledged shadow libraries like Library Genesis and Z-Library.
Silverman’s The Bedwetter, Golden’s horror tales, Kadrey’s dark urban fantasies all used, “allegedly,” as if copyright is optional and intellectual property is a polite suggestion. The AI models “allegedly” generated summaries of their books so detailed they could be mistaken for Cliff Notes on Adderall.
What do the plaintiffs want? Money. Credit. Respect. Maybe even a return to the radical idea that creators should be paid for their creations. “That’s Wild.” That’s a Bob Hope reference. (I feel like I’m even older than I thought a few paragraphs ago.)
The Legal Stage – Am I Bombing, yet?
Let’s talk law. More specifically, U.S. copyright law, where nothing’s easy and everything depends on what four vague “factors” say about “fair use.”
If you want more detail, see my February 4, 2025, article Fair Use Opens the Door to IP Theft. But for now, here’s a quick summary on what constitutes Fair Use that will enable you to understand the rest of this article and has just enough legalese to make your eyes glaze.
- Purpose and Character: Is the use transformative? Is it nonprofit? (Spoiler: Silicon Valley is allergic to nonprofit motives.)
- Nature of the Work: More creative equals more protection.
- Amount and Substantiality: Did they take the whole thing or just the part that makes it valuable? (Hint: It’s usually the good stuff.)
- Market Effect: Did this hurt the market for the original work? If AI gives you the book summary, why buy the book?
OpenAI and Meta argue their use is transformative, meaning it’s more than copying. They claim it’s creating something new. The authors say, “New?!? It’s just my work with the serial numbers filed off.”
Courtroom Comedy or Creator Catastrophe?
In February 2024, Silverman’s case against OpenAI took a hit. A judge dismissed several of her claims, citing lack of direct evidence and economic harm. So, no slam dunk yet. But one crucial claim survived: Unfair Competition.
Meanwhile, her case against Meta gained unexpected momentum when a judge ruled that Mark Zuckerberg himself must be deposed. Yes, that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Founder and CEO. Apparently, being the face of the metaverse also makes you a key witness in whether your AI slurped up The Bedwetter like it was bedtime reading.
Meta called the author’s argument “nonsensical,” claiming their LLaMA model isn’t derivative of any particular book. In other words: “We trained it on everything, but trust us. It remembers nothing.”
The judge, for what it’s worth, didn’t entirely buy it. So, here we are, left waiting for the big joke that finishes the set.
Publishers, Take My Advice, Please
You folks in the publishing world have been notoriously slow to see trends, threats and opportunities. So, let me help you. Here are three questions the publishing world should be asking right now, but aren’t.
- What happens when AI writes better than humans?
- What happens when AI sells better than humans?
- What happens when your back catalog becomes AI’s front catalog?
There’s only one answer, and it seems to be obvious only to me: If AI models are trained on your archives today, they won’t need you tomorrow. That’s not collaboration. It’s cannibalism with a spreadsheet. For my entire career as a licensing lawyer, publishers were afraid to license their intellectual property because of their unwarranted fear of cannibalism that never existed. And now, when cannibalism is staring them square in the face, they can’t see it. Go figure.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is offering “Copilot Copyright Commitment”, which is a fancy way of saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll handle the lawsuits if our AI steals stuff and you get blamed.” If that’s not comforting, it’s because it’s not supposed to be. It’s insurance against a fire that the insurance company started.
Transformative Use or a Transformative Excuse?
Transformative use has become Big Tech’s favorite punchline. But not all judges are getting the joke.
Take a quick look back at these 3 cases
- Warhol v. Goldsmith (2023): The Supreme Court said Warhol’s use of a photo of Prince wasn’t transformative just because it was in a different style.
- Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence (2025): The court ruled Ross’s use of copyrighted legal materials wasn’t fair use. It was commercial and competitive.
- Perfect 10 v. Amazon (2007): Thumbnails were ruled transformative, because thumbnails have a different function and a different purpose.
So where does that leave AI? In the awkward middle, like a second banana. Question: If a model trained on 40 million books can spit out summaries of your book, compete in your market, and get there first, then what, exactly, is being transformed?
Answer: The entire publishing industry.
The Humans Strike Back… Maybe.
Silverman isn’t alone. Dozens of lawsuits are being filed by authors, musicians, filmmakers, and anyone whose work has mysteriously turned up in an AI prompt. And rightly so. What’s happening isn’t inspiration. It’s extraction.
Sure, AI doesn’t plagiarize word-for-word (most of the time), but it learns from existing work, your work, to predict, mimic, and eventually outperform human creators at scale.
And if the courts decide this is all fine under “fair use”? Well, prepare for the age of infinite, mediocre content—written by nobody, owned by everybody, and profiting only the biggest tech players.
From Laughter to Legacy
Sarah Silverman has always weaponized humor. Now she’s weaponizing the legal system. It’s the same impulse. Call out hypocrisy, challenge power, and hope the audience (or judge) laughs in the right places.
She’s not just suing for herself. She’s suing for every creator who’s ever wondered where their content went, and why it suddenly started talking back like it swallowed their style whole.
This isn’t just a legal moment. It’s a cultural one. If Silverman wins, it could establish a new precedent. AI must pay to play. If she loses? We’ve effectively declared that everything humans create is up for grabs, so long as it’s filtered through a silicon brain and reworded.
We Wrote the Script. Who gets the Credit?
The future is here, and it doesn’t have an editor. It has algorithms. It doesn’t ask permission. It scrapes. It synthesizes. It sells.
And it doesn’t say thank you.
Sarah Silverman may not single-handedly save publishing, but she’s given it a shot in the arm, and maybe a swift kick a little further down. Her lawsuits are a wake-up call to creators, publishers, lawmakers, and yes, even comedians.
Because if we don’t fix this now, to quote the late, great Rodney Dangerfield: “I get no respect… I wrote the damn joke, and now my toaster’s telling it.”
If you’d like a serious legal analysis of the Silverman case, please let me know and I’ll do a follow up article. It will be complete, but I’m fairly certain it won’t be as entertaining.
About the Author
Frank Bilotto is a licensed attorney with over 25 years of experience in commercializing intellectual property. He was instrumental in creating The World Reporter in 1999, an alliance of 10,000 daily newspapers, and the first such content alliance in the digital content space. He’s negotiated more than 1,000 intellectual property licenses with the world’s largest organizations, including Comcast, Google, BBC, NewsCorp, Gannett, ESPN, NBC, CBS, ATT, Dow Jones, Thomson Reuters, Facebook, Microsoft, Nike, Adidas, Hewlett Packard, Knight Ridder, Capitol Records, MGM and Paramount. Frank’s passion outside of content licensing is trying to love his neighbor as himself.
