AI Didn't Break Copyright Law, It Just Exposed How Broken It Was

AI exposed the fundamental flaws in copyright law by removing human-scale constraints that made informal tolerance of infringement manageable for decades. While fan art and derivative works existed in a gray area where enforcement was selective and rare, AI's ability to generate massive volumes of content at ultra-low cost has transformed these quiet ambiguities into billion-dollar legal battles that reveal copyright frameworks designed for discrete, physical works cannot handle today's fluid, personalized, and global digital landscape.