Nothing had prepared William Passano for a new technology introduced in 1960 that threatened to upend his medical publishing business: the Xerox 914 photocopier. The machine offered the ability to produce cheap and quick duplicates that allowed the government’s National Library of Medicine to mass photocopy articles from his company’s copyrighted medical journals. Passano eventually sued in a case that went up to the Supreme Court, which ultimately took a cautious approach to regulating the emerging technology by ruling in 1975 that it was fair use for libraries to photocopy the originals. The justices left Congress to address the novel intellectual property issues raised in the case, leading to key revisions in copyright law a year later.

Fast forward half a century and the emergence of generative artificial intelligence has the similar potential to turn the entertainment industry on its head. While writers who spoke with The Hollywood Reporter weren’t...