AI Is Making Many People Rethink Copyright
from the a-great-reckoning dept
For the last hundred years or so, the prevailing dogma has been that copyright is an unalloyed good, and that more of it is better. Whether that was ever true is one question, but it is certainly not the case since we entered the digital era, for reasons explained at length in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). Despite that fact, recent attempts to halt the constant expansion and strengthening of copyright have all foundered. Part of the problem is that there has never been a constituency with enough political clout to counter the huge power of the copyright industry and its lobbyists.
Until now. The latest iteration of artificial intelligence has captured the attention of politicians around the world. It seems that the latter can’t do enough to promote and support it, in the hope of deriving huge economic benefits, both directly, in the form of local AI companies worth trillions, and indirectly, through increased efficiency and improved services. That current favoured status has given AI leaders permission to start saying the unsayable: that copyright is an obstacle to progress, and should be reined in, or at least muzzled, in order to allow AI to reach its full potential. For example, here is what OpenAI’s proposals for the US AI Action Plan, which is currently being drawn up, say about copyright:
America’s robust, balanced intellectual property system has long been key to our global leadership on innovation. We propose a copyright strategy that would extend the system’s role into the Intelligence Age by protecting the rights and interests of content creators while also protecting America’s AI leadership and national security. The federal government can both secure Americans’ freedom to learn from AI, and avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the [People’s Republic of China] by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.
In its own suggestions for the AI Action Plan, Google spells out what this means:
Balanced copyright rules, such as fair use and text-and-data mining exceptions, have been critical to enabling AI systems to learn from prior knowledge and publicly available data, unlocking scientific and social advances. These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation. Balanced copyright laws that ensure access to publicly available scientific papers, for example, are essential for accelerating AI in science, particularly for applications that sift through scientific literature for insights or new hypotheses.
Although developments in the world of AI are giving companies like OpenAI and Google an opportunity to call into question the latest attempts to strengthen copyright’s intellectual monopoly, they are not the only voices here. For example, some of the biggest personalities in the tech world have gone even further, reported here by TechCrunch:
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner, Elon Musk, quickly replied, “I agree.”
It’s not clear what exactly brought these comments on, but they come at a time when AI companies, including OpenAI (which Musk co-founded, competes with, and is challenging in court), are facing numerous lawsuits alleging that they’ve violated copyright to train their models.
Unsurprisingly, that bold suggestion provoked howls of outrage from various players in the copyright world. That was to be expected. But the fact that big names like Musk and Dorsey were happy to cause such a storm is indicative of the changed atmosphere in the world of copyright and beyond. Indeed, there are signs that the other main intellectual monopolies – patents and trademarks – are also under pressure. Calling into question the old ways of doing things in these fields will also weaken the presumption that copyright must be preserved in its current state.
There’s another important way in which copyright is losing its relevance. It involves AI once more, but not because of how today’s AI systems are trained, but as a result of their output. The ease with which generative AI can turn out material has had a number of important knock-on consequences. For example, as a post on the Creative Bloq site explained:
Some designers who use stock image libraries to source photos, illustrations and vectors for their projects are finding that they have to wade through more unusable [AI-generated] content to find an image that suits their needs, adding more time to their workflows.
The same is happening in other fields. An article on the NPR site last year explored the growing problem of “AI-generated scam books”:
“Scam books on Amazon have been a problem for years,” says Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, a group that advocates for writers. But she says the problem has multiplied in recent months. “Every new book seems to have some kind of companion book, some book that’s trying to steal sales.”
It’s also becoming a serious issue for music streaming services:
Deezer, the global music streaming platform, is receiving over 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks on a daily basis. It equals over 18% of all uploaded content, an increase from the previously reported 10% in January, 2025, when Deezer launched its cutting edge AI-music detection tool.
These AI-generated images, books and music tracks have one thing in common: they are probably not protected by copyright in any way. This is an evolving area of law, but a recent report by the US Copyright Office seems to confirm that material generated purely by AI, with minimal human input — for example, in the form of prompts — is not eligible for copyright protection:
Copyright law has long adapted to new technology and can enable case-by-case determinations as to whether AI-generated outputs reflect sufficient human contribution to warrant copyright protection. As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements.
Assuming this approach is confirmed both in the US and elsewhere, the net effect is likely to be that vast swathes of AI-generated text, images and sounds found online today are in the public domain, and can be used by anyone for any purpose. Once people understand this, and start using AI-generated outputs that they find online freely, without any fear of legal action being taken against them, there will be important knock-on effects. First, people may well seek out such AI-generated material, since it is legally unproblematic compared to complicated licensing schemes for copyright material, assuming the latter are even available. And secondly, people will as a result grow increasingly accustomed to re-using anything they find online, to the point that they simply ignore copyright niceties altogether.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published at Walled Culture.
Filed Under: copyright, generative ai
Companies: google, openai
Comments on “AI Is Making Many People Rethink Copyright”
AI as Fair Use is just not convincing
I generally agree with Mike’s takes on copyright and fair use but on this particular issue I’m not fully convinced that AI training is fair use when the models have been shown time and again that they can repeat their training data verbatim in more than small amounts.
The affect on the market is also a factor in fair use analysis and those pushing LLM AI’s claim they will replace Journalists and writers and artists with LLM slop also plays a role.
When they were just toys at universities I could see the argument that they fall under fair use but once taken out of the educational context at a minimum the training data should have to be obtained legally and with permission of the creator.
How to square that with things like the first sale doctrine among other legal standards is not something I have an answer for but I can’t believe a free for all for the AI companies to suck up every bit of content and then market their models to replace the roles of the creators of that content does not seem like an equitable outcome.
If anything I feel the better fix is reigning in the over broadness of copyright in other areas such as the length of time before things enter the public such that more older content is available to all and the LLM companies only need to license the most recent and up to date information instead of only things that are nearly 100years old being available to the public.
As it is now if I downloaded all the material and training data these companies obtained to build their models and then tried to profit off of it I’d never see the light of day again no matter how “transformative” I tried to argue my use was but these large corporations can do it with impunity.
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At the scale that a human can read and retain such information, what you’re describing is education and academia. And that might lead to profitable careers in any number of fields if applied effectively. If you could remember everything you read, you could do massive aggregate studies of academic works. Research scientists spend years doing that. Remembering writing styles might help you learn to be a better novelist. There are so many applications that this level of retention and breadth of knowledge would mark you as a valuable source of information and insight.
True hypcrites
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner, Elon Musk, quickly replied, “I agree.”
Putting aside the fact that both of these men are murderous sociopaths, this is laughably hypocritical given that the companies they run are falling all over themselves to file patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
It’s obvious why: they want IP laws for themselves, but not for anybody else. And since both of these men are utterly bereft of any humanity — there’s no art, music, literature, or anything remotely close in either of them — it makes perfect sense that they want to enrich themselves while destroying the careers and lives of the people who actually create culture.
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That’s unfair; Musk writes tons of fiction.
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Elon would be quite happy to sweep away IP protections now he’s king of the world, financially, and wants to be able to use the fruits of other people’s labour and creativity in any way he sees fit.
If there was a sudden realism applied to the price of Tesla stock and he stopped being rich as Croesus, all the talk of abolishing IP would evaporate just as quickly about him giving a crap about the environment, about wanting to use his wealth to solve world hunger or rescue stranded kids. The dirtbag Elon in the maga hat is who he has always been, people need to stop bringing him up like he’s actually thinking about acting for the betterment of mankind in this one specific instance when it puts him on the ‘right’ side of an issue they care about.
The enemy of your enemy is not your friend, don’t quote the man currently supporting attempts to demolish anything and everything positive done by government and demanding that one of the few great things the Internet has achieved in Wikipedia be destroyed for not being as sh*tty as he’s made twitter.
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“All Our Patent Are Belong To You”:
Tesla’s 2014 statement was a bold move to make its electric vehicle technology freely available for use by others
What were you saying about hypocrites?
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[Citation needed]
In the style of the “Is this a Pigeon?” Meme:
AI: Floods the zone with slop that makes it tougher for people to do their jobs
Glyn Moody: Is this the start of a public domain renaissance?
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Considering the capacity of the general public for consuming slop, whether from AI, advertisers/influencers or politicians, it could be…
So, um, have you been paying attention to real life for the last 6 or so years? I feel like if you were, you’d recognize Musk and Dorsey as persons that love causing shitstorms for attention, and that they are persons that one should never take advice from or listen to.
This ties back into what I wanted from AI in the first place- an image generator that could take things owned by corporate behemoths, make completely public domain images derived from them, and since the computer has no sense of right and wrong, could not be charged with committing a crime. Similar to how robots can repair undersea cables, fix space stations and work inside volcanoes, this amoral unthinking device could be used to circumnavigate copyright issues without anyone being guilty of anything.
It’s just too bad AI is being used today to undercut actual artists with a bunch of low-quality crap “artwork”
The only way copyright is going to change is for the worse. They’re going to create carveouts for AI training to loot the output of independent creators who have made it quite clear that they do not agree to the usage, while making sure the big publishers can keep bringing the hammer down on people who can’t fight back as they lack the resources of Facebook and Microsoft. AI ‘created’ works will start to get protections by the end of the Trump presidency, opening things up to become as undeniably sh*t as the patent system, with people who create nothing sitting on ideas, names and concepts generated en masse by machines, waiting until an automated system finds a match from someone they can sue in the court of a handpicked judge in texas.
Elon claiming that he supports ANYTHING these days should have you waiting for the other shoe to drop. IF he really wanted to wipe out all his patents, he could do so tomorrow but he hasn’t. He’s claimed to have open sourced things but has done so in a way where anyone using Tesla’s patents surrenders the rights to enforce their own, while granting Tesla the rights to use any improvements to the technology they develop. That’s not being anti IP law, that’s harnessing it to try and get free R&D from startups.
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They don’t need to, there’s already a carveout for human training to loot the output of independent creators, and it’s called education. But keep defending bad laws with your inaccurate anecdotes, copyright shill.
Reminder that IP law as it is STEALS FROM THE PUBLIC
The whole point of copyright in the US is To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, and yet ever since Disney was able to strong-arm the federal government into extending copyright terms, that purpose has been lost in favor of profiting large studios.
The point was originally to build a robust public domain, a huge body of art and techniques and studies and knowledge that the rest of us could tap into to make even more (and build useful stuff). And this is noted right on this site every year Public Domain Game Jam, celebrating the new things from around a century ago that have just entered the public domain.
Once upon a time that temporary monopoly was ten or twenty years. Before the dark time.
The ambition for a public domain to serve everyone been entirely hobbled thanks to the extention of IP laws to block most creativity, where it’s undeniable that IP law is used to block transformative content, despite alleged fair use laws.
The only reason copyright is being challenged now is because those laws impede other developments by big data, namely LLM-based generative AI, which does use prior media the way human artists do, to draw transformative inspiration, only now a machine is doing it (and not well, though getting better).
The problem is without a false tool like copyright and the temporary monopoly it grants, art and development of science is just not that profitable in a capitalist society, and we see this in big pharma where rare diseases don’t get much research because it’s not profitable to develop cures for them, and we end up with situations like Martin Shkreli’s Tiopronin price hike.
It’s time to ditch copyright just as its time to ditch capitalism, just as music flourished in Great Britain during its rock-and-roll revolution supported by state-provided benefits, we could promote the arts the same way, by feeding and housing our artists and let them do art, and we’ll get much better stuff than the movies coming out of the Sony and Disney empires.
Kill IP law and support the public enough that it does art for the love of art, and Generative AI will go the way of the camera, at worst, dying as an expensive shlock machine and at best turning into its own medium, in which the art is in what the artist creates (much the way photography is about what the artist chooses to shoot.
I get this looks like a pipe dream right now, but then so does democracy, and we’re fighting for that because the alternative is unconscionable, and our lives are at stake.
It’s time to open everything up for a rethink, and that includes IP law.
Re:
Ditching capitalism? Can you even define capitalism? Or articulate what on earth the alternative would even look like? I ask because it seems literally every anti-capitalist seems to have given up on such a task and instead thrown up their hands to lazily and brainlessly declare “Our inability as supposed theorists of alternatives to capitalism are incapable of coming up with even a workable theory of an an alternative to capitalism is all capitalism’s fault.” (See: capitalist realism)
Instead they have settled upon childishly declaring literally everything they don’t like is capitalism and acting like it is some sort of deep and profound revelation, instead of the intellectual shoving of dust under rugs that it is.
Re: Re:
Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. Under this system, owners reap most of the profit and the laborers who typically do the most work to generate said profits get the least. Our late stage capitalist system involves corruption of democratic institutions for the benefit of the wealthy owners (Musk being a prime example, benefiting from government efforts to help his companies). Laws are written for the wealthy and their corporations primarily. Intellectual property law is a great example of this. They “lobby” and provide “campaign contributions”/bribes to politicians to pass laws that are favorable to them. They get government subsidies for their industry. They get government grants and ignore the requirements and argue for more grants later.
Alternatives include a system by which labor would get the bulk of profits since it’s their labor that generates said profits. If a capitalist could run their company by themselves, they would. That they hire labor indicates the necessity and inherent actual value of labor (despite it being severely undervalued). That wouldn’t even require a switch to a socialist system, the mere suggestion of which spins uneducated capitalist cheerleaders into apoplectic fits. That would just require laws that dictate fair wages (“But muh ‘free’ market!”).
You can do worker-owned collectives seeded with public funding. You can do anarcho-syndicalist industry unions/guilds.
There are a variety of different options.
All that said, you don’t have to have a perfect solution to be able to identify a problem. Nobody has a perfect solution that we could just easily transition to, even if everyone was in favor of it. Society is complex. Transitions are messy and gradual or abrupt and even messier, usually with revolutions and mass deaths involved. But pretending people who disagree with you can’t complain if they can’t satisfy your desire for a perfect solution just means you’ve created a scenario where you’ll always feel smug because it’s not possible to satisfy your conditions. It’s also not necessary to convince you of anything. Why do you even deserve a full solution be provided? You’re not going to change your mind as a result of exposure to a better idea. If you were open to changing your mind, you wouldn’t be setting up a silly, obvious trap.
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, and keep saying it until people start to listen and do something about it – the US Constitution states: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”
Now Walt Disney’s been dead for quite some time. Yet the copyright has been extended for almost as long. Yet if the pupose of copyright is to provide material incentive to writers etc to continue creating, then where are all the new films Walt Disney himself has made, posthumously? Could it be that Disney Corp executives are filching the money that by law is to go exclusively to Walt Disney as the creator of Mickey Mouse? And not publishing his posthumous output? And not forwarding the money to him via the appropriate channels? Could we have on our hands a multidimensional posthumous fraud being committed by Disney Corp?
You may not think it, but I think I know how future generations – assuming that we keep civilization intact for another couple of centuries – are going to get their amusement. At least this – Walt Disney is portrayed as someone posthumously enslaved by malign forces in his own company to keep producing substandard films (lack of easily transferable funding) which are then rejected with prejudice by the mediums who are employed to keep tabs on him (and who are pocketing the money they are supposed to send him); and Mickey Mouse won’t lift a finger to help his creator!?!
Finally, a social benefit from AI.
Abolishing copyright and IP law entirely punches a gigantic hole in the way that people have carved out their digital identities. Abolish IP law entirely and what control do people have over their fursonas, their VTubers, and more?
Artists already have enough trouble with people stealing their art that then gets used in online roleplaying social media accounts. Making their lives even more a hell, where they don’t own what they make, not even art or characters they’ve made to represent themselves, it’s wrong.
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Won’t someone think of the fursonas?
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Gavin Newsom will save us!
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You say this like there’s a huge demand for artist avatars, fursonas and VTubers to be pirated. If someone’s leveraging something about these terminally online individuals, it’s not to cosplay as them. I could put out a crudely drawn rendering of Jaiden Animations and not only would there be nothing they can do about it under existing IP law, it would also be obvious that it’s not them.
How much of a market do you think there is for this? How much do you propose people pay for what is essentially image-based fanfiction?
If it bothers you that much, maybe you should autoreport every online account using Brazilian Hatsune Miku as an avatar.
I can get behind revising copyright law, but I cannot get behind it or take it seriously when it’s coming from people like Dorsey and Musk. They have certainly have created influential products and platforms, but they’ve often done so at the expense of humanity. No one with track records like these guys should have ANY say in how to “make things fairer.”
There has to be limits on copyright the problem for artists is people can say do a poster of person x in the style of day comic book artist George Perez trademarks are useful to consumers eg this is a genuine apple phone with the apple logo on it it’s the first time we have had big companys saying there must be limits s on ip law to allow people to make new art
…such as training other artificial “intelligence” systems. That should be interesting.
Re: Hmmm...
You may have just identified why some AI models are hallucinating more than they used to. Their training sets are polluted.
If IP law was erased in America it still exists in Europe and the rest of the world of someone writes s book a company makes a tv drama film they need to have e window to sell its films tv shows from the 1970,,s are still being watched and still hold up actors depend on residual payments
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Copyright is abolished in the heart and mind of any ardent anti capitalist when he says “I might be arrested for saying/publishing this but…”
Comfortable with our chains
One thing that I’ve found, when trying to have conversations about copyright reform with artists / musicians / writers, is that most of them are still absolutely wedded to a system that does not serve them.
They might agree that the legacy industries have too much gatekeeping, they might agree that those industries don’t do enough to justify their cut, they might agree that the abundance of dodgy practices (hello Hollywood accounting) should be challenged, they might even agree (if you approach the subject correctly) that the whole concept of copyright in a world of digital abundance is ethically questionable.
But try and get them to agree that there could be a better world without (or with a much reduced) copyright? Oh that’s crazy talk!
They will wrap the chains that bind them around themselves like a shield, protecting themselves (ironically) from any new or alternative ideas.
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They care more about the tiny, largely theoretical amount of money they could get by suing someone than about the artistic freedom they’d have if laws were changed.
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To this day I have not seen a single satisfactory explanation of how or why an artist might be incentivized to create less content if copyright lasted “life + 50” instead of “life + 70”.
They’re seriously hoping that nobody notices that no creation is going to happen during that extra twenty years as a corpse.
Screw the regurgitation engines and screw the people who make and use ’em.
AI Inanity
Imagine for a moment that we had a device which was capable of replicating food out of thin air just based upon the knowledge of what the molecular structure of food should look like, and could parse out something and could seriously generate various substances even if you asked for something like ‘beef based broccoli rich in vitamin C’.
Now imagine that in the face of such unprecedented abilities and our fundamental knowledge of the universe and the mathematics that underlie it, everyone’s concerns are only amount to “But what about copyright?” and “This thing which does considerable calculation uses energy, that is bad!”. Then you’ll know exactly how I feel about the state of discourse regarding AI.
I didnt say anything Mr Elon
^^^^^^^^^^^^ THOSE people up there Said it..
The thing about Copyright being a social good and necessary is a Big Lie perpetuated by the copyright cult. It is a social evil deemed ‘necessary’ by the copyright cult not based on reality. What Copyright is really? It is really a bourgeois ideology derived from outdated backward thinking traced to an unenlightened era.
Copyright is not evidence-based or evidence-driven. It promotes a greed-centered morality. Like sharing is not caring but is a ‘theft’, that kind of thing. It does a lot of bad in return for claims of promoting a social good, innovation, which it does badly in so many cases.
The ‘good’ it supposedly promotes is grossly overstated and mostly assumed. It is not reflected in reality. The ideology of copyright monopoly as applied today, what it does is promoting and entrenching bad business models that depend on exploitation of captive markets, and enriching an over-entitled class of copyright landlords at expense of the general society. That what monopolies do. Monopolies don’t add value to society. It takes away value from society by promoting economic inefficiency and social inequality.
This ideology also takes away value from society by promoting barriers to innovation. It too promotes barriers to education which is a REAL social good
unlike Copyright. It also promotes barriers to progress of scientific knowledge like locking so many research papers behind paywalls for example.
In addition, there is no good evidence that Copyright is the best way or necessary for promoting innovation. And how much good is in innovation that Copyright supposedly promotes when it also severely restricts access to said innovation? How much value should be seen in that when it is like only ultrarich who can afford to pay for all the access they want to benefit from all the innovation Copyright supposedly promotes?
Liberties is a real social good too. Why should the liberties of the economically marginalized be taken away for them to ‘benefit’ from innovation that they don’t have financial means to access all whatever their liberties are taken away for? Why should they be treated as inferior to the ultrarich as to access to innovation in a society claiming to be just? Why should they give up their liberties just to enrich the copyright landlords? Social justice is a real social good that the ‘good’ of Copyright also robs from. Free Speech is another real social good that Copyright robs from. Speech is being curtailed just to enrich the corporations.
How is robbing value from society is supposed to benefit society? The supposed value of Copyright to society is overblown and mostly assumed and no one has yet to show that Copyright adds more value than it robs from society. Copyright or other IPs is not necessary for promoting innovation and the copyright cult can’t prove otherwise. Even the oligarch Elon Musk, a huge force in driving innovation in some technology is implicitly acknowledging this. If IP was so necessary for innovation he would not said what he said. It’s past time to abolish digital Copyright . It’s past time to bury this legacy of Queen Anne and move from that backward thinking to a more enlightened and just era.
A modern enlightened and true free market and just digital society can do better than the outdated IP system for a vehicle of ‘promoting innovation’. It’s past time to support a better and more just vehicle that not just promote innovation but also don’t hinder it, that promote equal access to said innovation for all, that equally and fairly enriches all people, and promote better business models; models that don’t depend in exploiting people through copyright rents, and that promote better morality that is not centred around the worship of the Almighty Dollar.