Can Copyright Bullies Beat AI?
Copyright is structurally bad at protecting individual creators, and it will not save them from AI.
Copyright tends to benefit middlemen, much more than the creator.
Compared to property rights over physical goods, the laws are difficult and complex to enforce. If someone steals physical property, you can call the police, but there is no such thing as a ‘copyright police’ you can call if someone steals your IP. The enforcement of copyright laws is complex, so are the disputes, the case law, and how damages are calculated and awarded. The actors who benefit the most are resourceful middlemen, such as law firms, record companies, movie studios, big corporations with in-house legal teams, etc. who can shoulder the complexity and vagueness.
I am slightly ashamed to admit that I once worked as a legal advisor for a copyright collective management company. The company hid behind a high-minded rhetoric of “protecting creative work in the digital age” but the underlying business model was pure and clean extortion. Essentially, the business model was to blackmail small companies by sending cease-and-desist letters with dubious legal claims and outsized fines over trivial copyright infringements to the sole benefit of themselves and image licensing agencies. Many of the victims decided to just pay the fines, because smaller businesses don’t have the resources or the legal knowledge to fight such frivolous claims in court.
Out in the non-digital world, “collective management companies” might threaten to burn down your store if you don’t pay a protection racket. Depending on which area the shop is located in and how brave the shop owner is, they may have the option of calling the police instead of paying. But again, there is no such thing as a “digital police” or a “copyright police” to call for free. The best alternative to paying a frivolous copyright fine is to get acquainted with lawyers whose fees are so expensive that it would be cheaper to just pay the fine in the first place.
This is one example of how copyright law works in the real world. It’s a business opportunity for powerful middlemen who can hire legal muscles to do the dirty work on their behalf. Can the same arrangement work against more powerful AI companies that have scanned the entire internet’s worth of intellectual property to create highly sophisticated slop machines? It likely can’t.
Generally, whoever has the greatest amount of resources to shoulder the most uncertainty and complexity will win in a copyright dispute. The Big Tech companies can afford to hire the best legal teams in the world and they operate in such a complex technical environment that telling right from wrong is difficult for any jury or judge.
I personally think it would be a net good for society if copyright laws could be used as a pin to pop a hole in the AI bubble. Not because I hate AI or am afraid of the technology, but because American AI rests on unhealthy financial, digital, and philosophical foundations, and it will be a net good for society when the bubble pops – as it eventually must.
My purpose with writing this post is just to illustrate that copyright laws may not be the savior creative professionals are waiting for. Here is a crazy idea: What if – for example – the EU didn’t invest billions of Euros in building ‘AI Giga Factories’, but instead invested a few more millions on grants to support artistic, scientific, and other creative pursuits? A radical suggestion, I know.
