<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/04/if-creators-suing-ai-companies-over-copyright-win-it-will-further-entrench-big-tech/>
"There’s been this weird idea lately, even among people who used to recognize
that copyright only empowers the largest gatekeepers, that in the AI world we
have to magically flip the script on copyright and use it as a tool to get AI
companies to pay for the material they train on. But, as we’ve explained
repeatedly, this would be a huge mistake. Even if people are concerned about
how AI works, copyright is not the right tool to use here, and the risk of it
being used to destroy all sorts of important and useful tools is quite high
(ignoring Elon Musk’s prediction that “Digital God” will obsolete all of this).
However, because so many people think that they’re supporting creators and
“sticking it” to Big Tech in supporting these copyright lawsuits over AI, I
thought it might be useful to play out how this would work in practice. And,
spoiler alert, the end result would be a disaster for creators, and a huge
benefit to big tech. It’s exactly what we should be fighting against.
And, we know this because we have decades of copyright law and the internet to
observe. Copyright law, by its very nature as a monopoly right, has always
served the interests of gatekeepers over artists. This is why the most
aggressive enforcers of copyright are the very middlemen with long histories of
screwing over the actual creatives: the record labels, the TV and movie
studios, the book publishers, etc.
This is because the nature of copyright law is such that it is most powerful
when a few large entities act as central repositories for the copyrights and
can lord around their power and try to force other entities to pay up. This is
how the music industry has worked for years, and you can see what’s happened.
After years of fighting internet music, it finally devolved into a situation
where there are a tiny number of online music services (Spotify, Apple,
YouTube, etc.) who cut massive deals with the giant gatekeepers on the other
side (the record labels, the performance rights orgs, the collection societies)
while the actual creators get pennies.
This is why we’ve said that AI training will never fit neatly into a licensing
regime. The almost certain outcome (because it’s what happens every other time
a similar situation arises) is that there will be one (possibly two) giant
entities who will be designated as the “collection society” with whom AI
companies will have to negotiate or to just purchase a “training license” and
that entity will then collect a ton of money, much of which will go towards
“administration,” and actual artists will… get a tiny bit.
And, because of the nature of training data, which only needs to be collected
once, it’s not likely that this will be a recurring payment, but a minuscule
one-off for the right to train on the data.
But, given the enormity of the amount of content, and the structure of this
kind of thing, the cost will be extremely high for the AI companies (a few
pennies for every creator online can add up in aggregate), meaning that only
the biggest of big tech will be able to afford it."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
