Many arguments advocating the view that AI training does not conflict with copyright rights share a common fallacy, namely that AI outputs represent “competitive” works that copyright law was intended to promote. This error appears in Judge Alsup’s opinion in Bartz et al. v. Anthropic AI, in a report published by AI Progress, and in an amicus brief filed by ...
Over the past 13 years, I have repeated variations on the theme that strong copyright rights are essential because a healthy democracy requires a diverse, professional creative sector. Typically, I have advocated this perspective to refute the claim by the copyleft that copyright rights are in conflict with the speech right. Now that we are in climate in which creators ...
Patrick Gallaher at Public Knowledge recently posted an article about AI training with protected works, proposing to distinguish between piracy and fair use. Not to begin on a pedantic note, but the article is subtitled “Words Matter” because it claims that piracy is a provocative, non-legal term, so I have to respond by saying this is wrong. Although we think ...
To date, social media companies have avoided liability for egregious harm caused by design and management decisions made by top executives. Thanks largely to overbroad application of Section 230, claims against social platforms die at summary judgment, leaving victims without remedy and fostering an incoherent narrative in which Big Tech is still perceived by many as a serpentine conduit of ...
If you follow copyright matters, it would be impossible not to read commentary proclaiming either that copyright is “dead” in the age of artificial intelligence or that confronting AI exposes copyright’s philosophical underpinnings as a convenient fiction. There is nothing new about copyright skeptics claiming that its humanist principles are a fiction, but now that machines can produce material that ...