Copyright vests in the creator from the moment of creation. You don’t need to register it, publish it, add a copyright symbol, claim your rights, or anything else. It’s yours and it’s protected.
At least it used to be.
Now, AI companies are slurping up copyrighted content to train their own algorithms. What they’re doing is morally wrong and illegal. But it didn’t appear out of the blue.
When publishers started to put content on the Internet, they were told that it would expand their reach, build their audience, and give them a new revenue stream from online ads. I remember frequenting a news site from Arizona — something I would never have seen without the Internet. (I live in Maryland.)
Discovery was the name of the game, and Google became the front door to the internet. If you wanted your content to be found, you had to jump through Google’s hoops, which included allowing them to index your content to feed their search algorithms.
That was a big mistake. The allure of online ad revenue distracted content creators from the obvious need to create terms and conditions for how their content was used in Google’s secret sausage factory. Since there was nobody to stop them, Google just did what they wanted — not only with the consent of the content creators, but with their active assistance!
This (and other things) created the false impression that content on the Internet was free for the taking, and that (false) assumption has guided the development of artificial intelligence. Tech companies feel they have a blank check when it comes to online content.
I want to be clear about this. Scraping copyrighted content, ingesting it wholesale into AI models, and then using that stolen content to compete against the very creators they took it from is illegal and immoral. There are situations where “fair use” exceptions would apply, but the AI titans don’t really care about the rules, they just do what they want and make up excuses to justify their behavior.
Some publishers are pushing back. (Finally!!)
Unfortunately, they will lose for one simple reason. Fear of China.
“If you inhibit the development of AI in the United States, China will get out ahead, and that will be a strategic disaster for the country.”
- “We had to do it to stay ahead of China.”
- “It’s a national security issue.”
- “Don’t let copyright get in the way of global dominance.”
It’s not a pretty argument, and it’s not a fair one to the people who make a living creating content. But it will prevail because the strategic threat will have more pull than copyright.
