For those who have time this weekend or anytime, this long, really valuable essay in the New Yorker explains just how crazy the copyright system actually is – and that generative artificial intelligence could bring it to an end.
In a world of professional entertainment, superstars (which I last wrote about here) and entertainment corporations, rules apply that do one thing not: serve the public. (Perhaps the tension between individual creativity and “culture that belongs to the world” can never be resolved.)
A few notable points:
Copyright law leads to an absurd culture of lawsuits. Corporations sue small artists and people next door if there is a painting hanging in their photos, a snippet of “The Simpsons” playing on a television in the background of their documentaries, or a song in the background of a YouTube video. Companies, including those in the financial sector, see music rights as an investment that can be milked for passive income. (If I were Bruce Springsteen, however, I would also sell my catalog for XXX million dollars so that I could get more out of it during my lifetime.) Companies are treated like people – with consequences: The law today treats companies as “authors,” and classifies things like the source code of software as “literary works,” giving software a much longer period of protection than it would have if it were classified only as an invention and eligible for a patent (now good for twenty years, with some exceptions) . Generative AI asks new, interesting questions that go to the heart of copyright: “the AI-generated version of Johnny Cash singing a Taylor Swift song, which was posted online last year by a person in Texas named Dustin Ballard. But who owns it? Could Taylor Swift sue? Probably not, since it’s a cover. Does the Cash estate have an ownership claim? Not necessarily, since you can’t copyright a style or a voice. Dustin Ballard? He neither composed nor performed the song. No one “Does it belong to all the world?” (more on the last point in this Piq)
In short: AI is now breaking through the thicket that copyright already is and calling some certainties into question. Which, given the strangeness that is part of copyright law, can actually only be a good thing.