Sometimes you have a thought of feeling you can’t quite articulate and then you run into a piece that really nails it. That’s the case this time, from Cory Doctorow’s pluralistic. Over the past couple of months in particular I have heard more and more critiques of GenAI, across the board from the tools, to the environmental damage, to worker rights, to education. There’s a lot at play, but it really wasn’t sitting well that comparisons to Napster keep being drawn, and that some of the very same mistakes may well be made again to increase the scope of copyright yet again, with some folks going so far as to wish that copyright is the lever that will reign companies in and benefit workers. Some are even cheering on the big three.
In a very important, material sense, creative workers – writers, filmmakers, photographers, illustrators, painters and musicians – are not on the same side as the labels, agencies, studios and publishers that bring our work to market. Those companies are not charities; they are driven to maximize profits and an important way to do that is to reduce costs, including and especially the cost of paying us for our work…
…But we live in an era of extreme market concentration in every sector, including entertainment, where we deal with five publishers, four studios, three labels, two ad-tech companies and a single company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks. That concentration makes it much harder for artists to bargain effectively with entertainments companies, and that means that it’s possible -likely, even – for entertainment companies to gain market advantages that aren’t shared with creative workers. In other words, when your field is dominated by a cartel, you may be on on their side, but they’re almost certainly not on your side.
DoctorowDoctorow walks through the changes to the copyright notice issued by Penguin Random House. It ties into some of the earlier work published on this topic at pluralistic.
The copyright page now includes this phrase:
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.
Many writers are celebrating this move as a victory for creative workers’ rights over AI companies, who have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in part by promising our bosses that they can fire us and replace us with algorithms.
But these writers are assuming that just because they’re on Penguin Random House’s side, PRH is on their side. They’re assuming that if PRH fights against AI companies training bots on their work for free, that this means PRH won’t allow bots to be trained on their work at all.
…
As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism:
DoctorowGiving a creative worker more copyright is like giving your bullied schoolkid more lunch money. No matter how much you give them, the bullies will take it all. Give your kid enough lunch money and the bullies will be able to bribe the principle to look the other way. Keep giving that kid lunch money and the bullies will be able to launch a global appeal demanding more lunch money for hungry kids!
In some ways, copyright might seem like a smallish concern with the development and use of GenAI, especially when sat next to the power demand and related environmental impacts of not just training LLMs but maintaining and using the datacentres to run the services. But I see them as closely related. Expansion of copyright in the early 2000s is one of the reasons now that we have to buy ink for our HP printers at thousands of dollars per gallon, farmers can’t fix their own tractors, we can’t fix our iPhones (and instead generate heaps of e-waste), and artists get ripped off by a huge streaming company both monetarily and in distribution.
I think in an earlier work, Seize the Means of Computation, Doctorow outlines a bit of history around new mediums and the expanding scope of copyright from sheet music, to radio, to television, to Napster. I wonder what this chapter will bring, and what unintended consequences will arise.