Copyright is a deal society has made to advance the arts and sciences. We get more innovative media of all kinds, and in exchange, we pay for the government's policing of the right to copy.

I'm not AI optimist or booster, but AI is an advancement in the arts and sciences, despite all the risks and downsides. AI is a derivative work from all digitized media.

There's an argument to be made that the AI companies should borrow a copy of every book, rent every movie, etc. But the money accruing to the owners of those copyrights would be marginal, and even summing over all those individual copyright claims, I'd say that the societal benefit to AI is greater.

Maybe it's time that we have compulsory licensing the way that radio can license music to play. As training data for AI, a compulsory license, in principle, should be quite cheap, on par with renting that media.

The bigger question is to what extent AI will tend to make other media obsolete. We are already seeing this with AI summaries in web search undermining the search results themselves. I don't have an answer to that, except to say that severely restricting the training data available to AI is not very helpful.