The AI-Scraping Free-for-All Is Coming to an End

Syndication is the answer. Small artists are on Spotify, small video makers are on YouTube.

We don't need these institutions. We don't need these publishing platforms.

It's ok for them to die. They no longer provide value.

Adversarial scraping is not a thing, and it can't hurt you.

Fair use, however, is a thing, and what we need to be doing is totally overhauling copyright law such that it maximizes protections for individual creative types, and does away with the exploitable corporatized loopholes and bureaucracy.

99% of all sales for nearly all copyrighted products are done within the first 4 years of a work hitting the market. Give ironclad copyright to the creator for 5 years. The creator can assign their rights, explicitly, in writing, to a third party, for any particular work, or any particular fraction of their work, but each and every assignment of rights has to be explicitly documented and notarized.

No more DMCA automated bullshit. The creator can submit a copyright claim. They need to provide evidence. If the evidence of wrongdoing is false, they should be fined. If a third party files a claim, they should be fined, zero exceptions, even if they have assigned rights.

Artists and creators and writers should get the recognition - if someone creates a thing, they attach a name to it, and they can lease rights to corporations or the like.

After 5 years, extend fair use to something liberal and generous, requiring both acknowledgments of source works and royalties, no more than 15%, paid to the creator/s. If multiple post-5 year "fair use" creators are involved, the 15% is split between them. From 5-15 years, you have to give credit and pay a fair use royalty. If you're a trillion dollar company, you're shelling out a lot of royalties. If you're an artist reusing other art, or writing fanfic for profit, or whatever, you're buying other artists a coffee in tribute.

After 15 years, it becomes public domain.

Anything older than 5 years becomes fair game for training AI or otherwise using in software. You set aside 15% for distribution and reimbursement once a year, and notify any creator of your use of their material.

We need something sane, that scales, that doesn't hand power to corrupt cadres of lawyers and middle men who do nothing but leach from creatives and ruin innocent people's lives.

AI is here to stay. Let's set up a system in which they contribute back to the commons in a significant way, that doesn't favor byzantine licensing and gatekeeping schemes designed to keep lawyers fat and happy off the efforts of people actually contributing to the common good. Let's allow the corporate media platforms and publishing outfits to die off. We have much better ways of doing things and better ways of rewarding people for their work. We don't need lawyers sucking up 80% of the profits for "facilitating deals" or whatever it is they tell themselves to sleep at night.

Raze the old system and salt the ground. Simplify everything for the practical and creative people to maximize on the value all around, get people the credit and profit they deserve, and foster a vibrant public good. It doesn't need to be thousands of pages of technicalities and byzantine law and legal tradecraft. That game was built for the lawyers, and we should stop playing it.

Is there even one example of a “tech mega corp” that has grown to control more than 1/5 of its market without this circling back to hurt people in some way? A single example?

I wouldn't be quite so sure about that. The AI industry has entirely relied on 'move fast and break things' and 'old fart judges who don't understand the tech' as their legal strategy.

The idea that AI training is fair use isn't so obvious, and quite frankly is entirely ridiculous in a world where AI companies pay for the data. If it's not fair use to take reddit's data, it's not fair use to take mine either.

On a technological level the difference to prior ML is straightforward: A classical classifier system is simply incapable of emitting any copyrighted work it was trained on. The very architecture of the system guarantees it to produce new information derived from the training data rather than the training data itself.

LLMs and similar generative AI do not have that safeguard. To be practically useful they have to be capable of emitting facts from training data, but have no architectural mechanism to separate facts from expressions. For them to be capable of emitting facts they must also be capable of emitting expressions, and thus, copyright violation.

Add in how GenAI tends to directly compete with the market of the works used as training data in ways that prior "fair use" systems did not and things become sketchy quickly.

Every major AI company knows this, as they have rushed to implement copyright filtering systems once people started pointing out instances of copyrighted expressions being reproduced by AI systems. (There are technical reasons why this isn't a very good solution to curtail copyright infringement by AI)

Observe how all the major copyright victories amount to judges dismissing cases on grounds of "Well you don't have an example specific to your work" rather than addressing whether such uses are acceptable as a collective whole.

The right thing would be for the end users to receive the compensation Reddit is getting from AI companies.

VC will eventually run out, then comes the burst.