137: Copyright, AI and publishers

The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to create new works by providing a mechanism for them to profit from them. This is good for society because it fuels innovation. If authors know their work will immediately be stolen by AI, there is less chance for profit.

But copyright isn’t forever. At some point is enters the public domain, and there are legitimate arguments over how long a copyright should persist. Rule governing AI need to take into account public domain vs. copyrighted works.

Copyright varies country to country, but the internet is international. This complicates the matter.

Solutions

There has to be a way to calculate the proximity of one set of words to another, and the extent to which copyrighted material is used in a chat response. Rules could be set around this. For example, within a low range of proximity, the LLM doesn’t need to cite its sources. Within a medium range of proximity, it needs to cite and link to the source. A high range of proximity would illegal if copyrighted material makes up a certain percentage of the response.

Creative commons licensing might offer another option. This allows the author to specify how their content may be used. Creative Commons licenses were created to work internationally, so that avoids some of the shortfalls of copyright.

Publishers should continue to pursue copyright challenges to LLMs, but they should also consider using the Creative Commons path — that is, to specify the terms under which their content may be used.