Jacob Ward's Warning | Is A.I. Stealing Art?!
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How did the speaker's family background shape his view of copyright?
I grew up the son of a writer. He was a novelist, then a historian. And I remember at the bottom of the manuscripts that he typed out and submitted on paper to publishers was always this mysterious symbol, this little C with a circle around it. that he had protecting him against having his work stolen by other people. And I grew up sort of thinking about that a lot as one of the sort of cool things about living in the United States. And I didn't really realize how cool until I went to lunch one day with a friend of mine years ago when I was a magazine editor. And he told me the story of having written a script and submitting it to a famous actor's production company and then watching that actor go ahead and make the movie without giving him any credit or involving him or certainly paying him in any way.
And I was very cynical at the time. I was in a kind of beaten down part of my career. And I remember thinking, man, you must have gotten screwed, huh? And he laughed and he said, nope. He said he had registered it with the Writers Guild, which gave him copyright. And then he had an attorney send a demand letter to the company and he got a big settlement. And he said, that's how I bought our apartment. I raised two kids there thanks to this. Copyright in the United States is a big deal. It's constitutionally enshrined. We, in our constitution, talk about the need to facilitate the progress of science and the useful arts by basically giving exclusive ownership over a work to a creator, an author, a musician, a painter, whatever it is.
But at the same time, we don't give them the right to control the idea that we give them the right to have ownership over the expression of the idea. And that balance is a really important thing because it means you can't just say, I own the idea for the internet or for flowers on a canvas. Instead, what you own is your execution of that idea. And that is how we have, in part, been such an incredibly creative country is because we both protect creators' rights, but don't make it such that you can lock up creativity for all time. Why am I telling you all this? Well, because right now the Trump administration seems to be getting ready to do away with a bunch of the copyright protections that people like my dad and my friend and millions of artists and creative people have enjoyed all this time.
in order to hand the big AI companies the right to basically just use those copyrighted works. Over this past weekend, Sherry Perlmutter, who is the head of the Copyright Office in the United States, learned by email on a Saturday that she had been fired. And this I don't think is a coincidence. Most of the observers that I've been speaking to say it is probably not a coincidence that she got fired right after releasing the third part of a big report on AI that basically said that the Copyright Office was beginning to think that more and more AIs might be in violation of copyright or at the very least might owe creative people some consideration of the exclusive rights they have under copyright before these companies feed this stuff into training their AI systems.
Now I have a piece up at TheRibCurrent.com about this whole thing. And if you look back several months, you can also see one called The Exact Moment We Gave It All to AI. And this is a moment, a historical moment that I think about a lot because back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, There was a big fight brewing over Google Books, which at that time had basically sort of begun without anyone's permission, just scanning in copyrighted books. And what they argued when they were finally sued by two different big authors groups about it, was we are in fact transforming this work, these pieces of literature, these pieces of nonfiction, these history books, into a whole different thing. What we're making is an academic resource that people can use to study up on something.
And as a result, they fell under what in copyright law is known as fair use. If something is transformative, if it turns what was a product of the market into an entirely new interpretation of that product, one that doesn't seek to replace the old one, but is a new version of it with new value, that's considered fair game.
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