In this post the authors explore how today’s contractual restrictions on AI mirror the concerns libraries raised 20 years ago during the US Copyright Office Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 104 study. Further, they examine the differences between copyright law – which enables access through fair use and other rights – and contracts, which can carry legal weight and intimidation tactics, such as copyright warnings.
Actually there is a small but important difference. Libraries usually don’t generate (much) revenue. They’re funded by public money, institutions… And a subscription is like 25€ annually or it’s free… While AI companies have billions of dollars turnover and they’re very much for-profit. And Fair Use has other applications as well. It allows science, allows me to record television or listen to music in the car or together with friends. I don’t think we can lump all of this together.
You have to remember, AI training isn’t only for mega-corporations. By setting up barriers that only benefit the ultra-wealthy, you’re handing corporations a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive to for regular people to keep up. These companies already own huge datasets and have whatever money they need to buy more. And that’s before they bind users to predatory ToS allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us. What some people want would mean the end of open access to competitive, corporate-independent tools and would leave us all worse off and with fewer rights than where we started.
The same people who abuse DMCA takedown requests for their chilling effects on fair use content now need your help to do the same thing to open source AI. Their next greatest foe after libraries, students, researchers, and the public domain. Don’t help them do it.
I recommend reading this article by Cory Doctorow, and this open letter by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries. I’d like to hear your thoughts.
