TIMOTHY LEE: Copyright Will Strengthen, Not Weaken AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies require access to enormous amounts of data, including valuable creative works protected by United States copyright and other laws.

It’s therefore no surprise that the biggest AI companies have been lobbying President Trump for months to weaken or override those intellectual property (IP) laws, claiming that requiring them to negotiate for rights to “training data” (that’s the AI companies’ term for what you and I call “books,” “newspapers,” “movies,” “art,” and other creative works) will somehow slow them down and forfeit leadership on AI to less scrupulous countries like China.

That’s just false.  Protecting America’s IP won’t hinder progress on AI, it will strengthen and accelerate it by putting the power of property rights and free markets to work steering investment and innovation in smart, sustainable directions.

And that’s precisely what the Founding Fathers intended when they enshrined IP rights in the US Constitution, empowering authors, artists and all creators to bargain over the use of their work. Those IP rights ensure that the parties with the most knowledge and the greatest interests (on both sides of the deal) ultimately determine price and other terms through free-market negotiations.

Accordingly, protecting IP doesn’t prevent AI companies from using creative works, it simply requires them to cut a deal and pay fair market value to do so.

On the other hand, if we override creators’ property rights and give developers the free pass they seek, that really would undermine American AI over time.

Most immediately, taking away individual creators’ bargaining power would drain income away from them and small businesses while subsidizing the largest AI platforms that can suck up the most material the fastest. That’s the opposite of what President Trump has promised – policies that put working people and small businesses ahead of tech giants and the one percent.

And that’s not just a problem for artists, it’s an attack on every commercial rights holder.

Indeed, President Trump himself stands to personally lose a great deal of money as the owner or beneficiary of a significant portfolio of IP rights, including a valuable global brand, the copyright to multiple books and vast data holdings generated by his Truth Social platform. AI companies shouldn’t be allowed to use those valuable resources without paying what they’re worth in the market.

Over the longer term, as the AI economy gets bigger and bigger, and produces more and more artificial works that compete with human originals, creators would have less and less incentive to make new works to compete in a game that’s been rigged. And if the supply of new human-created works dries up, AI innovation may in turn starve for lack of fresh “training data” to ingest, a self-inflicted wound that can only be avoided if AI pays for the creative material it needs.

The platforms’ short-sighted approach would also foolishly sacrifice one of America’s greatest strategic edges in the global AI competition.  Art and culture is an area where America undeniably leads the world – both as a “soft power” resource that spreads our values and a “hard power” economic tool that runs a $74 billion IP export surplus each year. Overall, the US copyright industries produce over $270 billion in annual foreign sales, more than double even historically strong export industries like aerospace.

As Mitch Glazier, Chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), recently put it, “America has a major advantage in the global competition for AI dominance – we have the greatest scientists, programmers, authors, storytellers, and creative artists in the world. All that brilliance (not to be diminished as ‘data’) is a vital resource desired by anyone who wants to build smarter, stronger, more capable AI.”

Obviously, it’s in America’s interest to protect and value this strategic advantage, not give it away to rivals and competitors for free.

So far, President Trump and his administration seem to get those basic points. The Administration has wisely resisted tech entreaties to become involved in legal cases evaluating tech platforms’ unlicensed use of creative works. Conservative groups like The Internet Accountability Project have also clearly explained the political and economic costs of overriding copyright in order to appease tech giants. And while recent drama at the US Copyright Office raised initial concerns, informed reporting suggests that AI platform efforts to rig the game by putting a thumb on the regulatory scales have backfired.

These are welcome developments. No one doubts the importance of fast progress in the race to develop winning AI technologies. The way to achieve it, however, is to honor IP first principles that put the power of free markets and human creativity to work in support of American innovation.

Timothy Lee is Senior Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs at the Center for Individual Freedom.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the 🏢Daily Caller News Foundation.

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