Why licensing is crucial

Recently I wrote a defense of licensing, from medieval practices to modern authorship and occupation licensing.

Here’s why licensing is needed. A judge has made a completely unusable and pointless decision on AI theft.

Anthropic likely violated copyright law when it pirated authors’ books to create a giant dataset and “forever” library but that training its AI on those books without authors’ permission constitutes transformative fair use under copyright law.

Before Disney bought the copyright law, a copyright was a license. You had to formally REGISTER a work with a sufficent sample of it, and you had to PAY. Both actions are crucial. The government was then effectively employed by the copyright owner, and the government would assist** the owner in prosecuting thieves.

Under a license, whether the old copyright or a written contract, it’s EASY to define fair use. If the user ASKS PERMISSION from the owner and RECEIVES PERMISSION from the owner, the user can make SPECIFIC use of the material within the SPECIFIC TERMS of the contract, paying if wanted. No ask, no permission.

Under Disney’s arrangement, everything you write is allegedly “copyrighted”. This means that Disney and other giants are able to prosecute ANYONE for ANYTHING if they choose to, while non-Disneys have to beg the thieves to be nice.

Begging Altman to be nice is like begging an alligator to avoid digesting you. After the material has been gobbled up by Altman’s jaws, there’s no way for a judge to determine whether it was only “trained” or “digested” in Altman’s reptilian gut. The “training” inputs serve to control the output, and the “digesting” inputs serve to control the output. It’s all alligator shit when it comes out the other end.

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Can’t resist: “Training” the AI is like shaping digestion with vitamins or electrolytes. In other words, it’s like Gatorade.

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** Assisted: I don’t mean the Copyright Office would pay your lawyer fees. They supplied authoritative evidence of ownership, which deterred thieves. As with cars and houses, publicly available proof of ownership makes it hard to claim ignorance or “fair use”.