Be vigilant about copyright bill or risk being thrown under AI juggernaut

I have a hunch that there’s a large percentage of the readership of this publication who spend their lives turning their ideas into tangible things: words, music, designs, and whole shows even.

In an ideal world, their reward wouldn’t just be seeing those things conjured into something from seemingly nothing: it’s great if there’s also some money to be made from the end result. Money is not the be-all and end-all, but it sure helps pay the rent.

Assuming, of course, others like your work, that’s only really possible if you can prevent them from just blatantly copying your creations.

Technology has always been the challenge here. When books were handwritten, making copies was laborious and incredibly expensive. Then came the printing press: effectively infinite copies could be made very cheaply. The authors were a bit disgruntled, and laws were created to protect them, governing the rights of people to copy work: copyright.

As it stands today, if you work for yourself, once you create your ‘thing’ – your words, set or lighting cue – you ‘own’ that thing and control the rights to it. If others want to use it, they have to pay you for the right to do so. It’s a system that has worked reasonably well for a long time. However, technology never stands still. Now it’s the AI industry that’s after your stuff. This so-called artificial intelligence is effectively data mining on a massive scale: super-powerful computers sifting information really quickly to spot patterns, then using those patterns to create new work. But the machines need data to sift. The source: HI – human intelligence. The work of those who create, including, very probably, you.

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