Making it Unfair, or Who Owns Creativity? AI, Copyright and the Battle for Wealth and Control
Tuesday, February 25, 2025 at 12:29PM Today has seen yet more protests - this time from newspapers and musicians, the latter including Kate Bush, Damon Albarn and Annie Lennox - against AI companies for using their copyrighted work without permission to train generative models.
Yet, to reiterate, the solution to what OpenAI, Stability AI and co. are doing is not to preserve or strengthen existing copyright law. That would be to continue upholding a system that just benefits a relatively small group of organizations and creatives - Kate Bush, Damon Albarn and Annie Lennox included - to the disadvantage of nearly everyone else.
Or is that, in fact, the real issue? Is the debate really about who gets to belong to this small, privileged group in the future? Newspapers, musicians/music companies, or BigAI?
Crucially, the approach of the wider UK Creative Industries’ Make It Fair campaign - of resisting AI ‘piracy’ by preserving or strengthening copyright law - ignores what David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu make clear in their recent book Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Copywrongs:
- Copyright is a major driver of inequality in the twenty-first century.
- It plays a pivotal but often overlooked role when it comes to understanding the roots of disparities of wealth in modern societies.
- the wealthiest corporations globally derive their power primarily from owning copyright and patents, with ‘sixteen of the fifty richest people in the world’ amassing their fortunes entirely or partially from copyright-related industries.
What’s so fair about this?