a brief history of asking for forgiveness versus permission - the napsterisation of AI...

 

back in the day, the Jesuits used to say that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission. I think that this may refer to the idea that people may have committed minor errors without knowing what they did was wrong, so they were less blameworthy, especially if, after the event, when the priest or other wise person explained to them the error of their ways, they recanted and were forgiven. To ask permission implies that the answer might be "no".

So now we are in a. world where people are being paid to run stuff like this legitimised botnet, effectively becoming part of a P2P file sharing world. Once upon a time (a generation ago, or almost infinitely in the past) if you ran a thing like this (the Napsterised Internet) you would get sharp letters from lawyers or even just be fined by the copyright infringement police.

Post Napster, Google acquired Youtube and took an interesting step...they basically took the Jesuit line, with a vengance - the trick was that Google went and did massive deals with all the large copyright owners (actually paying quite serious money) and then if you or I uploaded something already covered by that agreement, then no problem. If we uplaoded something not yet covered by the agreement, Google had an offer - they could offer advertising revenue, or possibly market research (popularity metrics), or as a last resort, take down the content.

While the large copyright owners have not been the best of friends to the artists who actually create stuff, this was at least semi-legitimate (I'm not a lawyer, obviously, but it seems to follow the aforesaid Jesuit model, and that has history behind it:-)

Now we have all those GenAI tools trained on a  lot of content that is avaialble on the non pay-walled Internet - this does not mean it isn't copyrighted. The AI/LLM companies are notably trying to claim fair use type arguments (which search engines 20 years ago most notably did not) - the difference may reflect a change of culture, a shift in legal interpretation (of say fair use) or perhaps simply a shift in power (AIs owned by companies that have a larger market cap than the GDP of most countries).

At least one of those AIs is run by the aforesaid search engine company. But others are not, and don't necessarily have search, and certainly don't appear to have done the large deals for content with those big copyright owning companies...

So the game is afoot... ... ...