The tech company’s latest proposal about generative AI turns copyright law on its head, and could especially hurt smaller content creators, say experts
In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
True, I wrote this from a US law perspective, where that kind of behavior is expressly protected. US law is also written specifically to protect things like search engines and aggregators to prevent services like Google from getting sued for their blurbs, but it’s likely also a defense for AI.
Regardless of if it should be illegal or not, I feel that AI training and use is currently legal under current US law. And as a US company, dragging OpenAI to UK courts and extracting payment from them would be difficult for all but the most monied artists.
For the moment, US companies do actually care what the UK courts and regulatory bodies say, because the trifecta of US-UK-EU is what tends to form a base of what the rest of the world decides. It’s why Microsoft have been so unhappy about the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority initially blocking the merger with Blizzard: even with the US and EU antitrust bodies agreeing to it, it did actually matter if the UK didn’t agree (I am so disappointed in the CMA finally capitulating). And some of the lawsuits against the AI companies are taking place in the UK courts, with no indications that the AI companies are refusing to engage. Obviously at this point it’s hard to say what the outcome will be, but the UK legal system does actually have enough clout globally that it won’t be a meaningless result.
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True, I wrote this from a US law perspective, where that kind of behavior is expressly protected. US law is also written specifically to protect things like search engines and aggregators to prevent services like Google from getting sued for their blurbs, but it’s likely also a defense for AI.
Regardless of if it should be illegal or not, I feel that AI training and use is currently legal under current US law. And as a US company, dragging OpenAI to UK courts and extracting payment from them would be difficult for all but the most monied artists.
For the moment, US companies do actually care what the UK courts and regulatory bodies say, because the trifecta of US-UK-EU is what tends to form a base of what the rest of the world decides. It’s why Microsoft have been so unhappy about the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority initially blocking the merger with Blizzard: even with the US and EU antitrust bodies agreeing to it, it did actually matter if the UK didn’t agree (I am so disappointed in the CMA finally capitulating). And some of the lawsuits against the AI companies are taking place in the UK courts, with no indications that the AI companies are refusing to engage. Obviously at this point it’s hard to say what the outcome will be, but the UK legal system does actually have enough clout globally that it won’t be a meaningless result.