Copyright in the Age of AI

A reader recently asked a fascinating question:

I was wondering about your opinion about copyright as a creative and business owner, i.e. Creative Commons, copyleft, all those things that are confusing! I’ve tried searching through your blog, couldn’t find anything, not sure if I’ve missed it.

What a great question and, honestly, not one I’ve ever really spent time exploring. My site has had the little © at the bottom since the late 90s, but short of thinking it protects my content, I’ve never really thought about the implications. This question sent me on a journey of exploring copyright and its super weird history, and now I’m going to share it with you!

I started exploring copyright by trying to understand where it originated. Believe it or not, copyright was not one of the original laws found on Hammurabi’s Code. In fact, copyright didn’t exist as a law until Gutenberg changed the world.

When Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press in 1450, the world of publishing went from being controlled by the extremely wealthy (those who could afford hand-scribes) to anyone who could afford a press. With the mass adoption of printed material, copyright laws began springing up to protect the commercial interest of publishers.

Early copyright privileges were called "monopolies," particularly during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who frequently gave grants of monopolies in articles of common use, such as salt, leather, coal, soap, cards, beer, and wine.

In other words, early copyright law was intended to give publishers a monopoly over their printed works. These laws provided financial protection to the publishing houses that distributed books.

The printing press made written knowledge accessible to all. As a result, literacy wasn’t exclusive to the wealthy, the church, or those in power (which, you know, were basically all the same people). As people began to read, ideas were being spread through printed books. People could start to think for themselves. As such, those in power got scared.

As the "menace" of printing spread, governments established centralized control mechanisms, and in 1557 the English Crown thought to stem the flow of seditious and heretical books by chartering the Stationers' Company. The right to print was limited to the members of that guild.

The right to print is one hell of a concept in today’s world. But, I guess in 1557, printing could lead to power and it was a right to be granted, not inferred.

Copyright laws led to unauthorized publishers being jailed or worse. Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake in 1546 for illegally printing in France. Not even 100 years after Gutenberg made knowledge accessible to the masses, governments were trying to limit its spread, all under the guise of protecting copyright.

Here’s where things start to get really interesting for me. John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost, challenged the concept of copyright in 1644. He called it a form of “pre-censorship” preventing “free-expression.”

Milton is not wrong. Copyright laws were used to control who could and could not publish and, therefore, what ideas were allowed to spread. Copyright was censorship, and power was again reverted back to those with the ruling class’s favor.

Copyright laws have expanded and compounded over the centuries but remain a commercial enterprise to protect a publisher’s monopoly while simultaneously restricting access to certain ideas. This is all starting to feel really icky, isn’t it? After all, we haven’t mentioned a single benefit to authors at all...

In the early digital age, some started to wonder if copyright laws still had a place in society.

Commentators such as Barlow (1994) have argued that digital copyright is fundamentally different and will remain persistently difficult to enforce; others such as Richard Stallman (1996) have argued that the Internet deeply undermines the economic rationale for copyright in the first place. These perspectives may lead to the consideration of alternative compensation systems in place of exclusive rights for all types of information, including software, books, movies, and music.

Boy were Barlow and Stallman right. As anyone who has had their work scraped and republished on a foreign click farm knows, enforcing copyright online is virtually impossible. Things are only getting worse now that AI firms think every word published online is fair game.

So, does copyright even matter? Did copyright ever matter? I honestly don’t know.

After reading through the history, the whole concept of copyright feels wrong. As I wrote last year, I believe knowledge and ideas should be accessible to all. I also believe that authors should be able to profit from their work. It’s a dichotomy that runs right into the very concept of copyright law.

As Barlow and Stallman predicted, alternative compensation systems have arisen for information online.

• Copyleft: Primarily used in software, Copyleft allows users to “modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work” so long that the “same rights be preserved in derivative works.”
• Creative Commons: “These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.”
• Voluntary Collective Licensing: This license places access behind a subscription wall and distributes earnings among the creators whose work is accessed.

Copyright is a form of control, not for the creator, but for the publisher or those in power. The concept has evolved, but it’s a way to limit ideas or prevent their distribution. Creative Commons seems like a viable option that is genuinely in tune with the spirit the internet is built upon, but does it matter when tech companies or click farms believe they have access to every written word? I really don’t know.

I’m not removing the © at the bottom of my website — not yet, at least. I’ll continue to read about Creative Commons and see if that makes sense for my writing. What do you think? What is your take on copyright in a digital world?