Author's Guild Fighting A Losing Battle: Lawsuit Flying

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

We are having deja vu all over again.

While history might not exactly repeat, it certainly does rhyme.

However we want to box it up, I have seen this story before. While we can understand the point being expressed, there is a practicality that overrides everything.

We have the author's guild suing Microsoft, the one behind OpenAI, for copyright infringement in the training of its AI system without the permission (and payments) to guild members.

Here we go again.

Source

Technology And The Law

Technology moves at a much faster pace than the law. This is why I keep saying the solution to Gary Gensler and the application of securities laws that are 90 years old is to simply keep building. It is impossible for Congress or any other legislative body to keep up.

This concept gets put on steroids when we are dealing with other technologies. Looking at LLM and other forms of machine learning, good luck with that.

Here we have a repeat of the Napster episode. Record companies were able to take down that application but it failed in its battle against file sharing. Metallica became the poster child for this movement. Record companies went as far as suing parents for their kids downloading hundreds of songs. People were getting bills in the thousands.

Of course, this was a failed effort. Intellectual Property became something very difficult to protect. Laws that were decades old were revamped. The problem is they cannot keep up with technology.

Which brings us to the author's guild.

I am no legal expert so I cannot comment on the potential of this particular suit. Perhaps they have a valid chance of winning. This is a claim against an individual company, one where damages might be accessible.

The problem that I see is what about all the other entities out there. Going after Microsoft, with their deep pockets makes sense. However, what about the hundreds of other companies that might start training their products in the same way?

Lawyers could be on high alert, just like they were 20 years ago. Nevertheless, it could become a game of whack-a-mole.

Losing Battle

As stated, there might be grounds where the author's guild wins this round. That said, if technological history is any guide, they will lose the overall battle.

While it is easy to say do not use my property, once it is on the Internet, it has a way of getting scraped. These lawsuits can take years to settle, with delays built in, often by the defendants. By the time this gets resolved, AI might be running the world.

It seems this is common practice.

When technological disruption enters, those being thrown to the curb turn to the legal system for protection. Unfortunately, by the time it is realized, the game is already over.

This was a year where the chatbots exploded. I have no idea what was used to train them. Was copyrighted material part of the process? Most likely. Are damages warranted? I have no idea but perhaps.

Will it matter in the end? This is where I will go out and claim, not likely.

Technology is going to forge ahead. Protectionism only goes so far. One of the reason why I theorize that governments will be done by the end of the century, at least in this form, is they were not designed for the digital world. This is a completely different era as compared to the physical, geography based nation-state.

Development is taking place all over the planet. While LLM tend to benefit large corporations, there are other ML engines being designed. These could be doing something similar in the taking of copyrighted material. Is the guild going to find everyone? Can they even sue all of them?

It is going to get very difficult. Even when the law wins and a site is shut down, more seem to appear.

When I read the article about this action, I had an instant flashback to file sharing and the illegal download of music.

I am having deja vu all over again.

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