AI's Napster Moment May Be Next

Yahoo

4 days ago

Two years ago this month, the Writers Guild of America went on strike for, among other key issues, a set of landmark AI protections to safeguard our writing and our finished work. It took six months of sustained solidarity, picketing and an outpouring of public support — everyone from fellow unions, politicians and yes, even Elon Musk — before the studios finally met our demands.
Today, writers, journalists and creatives across every medium are facing a new kind of existential threat to their professions from the interests of Silicon Valley. Tech companies have been openly lobbying the White House to rewrite copyright law to freely train their models on films, television shows, articles, books and beyond without paying so much as a dime to studios, publishers or writers. OpenAI has been referring to this as 'the freedom to learn.' In New Jersey, it's just called theft.
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Three weeks ago, Shira Perlmutter, the Director of the U.S. Copyright Office, was fired shortly after publishing a new report on Generative AI Training. The release advocated for preserving current copyright law and signaled a setback for Sam Altman's craven attempt to expand the Fair Use doctrine into a smash and grab campaign on decades of copyrighted material. In other words, tech companies cannot use stolen intellectual property in their models.
In the meantime, dozens of ongoing lawsuits against OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini) and Meta (Llama) making their way through the courts. Without a sympathetic judge willing to distort fair use, these companies could find themselves liable in billions of theft, potentially even more in damages, and in some cases, face total bankruptcy.
But we've been down this road before with Napster. The company launched as a free file-sharing app in 1999. Almost overnight people around the world could download entire music libraries in seconds. It was a groundbreaking use of technology that, at the time, felt too good to be true. And that's because it was. Napster was quickly sued out of existence for copyright infringement and racketeering.
Since then, every major media tech platforms — YouTube, Spotify and even OpenAI until recently — have been making deals with studios, publishers and labels to compensate them for using their copyrighted work. While many of these agreements have been deeply flawed and exploitive, the firing of Shira Perlmutter represents a pivot to something much worse.
Silicon Valley is now asking the government for permission to steal our copyright in order to escape their pending lawsuits. They are knowingly trying to de-value our professions and countless others in order to freely enrich themselves without caring about the consequences.
In the case of screenwriters, copyright of an original script is sold to the studios in exchange for core benefits like health care, pension and residuals. This is one of the bedrock principles that has helped sustain writers during the highs and lows of this business. But if copyright protections were to be stripped away, then so begins the unraveling of the entire value proposition that union members past and present have fought so hard to maintain in the film and television industry.
In April, Sam Altman appeared on stage with Chris Anderson, the head of TED, who pointed out, 'At first glance, this (ChatGPT) looks like I.P. theft.' The audience erupted in applause until Sam fired back, 'Clap about that all you want. Enjoy.' And then Sam said something far more revealing, 'We do need to figure out some new model around the economics for compensating creative output. Exactly what that looks like I'm not sure.'
But the copyright system isn't broken. Companies like OpenAI simply don't want to negotiate consent and pay. So, Sam can shrug about 'the economics for compensating creative output' all he wants. Enjoy.
The solution will always be the same. Stop stealing writers work and follow the law.
Larry J. Cohen and Sarah Montana are the co-chairs of the Writers Guild of America East AI Task Force. Cohen is a writer, producer and director who currently serves on the WGAE council. Montana is a writer and public speaker who currently serves on WGAE council.
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