Why Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey Want To Eliminate Intellectual Property Rights

Eyes are rolling. The short answer is that big tech billionaires want to eliminate intellectual property rights - and related law - because it gives mere content generators access to the vast sums of money they are generating - or expect to gain - from AI. D'uh. 

Tech has always purloined others legally protected intellectual property rights. But accomodations have been negotiated - witness the recent Hollywood actors and writers strike. AI has raised the stakes again because it requires so much content that there are concerns not enough exists and that some will have to be manufactured specifically for that purpose. Some argue out of self interest that such laws give China an advantage in the AI race. But others point out that if the US ignores intellectual property rights, why should other countries recognize US intellectual property? The issue is who controls all that copyrighted, trademarked and patented material and the money it is minting. Musk, Dorsey and others in big tech are making it clear that what's theirs is theirs and what's yours is theirs. Everyone else better hold on to their wallets. JL

Gerrit de Vynck and Will Oremus report in the Washington Post:

AI that powers ChatGPT or X’s Grok was trained using huge numbers of images and text scraped from the internet, much of it copyrighted. Tech companies argue copyrighted material to build AI falls under the “fair use” exemption of copyright law. But people who make a living producing creative works - artists, authors, news organizations and filmmakers - have sued AI companies, demanding pay and permission before using their copyrighted for AI. Tech titans are demanding more permissive copyright laws (because) without the fair-use exception, developing new AI products will be too time-consuming and expensive. OpenAI argues if AI isn’t covered by fair use, the U.S. would cede control over the future of AI to China. 

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Square, posted a cryptic and drastic demand on Elon Musk’s X over the weekend: “delete all IP law.” The post drew a quick reply from Mr. X himself: “I agree.” Musk’s laconic response amplified Dorsey’s post to his 220 million followers and sparked a debate that drew in a cast of characters including Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, tech lawyer and former vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, novelist Walter Kirn, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller and the technologist and early Twitter developer Evan Henshaw-Plath, a.k.a. Rabble, among others. It could all be dismissed as idle social media chatter if Musk didn’t have a track record of turning X posts into U.S. government policy via his prominent role in President Donald Trump’s administration, as our Washington Post colleagues recently explained. “The line between a random conversation on Twitter/X and actual government policy is thinner than it used to be,” TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha wrote. Serious policy idea or not, the concord between Dorsey and Musk highlights how the debate over AI and copyright law is coming to a head in Silicon Valley. How it’s resolved will have major ramifications for the tech companies, creative people and their livelihoods and the overall AI race. The AI software that powers products like ChatGPT or Musk’s Grok chatbot was trained using huge numbers of images and text scraped from the public internet, much of it copyrighted. The tech companies argue using copyrighted material to build AI tools falls under the “fair use” exemption of copyright law because the outputs from those AI models substantially change the underlying art, music or writing. But many people who make a living producing creative works disagree. Artists, authors, news organizations and filmmakers have all sued the AI companies, demanding they pay and ask for permission before using copyrighted works to make their AI. The tech industry is recoiling, arguing that without the fair-use exception, developing new AI products will be too time-consuming and expensive, or even impossible. OpenAI, in a submission to the White House last month, argued that if AI isn’t covered by fair use, the U.S. would be ceding control over the future of AI to China. If “American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over,” OpenAI wrote in its submission. The tech industry has always had a complicated relationship with intellectual property laws. The internet caused an earthquake when it went mainstream in the late 1990s and people began sharing songs and books freely. After years of lawsuits, Hollywood and the record industry made peace with tech and worked together to enforce digital copyright laws. Now the fight is heating up again, and tech titans are again demanding more permissive copyright laws. The idea of deleting all intellectual property law is “a bit ridiculous,” given its roots in the U.S. Constitution and numerous acts of Congress, said Tiffany C. Li, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. Drawing on English common law, the Constitution gave Congress the power to establish copyright and patents in order “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.” There are legitimate arguments that IP law today is “too strictly enforced” in ways that limit creativity or broad access to new technologies or pharmaceuticals, Li said. But weakening intellectual property protections would come with huge costs. Those directly harmed would be artists, creators and inventors whose work could be copied or appropriated without compensation, Li said. There could also be downstream harms to society if fewer people and companies take the time and trouble to create new things, knowing they won’t be remunerated for it. And if the U.S. loosens its IP protections, other countries may respond by declining to enforce American companies’ intellectual property, opening the floodgates to counterfeit goods. Musk has generally espoused a more open approach to copyright. His auto company, Tesla, pledged in 2014 not to sue other companies for using its trade secrets. Musk is currently suing OpenAI, arguing that it has abandoned its mission of making AI to benefit all of humanity by trying to shed its nonprofit status and become a more traditional moneymaking corporation. The cuts directed by Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have already hit the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In February, Vaishali Udupa, the head of the USPTO, resigned, writing on LinkedIn that workers at the agency “face uncertainty amid unprecedented reductions and restructuring of the federal workforce.” Trademark lawyer Josh Gerben wrote in a blog post soon afterward that if there are significant cuts to the USPTO, “The entire trademark system … will grind to a halt.” Regardless of Musk’s actions, the fight is far from over. A flotilla of major lawsuits against OpenAI and other AI firms will go to trial throughout the rest of the year, even as the tech companies charge ahead with building new tools that rely on copyrighted work.