US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

One aspect that I feel is ignored by the comments here is the geo-political forces at work. If the US takes the position that LLMs can't use copyrighted work or has to compensate all copyright holders – other countries (e.g. China) will not follow suit. This will mean that US LLM companies will either fall behind or be too expensive. Which means China and other countries will probably surge ahead in AI, at least in terms of how useful the AI is.

That is not to say that we shouldn't do the right thing regardless, but I do think there is a feeling of "who is going to rule the world in the future?" tha underlies governmental decision-making on how much to regulate AI.

Well hell, by that logic average citizens should be able to launder corporate intellectual property because China will never follow suit in adhering to intellectual property law. I'm game if you are.

Well I always felt rebellious about the contemporary face of "rules for thee but not for me", specifically regarding copyright.

Musicians remain subject to abuse by the recording industry; they're making pennies on each dollar you spend on buying CDs^W^W streaming services. I used to say, don't buy that; go to a concert, buy beer, buy merch, support directly. Nowadays live shows are being swallowed whole through exclusivity deals (both for artists and venues). I used to say, support your favourite artist on Bandcamp, Patreon, etc. But most of these new middlemen are ready for their turn to squeeze.

And now on top of all that, these artists' work is being swallowed whole by yet another machine, disregarding what was left of their rights.

What else do you do? Go busking?

We regulate it like how we did centuries ago that lead to copyright. If we already have rules we enforce it. If no one in power wants to, we put in people who will.

In the end this all comes down to needing the people to care enough.

Disney continued to lobby to extend copyright for like half a century. A lot of people did care. What use is regulation if you can just buy it?