And in your browser, it's hard to tell who's winning
Remember "fair use"? It's a concept kind of like "public airwaves." There's an ideal in there somewhere, but the context is a world where social contracts really aren't, and it's all kind of worked out, but not really. Alex Raksin tackles "fair use" in How to Copyright the Weather. His explanation is as lucid as one can be about a topic (or set of them) that could hardly resist it more:
Our law treats text as property—a thing you can borrow, return, or fence off. The machine treats text as atmosphere—a pool of probabilities it breathes in. These soft laws are trying to use the vocabulary of real estate to regulate the weather.
Both the hard law and the soft, in short, are failing to resolve the tension between content owners and content users.
So two opposite things are now happening at once. From below, resistance: software developers building tools like Cloudflare’s Pay-Per-Crawl marketplace, which flips the default so AI crawlers are blocked unless a publisher lets them in—free, or for a per-crawl fee the publisher sets. From above, capture: the tech titans simply routing around the public fight by signing private contracts, quietly converting what used to be an open information commons into an elite network of paid toll roads. It isn’t yet clear which direction wins.
Linkages
On Your Terms. Needs to connect to MyTerms.
What If Every Massachusetts Resident Had Their Own AI Agent?
Leave a Reply