The AI tech bros want you to believe U.S. copyright law is the only thing standing between America and AI dominance. They and other fearmongers are claiming that any court ruling against generative AI strip-mining of copyrighted works “is the single biggest near-term threat to American AI dominance.”
Tech titans like Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk called to “delete all IP law,” and more workaday figures are claiming “copyright threatens American economic and national security.”
It’s a false narrative. We can protect the rights of American creators and beat geopolitical rivals like China in the AI race.
The United States has a long and storied tradition of strong protections for intellectual property. These protections have led the United States to dominate the world in technological and cultural progress. President Trump gets it, saying earlier this year, “The future of our great Nation depends on the continued safeguarding of our intellectual property, which fuels economic growth, technological progress and global competitiveness.”
Strong IP protections are the legal foundation of America’s core copyright industries, which add more than $2 trillion annually to the U.S. gross domestic product, accounting for 7.66 percent of the U.S. economy and employing 11 million workers. Sales of major U.S. copyright products overseas amount to $272.6 billion annually. There can be no doubt that strong IP protection is a foundation for a strong America.
The same principles hold for AI. America’s global lead in high-quality, high-value creative works sought after to train AI models is a major strategic advantage for U.S. developers. It’s also foundational to a well-functioning internet, so much so that Cloudflare recently launched an AI scrape-bot blocker “to help preserve a safe internet for content creators.”
But Gen AI developers seem to think that to beat China, we need to become China, playing by their rules and “deleting all IP.” That would be a colossal mistake. The better choice is to do what America has always done when faced with similar challenges: reject the “race to the bottom” and ensure everyone follows the rules.
Over the decades, America’s core principle of strong creators’ rights has produced the world’s strongest and most dominant creative economy, as well as the world’s most innovative and effective high-tech economy. Strong IP doesn’t hold innovation back; it pushes innovation forward to greater heights. Strong IP isn’t the enemy of AI Innovation; it’s the backbone. Strong IP, Strong AI.
Make no mistake, the AI bros are pursuing corporate, not patriotic, goals.
AI developers insist that licensing is impossible given the enormous volume of copyright works they seek to use, but that claim doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Most of the big AI companies already license a vast volume of creative works for their consumers, and digital markets for music, books, films and television programming are robust and mature.
Contrary to claims that these AI training deals are impossible to make at scale, a robust free market is already emerging in which hundreds (if not thousands) of licensed deals between AI companies and copyright owners have been reached. New research shows it is possible to create fully licensed data sets for AI.
No wonder one federal judge recently called claims that licensing is impractical “ridiculous,” given the billions at stake. “If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders.” Just like AI companies don’t dispute that they have to pay for energy, infrastructure, coding teams, and the other inputs their operations require, they need to pay for creative works as well.
America’s example to the world is a free-market economy based on the rule of law, property rights and freedom to contract — so, let the market innovate solutions to these new (but not so new) licensing issues. Let’s construct a pro-innovation, pro-worker approach that replaces the false choice of the AI alarmists with a positive, pro-America pathway to leadership on AI.
A win-win-win solution that delivers strong IP, strong AI, and a strong and successful America.
