If they're going to treat copyright works like a public good, then the product they produce should also be a public good to prevent the "free-rider" problem.
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The free rider problem is also a form of market failure...
The production of public goods results in positive externalities which are not remunerated. If private organizations do not reap all the benefits of a public good which they have produced, their incentives to produce it voluntarily might be insufficient.
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The US government has just made the NY Times content a public good, and in doing so, allowed openai to create a private good, for which they will be remunerated instead.
It could be argued that this means the US government has effectively taken profit from one company to fund another, under the guise of helping global competitiveness, and whilst this may be the current M.O. of the Trump administration it means predominantly domestic companies are effectively forced into providing export subsidies for the new industry, and monopolising (or oligopolising?) an incumbent.
I wonder if on this basis Seedance could also be equally legally be allowed to use copyrighted media for its video AI, so effectively they're also pulling the legs out from under the film industry too.
To some extent, and obviously grossly over-simplified here, copyright is the act of taking some already public good and putting private rights on it. My reading of the amicus is that the government is arguing that particular rights that NY Times are asserting that they have are not ones that promote the aims of the original reasons for copyright to exist and so aren't necessarily ones which need to govern the behavior of any other people (in this case OpenAI, but this likely applies to any LLM training no matter the size).
Comments
If they're going to treat copyright works like a public good, then the product they produce should also be a public good to prevent the "free-rider" problem.
--- The free rider problem is also a form of market failure... The production of public goods results in positive externalities which are not remunerated. If private organizations do not reap all the benefits of a public good which they have produced, their incentives to produce it voluntarily might be insufficient. ---
The US government has just made the NY Times content a public good, and in doing so, allowed openai to create a private good, for which they will be remunerated instead.
It could be argued that this means the US government has effectively taken profit from one company to fund another, under the guise of helping global competitiveness, and whilst this may be the current M.O. of the Trump administration it means predominantly domestic companies are effectively forced into providing export subsidies for the new industry, and monopolising (or oligopolising?) an incumbent.
I wonder if on this basis Seedance could also be equally legally be allowed to use copyrighted media for its video AI, so effectively they're also pulling the legs out from under the film industry too.
To some extent, and obviously grossly over-simplified here, copyright is the act of taking some already public good and putting private rights on it. My reading of the amicus is that the government is arguing that particular rights that NY Times are asserting that they have are not ones that promote the aims of the original reasons for copyright to exist and so aren't necessarily ones which need to govern the behavior of any other people (in this case OpenAI, but this likely applies to any LLM training no matter the size).