The internet is not a free-for-all—we shouldn't let big tech companies wish copyright out of existence

SoftwareAIThe internet is not a free-for-all—we shouldn’t let big tech companies wish copyright out of existenceWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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For the avoidance of any copyright concerns in this article, we’ve decided to draw our own images representing some of the themes discussed in the story—Jacob Ridley, 2024(Image credit: Future)

Why copyright right matters, over a crudely drawn countryside scene.

Jacob Ridley, senior hardware editor(Image credit: Future)This week:I just so happened to be listening to Mustafa Suleyman’s book,The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma.In which, the DeepMind co-founder goes into his thoughts on AI and the “technological revolution” he suggests has already begun.

Jacob Ridley, senior hardware editor

(Image credit: Future)This week:I just so happened to be listening to Mustafa Suleyman’s book,The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma.In which, the DeepMind co-founder goes into his thoughts on AI and the “technological revolution” he suggests has already begun.

(Image credit: Future)

Jacob Ridley headshot on a green background

This week:I just so happened to be listening to Mustafa Suleyman’s book,The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma.In which, the DeepMind co-founder goes into his thoughts on AI and the “technological revolution” he suggests has already begun.

So, I say this with the utmost respect to a pioneer in his field: I believe his idea of a “social contract” for the internet is complete nonsense.

With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ’90s has been that it is fair use.Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft

With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ’90s has been that it is fair use.

“It’s a very fair argument. With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ’90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That’s been the understanding.”

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Except that isn’t the understanding. At least not mine, anyways, and if you’ve been taking content freely from anywhere on the internet this whole time, I have some very bad news for you.

If we ignore the fact that freeware is already a thing and, no, not everything on the internet is freeware—just think of the ramifications for a moment if it were so, especially for Suleyman’s own employer, Microsoft—there’s further legalese to prevent a free-for-all online.

There’s something called copyright, which here in the UK was enshrined into law through the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. As a journalist, I have to be very conscious of the right I have to use anything on the internet, otherwise I may (rightly) be forced to pay a very large sum of money to the copyright holder.

Let’s not get too into the weeds with this (he says, not even halfway through a 2,000 word column), but generally copyright law covers “original literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic works.” That includes all manner of text, too, not just novels or short stories, and lasts usually 70 years. The rights to which are initially assigned to the “first owner” or creator of that work.

Here’s a monkey. It was meant to be taking a selfie but hey ho—Andy Edser, 2024.(Image credit: Future)

A crudely draw monkey on a green background with the words ‘Hail Satan’ in the upper corner.

Whether you own the copyright to the art you prompted through a generative AI system, even finessing those prompts to get it just right, is an ongoing debate. However, US courts currently rule against granting copyright in these instances, and have evenbarred award winning artwork from copyright.

Within UK law, the copyright owner (automatically the author or creator, or employer of said author or creator) gets to say who can use its images and how. It’s easy to waive your rights to images—I might see you’ve posted an image of a fun PC mod and message to ask if I have your permission to use it on PC Gamer, for example. If you say yes, providing I give you sufficient attribution for your work, everyone is happy and life moves on.

If I don’t ask your permission and subsequently take the image or “substantial” part of it (which some do, no doubt about that), upon finding out that I’ve encroached on your copyright, you could demand I remove the offending material, sue for damages, or even get an injunction banning me from publishing or repeating an offence again.

This has been the case since the act was introduced in the UK in 1988—which I’d add was before the internet was a big deal. Similar protections also exist around the world, including the US and EU.

So there’s really no excuse for saying we’ve all been living in some kind of wild west where anything goes on the internet. It doesn’t, AI companies just want that to be the case, and they arefighting to protect their own interests.

There are a few defences for taking copyrighted works without permission in UK law. These mostly come under something called fair dealing. Fair use in the US is a similar concept but different in practice and applicability—as a UK national, it’s mostly fair dealing that covers my actions. There are a few versions of fair dealing: one covers reporting of current events , another for review or criticism, and quotations and parody are also covered. Unless AI is actually a big joke, that last one won’t offer much of a defence.

The PC Gamer logo crudely drawn.

Neither will the rest. They don’t cover photographs, for one, which are proactively defended in the law. They also require a user to not take unfair commercial advantage of the copyright owner’s works and only using what’s necessary for the defined purpose. They also frequently require sufficient acknowledgement—none of which is the done thing in generative AI.

That’s a grey area and I think that’s going to work its way through the courts.Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft

That’s a grey area and I think that’s going to work its way through the courts.

“There’s a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organisation had explicitly said do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so other people can find that content. That’s a grey area and I think that’s going to work its way through the courts.”

“So far, some people have taken that information. I don’t know who, who hasn’t, but that’s going to get litigated and I think that’s rightly so.”

Except that the one form of content that doesn’t generally come under copyright law are actually news articles.

Plenty of publishers will argue against AI systems on the finer points of these systems and what constitutes lifting and what’s just taking without asking and without fair recompense—see theNew York Times vs. Open AI case. I’ll leave that to the lawyers. My argument is that, legal or not, an AI summarising stories with no kickback for the people working to create those stories will ultimately do a lot more harm than good in the long run.

You can have this one for free, AI—Jacob Ridley, 2024(Image credit: Future)

Artificial intelligence drawn crudely with the words ‘ooo, art’ at the bottom right.

Simply put, I don’t understand the argument from Suleyman here. Maybe it’s a degree of wishful thinking from someone inside the AI inner circle looking out, or maybe he’s looking around the internet and seeing some sort of wild west without any rules? But that’s not the case, even considering the common exceptions to copyright law we’ll get to in a moment.

Copyright infringement happens all the time on the web, and it’s a debasement of both our rights as creators to not have our stuff nicked and the value of the content itself. Does that mean we should just lay down, admit defeat, and let an AI system or dataset crawler rewrite the rules so that copyright need not apply to them? I don’t think so.

AI, explained(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)What is artificial general intelligence?:We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.

AI, explained

(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)What is artificial general intelligence?:We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.

(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.

What is artificial general intelligence?:We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.

The UK has something similar in place, as an exception to the 1988 Act, which allows fornon-commercial use of data mining. This is generally not considered a viable defence for large AI firms with public, and commercial, generative AI systems. The UK Government had alsoplanned another exception, since the sudden popularity of AI systems, though that has since fallen through. That’s probably to the benefit of people in the UK, who are technically safe from data mining for commercial purposes, but not for the AI firms hoping to scrape data from within the UK’s borders.

The exact ways in which companies hope to circumvent these limitations or how these laws look in practice are matters that lawyers, civil servants and politicians will have to debate for years to come. Though generally I just want to make it clear that these arguments exist because of copyright law—not for a lack of it.

Speaks for itself—Jacob Ridley, 2024.(Image credit: Future)

A crudely drawn data miner.

“What a pity,” the AI exec might say.

Because, after all, it’s not just my words in an article that an AI might look fondly upon, or even someone’s publicly published artwork, but perhaps your wedding photos or your smutty fanfiction. And what then, of that AI generated advert for something that you don’t agree with that looks like you, or sounds like you, of your ability to get it removed oryour likeness untrained? Now,thatsounds a lot more like the pandemonium free-for-all that Suleyman believes has been happening this entire time.

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