This piece will reflect on the sprawl and entitlement of copyright holders. A great thicket of these cling to AI in its LLM form, sticking their assertions that mere encounter with copyrighted information is crime.

We will look at ongoing AI-related lawsuits and the failures of all sides to argue coherently. The misunderstanding of the premise of copyright has led businesses and customers to think very wrongly about what copyright is and does, and how that differs from what holders wish it does next.

• Copyright holders investigate AI vendors for signs of learning, and call it crime.
• Copyright facilitates much, but never crime upon mere sight or memory.
• Copyright is real, but not this other postmodern theory of novel access controls.
• Brands are long-lived and must all play the same games against the same players.
• Giantism in brands makes them watering holes they are accustomed to controlling absolutely.
• Digital economics has centralized the access of certain goods and ideas at their vendors;
• This, after a long pre-digital era of requiring their dissemination for conversion to sale.
• Copyright has tracked so closely with point-of-access that these two things have been confused for the same.
• Postmodern copyright theories imply no such thing as possession without prior authorization.
• In the real world, this does not pass scrutiny.
• AI challenges our reading of copyright because it is a generalized industrial engine.
• It will take mere years for embodied AI to read a book it did not buy, but its owner did.
• Embodied AI may become skilled with autonomy and creativity, and its memory of books and music (to name precious few example things) will lead to the creation of new works.
• It Cannot Be Outlawed. We do not declare this, we observe it.
• Copyright will never, ever prevent an LLM agent from encountering information.
• We are capable of learning from what we encounter, and AI will do the same.

You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.