AI, Copyright, Napster, Global Conspiracies, and You!
What if You Are Now in Legal Trouble in the Future?
COPYRIGHT MEGA TRAP!
Is the turd in your pocket?
These are the fevered musings of a longtime lawyer.
Do you know how you use your login from Google to access various AI programs?
"Login for free"
And if you are like me you're like, "many for free what is going on?"
And then that old saw about, "if a technology product is free, you are the product."
And so then sure we are all like "worker bees" generating ideas into content for others to review and cull and parse and utilize for what purposes they may have. And so on inside of a digital hive that has been created by others unknown, for purposes unknown, and with content legality unknown (since we are on the frontier of what legally can be done with content + ai and what can not).
The legal situation vis a vis copyright and AI is fluid. Many T cases (Trillions sought) here and coming and coming…
We get interesting stuff out of it.
Pop it on your X. Add it to your blog. Create other products based upon these generations, be they text, image, video, or even Code.
"They get people worldwide making generations for them constantly day and night."
Digital creative worldwide free worker bees.
Yet, here is the "CONSPIRACY THEORY" element.
Fevered musings from an ip and corporate attorney who has seen a lot of things.
Patterns emerge.
The law is speculative. Hey, not unlike medicine.
Some guesswork is involved, looking at data points, applying the "stored knowledge" we have mostly from scenarios we have already experienced playing out.
And so for copyright claims, for instance. Company A or Person A will send a cease and desist letter and then later maybe sue Company B or Person B.
Often, and especially in technology (in code_), there are many "intermediaries".
These can be humans, programs, digital locations, programmers, companies of same, start-ups, or individual users; laypeople.
These are people in the "chain of access or use" — think of an assembly line yet bits and bytes across the world.
One obtains content.
One passes on content to another.*
One manipulates content.*
One passes on the manipulated content.*
One may host a variety of manipulated content.
Think of Napster…
On Napster people shared effectively pirated content, it remains a "wobbler" legal case............who took it in the first place? who allowed it to be taken? once taken, isnt it theirs? what if they paid money for it to someone else?
So in Napster (and other big cases like MegaUpload and Telegram) the effort goes at the big company for "creating an environment of violation" — there are the “deep pockets.”
[Please read the story of Pavel Durov CEO of Telegram. The turd is in his pocket. Big time. What incentive might he have to “cooperate” to help himself. NOTE: I’m not making any statement of the person whom I do not know, only speculating based upon human nature.]
But does the homeowner really always facilitate what goes on under their roof always?
In my scenario the asterisks above may be you (*).
It makes sense to me from a corporate risk perspective as a very good enterprise legal mitigation strategy.
"We will pass the 'bag of risk' on to the user level."
[A senior partner I was working with at Manatt once told me, "Cyrus the whole thing is do not let them put the turd in your pocket."]
Is the turd in your pocket?
Let's say original claiming rights owners went after whatever LLM BigCo deal for many many violations.
Let's say the BigCo handed you up, its users, "It's not me, it Jane! Look here is her login/s. Look how SHE is using the content RIGHT NOW from that access and manipulation (chain of access and use gets defined).”
Let's say users even reported other users or web creators or start-up companies they supplied or otherwise worked with in order to save their ass?
[I’m saying again we are talking big money dollars here, Ts.]
Same could happen with like gov or quasi gov (EU) orgs which could demand user lists and violations and pursue those.
In the most dystopian suspicious, a crowd of “little guy” is the fall guy, world, are you creating liability for yourself on the daily..................while providing free labor for those building large systems and respositories (and you give them a "liability wash)."
Total Digital Content Liability Panopticon where power string pullers make you dance like a marionette.
[AT. SOME. FUTURE. DATE. ON. THE. ACTIONS. OF. TODAY. THIS DAY.]
Is the turd in your pocket?
"Don't sue us. Here's a list of 1m users, I bet several of these are highly collectible."
…
We are brand new days here so it pays to think about it. We do not know what is to happen only guesswork.
Have to look whether any users of Napster ever got in the twist, ditto MegaUpload ditto Telegram (I understand authorities have ask (and they provided) user lists)?
[When they say, "thought leader", hey this is some very valuable legal thoughtware from my experience, free to you. And thank you for sharing my substack with others. -AIC]
