Article by Cory Doctorow: “…The fact that every AI-created work is in the public domain means that if Getty or Disney or Universal or Hearst newspapers use AI to generate works – then anyone else can take those works, copy them, sell them or give them away for nothing. And the only thing those companies hate more than paying creative workers, is having other people take their stuff without permission.
The US Copyright Office’s position means that the only way these companies can get a copyright is to pay humans to do creative work. This is a recipe for centaurhood. If you are a visual artist or writer who uses prompts to come up with ideas or variations, that’s no problem, because the ultimate work comes from you. And if you are a video editor who uses deepfakes to change the eyelines of 200 extras in a crowd scene, then sure, those eyeballs are in the public domain, but the movie stays copyrighted.
But creative workers do not have to rely on the US government to rescue us from AI predators. We can do it ourselves, the way the writers did in their historic writers’ strike. The writers brought the studios to their knees. They did it because they are organized and solidaristic, but also are allowed to do something that virtually no other workers are allowed to do: they can engage in “sectoral bargaining”, whereby all the workers in a sector can negotiate a contract with every employer in the sector.
That has been illegal for most workers since the late 1940s, when the Taft-Hartley Act outlawed it. If we are gonna campaign to get a new law passed in hopes of making more money and having more control over our labor, we should campaign to restore sectoral bargaining, not to expand copyright…(More)”.
