A little over a month ago we told the Copyright Office in a comment that there was no role for copyright law to play when it comes to training AI systems. In fact, on the whole there’s little for copyright law to do to address the externalities of AI at all. No matter how one might feel about some of AI’s more dubious applications, copyright law is no remedy. Instead, as we reminded in this follow-up reply comment, trying to use copyright to obstruct development of the technology instead creates its own harms, especially when applied to the training aspect.
One of those harms, as we reiterated here, is that it impinges on the First Amendment right to read that human intelligence needs to have protected, and that right must inherently include the right to use technological tools to do that “reading,” or consumption in general of copyrighted works. After all, we need record players to play records – it would do no one any good if their right to listen to one stopped short of being able to use the tool needed to do it. We also pointed out that this First Amendment right does not diminish even if people consume a lot of media (we don’t, for instance, punish voracious readers for reading more than others) or at speed (copyright law does not give anyone the right to forbid listening to an LP at 45 rpm, or watching a movie on fast forward). So if we were to let copyright law stand in the way of using software to quickly read a lot of material to it would represent a deviation from how copyright law has up to now operated, and one that would undermine the rights to consume works that we’ve so far been able to enjoy.