Unshackling Innovation: AI, Copyright and Our Right to Share Ideas

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” - Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution

“Knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.” - Louis Brandeis

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As a photographer, I assemble parts of the world into creative compositions that reflect both my vision and excitement of a scene. As a writer, I assemble ideas into coherent narratives.

Lately, I’ve found AI to be a powerful partner in my writing process. However, I am often stymied as I seek to leverage this powerful tool to research and write.

The reason is not technological. It’s social. Specifically, there are many barriers to using books I own to their maximum advantage because of outdated notions of copyright and perceived rights to ownership of ideas.

I can load books and articles into a RAG like Notebook LM and use it to deconstruct and reconstruct ideas contained within those pieces. Prior to AI, this task was a laborious process.

JCR Licklider wrote over 60 years ago, “my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability.“ I have spent most of my career trying to reduce my “considerations of clerical feasibility” applying technology to maximize my ability to maximize my (and others’) “intellectual capabilities.”

AI has given me tremendous tools. However, considerations of copyright and intellectual “property” often hobble those tools. I am not talking here about large corporations like Meta and OpenAI vacuuming up vast quantities of content for profit.

My individual ability to analyze ideas in copyrighted works which I’ve legally purchased has no impact on the income of authors and other creators. I should also have this kind of access to material I’ve borrowed from libraries.

US Copyright law has struggled for decades to manage the realities of the digital world, which simplified creative innovation. Digital tools allow for the quick copying and remixing of text, visual media, and music. The logic of current copyright restrictions collapses entirely when confronted with the emerging logic of Generative AI.

I can now share, repurpose, and modify ideas on a scale impossible when tied to paper. We should not hobble this power because custom shackles us to anachronistic technologies for sharing them, much less legal prohibitions that artificially protect them in the name of profit.

To me, the killer app that AI is likely to provide to us involves synthesizing ideas in new and unexpected ways. This is already happening in the scientific world. The more brains we can put on a problem, the better.

Digital rights management interferes with my ability to use books I already own in the way that I need to use them in an AI world. I cannot simply slice and dice a Kindle book.

I must do this to put it into Notebook LM for analysis. If I had a physical copy of the book, I could do this by scanning the pages into a PDF format, but this is highly inefficient and I’m back to the Licklider problem.

The inability to see inside books also leads to missed connections. I am the author of several books myself, and while I do cite many sources within those books, they contain many ideas that I have forgotten the provenance of. Having a tool to explore those connections would open up new vistas of creativity and intellectual growth for me and my readers.

I spent far too much time in writing my last book going back and forth to sources. Sometimes this was just physically finding an article that I had highlighted months before. I have other books in me, but I don’t have the time to write them. “Clerical considerations” make this too big of an opportunity cost for me right now.

I should be able to search across multiple documents for passages that I need to complete my thinking. However, the process of extracting ideas remains a significant barrier to productivity.?

The power of innovation comes from a community of ideas, not individual geniuses. Your priority, if you want to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” should therefore be to promote sharing ideas, not locking them up.

We need more ideas in the public discourse today, not fewer. Just because I have a book does not mean I can access its content efficiently or effectively. I love spending an afternoon reading, but the amount of ground I can cover there is limited by my time and attention span. Going back to highlighted passages is a laborious process.

Digital transformation changed our relationship to the production of ideas (and many are still struggling with this phase), but it will pale compared to how AI will reshape those relationships. Relying on idea sharing mechanisms that were corrupted in the 19th Century is no longer tenable.

I may represent the bleeding edge of this process, but eventually, the world will catch up with me. The more we democratize access to ideas, the richer our societies will become.?

The easiest remedy is to clarify the definition of Fair Use to include the individual ability to ingest and analyze ideas using AI tools. One idea might be to replace current lockdown versions of Digital Rights Management with a watermarking system that would allow individuals to download legitimate digital copies of books but give content owners the ability to track wholesale scraping of them by large corporations.

This would build on existing copyright law in the United States. Sony Corporation vs. Universal Studios already recognized our fair use right to make copies of purchased or broadcast content for personal use.

AI, however, is likely to force that expansion into a more generalized “right to read.” As Jeff Jarvis describes it, we (and this includes our AI tools) have the right to consume legitimate media: “If AI creators would be required by law to license everything they use, that grants them lesser rights than media?—?including journalists, who, let’s be clear, read, learn from, and repurpose information from each other and from sources every day.”

A ‘right to read’ would ensure that individuals can legally analyze and process content they own using AI, much like personal research or study under traditional Fair Use. Legal precedent and the original language in the US Constitution implies this right, but legislation to clarify it might be necessary.

My ability to systemize textual (and visual) analysis using AI does not differ from me doing it manually. It’s just faster. I am not violating copyright if I use someone else’s ideas to build my own.

In a world characterized by challenges of technological transition, climate change, and political dislocations, access to ideas and discourse is a matter of human survival. AI shows us what is possible. We must adapt our systems to the new realities of automated knowledge creation.

Jeff Jarvis Bryan Alexander Frode Hegland Paul Signorelli Maurice Coleman Mark Corbett Wilson Shane Patience, MSTC John Hildreth John Hollenbeck, Ph.D. Bren Triplett Andi Hess Jared Bendis Roxann D. Riskin Ruben Puentedura Testing Notebooklm 谷歌