Musicians vs Big Tech: Rights aren’t just regulation [Chris Castle]
As Big Tech pushes for AI innovation, artists are losing ground in the fight to protect their rights and creative work.
Musicians vs Big Tech: Rights aren’t just regulation [Chris Castle]
by Chris Castle via Music Tech Solutions
It was a rough morning. I ran across both reports from Davos where they are busy blowing AI bubbles yet again and also read about a leading Silicon Valley apologist discussing the current crop of AI litigation. That was nauseating. But once the bile settled down, I had a realization: This is all straight out of the Woodrow Wilson rule-by-technocrats playbook.
Wilson believed that experts and intellectuals, rather than the voting public, should guide the creation and implementation of public policy. The very model of a modern technocrat. The present day technocrats and their enablers in the legal profession are heirs to Wilsonian rule by experts. They view copyright and other human rights of artists as regulation impeding innovation. Innovation is the godhead to which all mankind must–emphasis on must–aspire, whether mankind likes it or not.
Not human rights–artist rights are human rights, so that proposition cannot be allowed. The technocrats want to normalize “innovation” as the superior value that need not be humanized or even explained. Artist rights must yield and even be shattered in the advance of “innovation”. The risible Lessig is already talking about “the right to train” for AI, a human rights exception you can drive a tank through as is his want in the coin-operated policy laundry. In Wilsonian tradition, we are asked to believe that public policy must be the handmaiden to appropriation by technology even if by doing so the experts destroy culture.
We went through this before with Internet piracy. There are many familiar faces in the legal profession showing up on AI cases who were just getting warmed up on the piracy cases of the 1999-2015 period that did their best to grind artist rights into bits. AI is far beyond the massive theft and wealth transfer that put a generation of acolyte children through prep school and higher education. AI takes extracting profit from cultural appropriation to a whole new level–it’s like shoplifting compared to carpet bombing.
“I got the shotgun, you got the brief case…”
And since the AI lawyers are fascinated by Nazi metaphors, let me give you one myself: Internet piracy is to Guernica what AI is to Warsaw. The Luftwaffe was essentially on a training run when they bombed Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Guernica was a warm up act; the main event was carpet bombing a culture out of existence in Warsaw and after. It was all about the Luftwaffe testing and refining their aerial bombing tactics that opened the door to hell and allowed Satan to walk the Earth swishing his tail as he does to this day. But in the words of Stefan Starzyński, the Mayor of Warsaw who broadcast through the German attack, “We are fighting for our freedom, for our honor, and for our future. We will not surrender.”
This is what these crusader technocrats do not seem to understand no matter how they enrich themselves from the wealth transfer of cultural appropriation. AI litigation and policy confrontation is not about the money–there is no license fee big enough and nobody trusts Silicon Valley to give a straight count in any event.
Artists, songwriters, authors and other creators have nowhere to go. The battle of human rights against the AI appropriation invasion may well be humanity’s last stand.
