Those were the good old days
Those were the good old days
The years go by, but the memory stays
And those were the good old days
Good Old Days, Weird Al Yankovic, 1988
Twenty years ago, echoing the great Dave Stephens of Procurement Central fame, we cried about the software patent pirates plundering away your hard earned revenue as they scooped up patents from failing enterprises (or enterprises not willing to enforce them) for pennies on the filing dollar, and then sued any decently sized company that was offering software that sounded like it was covered by one of the patents in their hold, threatening to bankrupt the company with an expensive lawsuit that would be dragged out endlessly if the threatened company didn’t pay a patent licensing fee for a totally bogus patent claim. It worked well, until they got greedy and went after bigger fish who fought back and made it costly for them to make bogus claims.
When that was the worst corporate theft we had to worry about, in hindsight, it really wasn’t that bad.
Considering that today the Big AI players are stealing all of your copyrighted and corporate data and using it to train their systems in the best case, then using those trained systems to output similar derivative works for their profit in the average case, and allowing shareholders and foreign governments to access it in the worst case, the patent pirates don’t sound so bad — you had to have similar software for them to even consider targeting you!
The posts on your private sites, the published articles in major publications, and the books that took you years to write are being sucked into these LLMs without a penny of royalty to you or your publisher. If you’re an artist, they’re stealing your entire catalog from Youtube, Spotify, etc. to train their music generator app to output music that sounds like you (just with worse lyrics, off tones, and no heart or soul), and if you’re a corporate enterprise — everything on your website, in your emails, and in your private meeting notes for meetings you send your AI assistants to for note-taking purposes. Once they speech-to-text those meetings, all of the output is fed into the LLM training archive for “future improvement” before it is summarized and fed back to you.
Now, if that AI platform is owned by a company based in the USA, it doesn’t matter if the instance you’re using in the EU is hosted in the EU — US law gives them the right to access all your data at any time. And if you’re an American accessing DeepSeek … all that data is passing though Chinese government servers!
So not only are they using your information without your consent and without compensation, since the majority of the big players are in the US, they are using it without any repercussions as the US Federal Government put a 10-year moratorium on AI legislation, basically allowing these companies to steal all your data without consequence for the next decade! Because, even if they say it’s “just for training”, we all know that training data leaks out of LLMs with the right prompts in the right circumstance. There is no safe “just for training” instance, so if the data is your copyright, they’re giving it away for free. And if the data is your trade secret, its a trade secret no more!
And there’s nothing we can do! Our only hope is for every major publishing house and media company that does business in every country outside of the USA and China with copyright and IP protection legislation to launch lawsuits in those countries against these global AI companies that are stealing their IP and copyright and serving it up outside the US. Force them to defend hundreds of suits across the global stage, while lobbying other governments to create stronger protections and mandate consent before using content, and penalties for violating the law equal to at least 10X what the fair market value of the content is. Since the market won’t bankrupt these companies that shouldn’t exist based on the fact they lose more every year than 99.9% of businesses generate in revenue, let the media industry and legal systems do it.