Fuck Google.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Even if that means creating an entirely new class of extralegal contractual royalties for big music labels just to protect the online dominance of your video platform while simultaneously insisting that training AI search results on books and news websites without paying anyone is permissible fair use?

— private intellectual property rights, while basically telling the rest of the web that the price of being indexed in Search is complete capitulation to allowing Google to scrape data for AI training.

The thing is that “fair use” is 1) an affirmative defense to copyright infringement, which means you have to admit you made the copy in the first place, and 2) evaluated on a messy case-by-case basis in the courts, a slow and totally inconsistent process that often leads to really bad outcomes that screw up entire creative fields for decades.

But it is a pretty shitty solution for the rest of us, who do not have the bargaining power of huge music labels to create bespoke platform-specific AI royalty schemes and who will probably get caught up in Content ID’s well-known false-positive error rates without any legal recourse at all.

If you make something — a piece of music criticism, say — flagged by Content ID as infringing a copyright and you disagree with it, YouTube never steps in to resolve it but instead imposes some tedious back-and-forth and then, if that doesn’t work out, politely suggests you head to the courts and deal with it legally.

It is really not clear whether scraping data to train AI models is fair use, and anyone confidently predicting how the upcoming set of lawsuits from a cast of characters that includes Sarah Silverman and Getty Images will go is definitely working an angle.

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They have more money than ussss they’re going to pay the government to winnnnn