I hadn’t read your comment yet, but I was just about to post the same idea you did. I’m a supporter of the EFF in both spirit and with my monetary donations. This particular article is a strange one though. I have no complaint with the DMCA section of the article and the end, but the rest is strange.

Copyright Kills Competition

Okay so copyright is bad. Lets see where the author goes with this.

Copyright owners increasingly claim more draconian copyright law and policy will fight back against big tech companies. In reality, copyright gives the most powerful companies even more control over creators and competitors.

Wait, what? A creator that creates an original piece of art or music is the copyright holder. The only way “the most powerful companies” would have more control is if the creator chooses to transfer their copyright (either transferring it freely from a legal agreement or selling it). So is the author making an argument that powerful companies are unfairly coercing creators?

Today’s copyright policy concentrates power among a handful of corporate gatekeepers—at everyone else’s expense.

Okay that statement suggests the coercion angle, but gives no concrete examples of it in practice.

We need a system that supports grassroots innovation and emerging creators by lowering barriers to entry—ultimately offering all of us a wider variety of choices.

Lowers barrier to entry? There is literally zero cost for a creator to create an original work and own that copyright.

Pro-monopoly regulation through copyright won’t provide any meaningful economic support for vulnerable artists and creators. Because of the imbalance in bargaining power between creators and publishing gatekeepers,

Okay here it is! The author isn’t making an argument about protecting the copyright of creator’s original works. The author is citing the problem small creators making money with their copyrighted works. I’m assuming they mean because of the expense of publication, promotion, and distribution. That is an entirely different problem, and I think that legal regulation could make a difference there.

Entertainment companies’ historical practices bear out this concern. For example, in the late-2000’s to mid-2010’s, music publishers and recording companies struck multimillion-dollar direct licensing deals with music streaming companies and video sharing platforms.

The author has now switched the argument. These entertainment companies are getting these deals because the entertainment companies are the copyright holders. The only way for the companies to gain that status is if the original creator chose to sell or transfer the copyright of their original work to the entertainment company.

Yet music labels and publishers frequently fail to share these payments with artists, and artists rarely benefit from these equity arrangements. There’s no reason to think that these same companies would treat their artists more fairly now.

The artists agreed to this arrangement in exchange for money or other compensation. I’m the first to say that record company deals (as an example) usually largely favor the company and not the artist. However, this is where regulation of the industry could come into play to fix this. This isn’t a problem with copyright.

In the AI era, copyright may seem like a good way to prevent big tech from profiting from AI at individual creators’ expense—it’s not. In fact, the opposite is true.

I agree copyright should prevent someone else from profiting from the individual creator’s expense.

ROSS trained its tool using “West headnotes” that Thomson Reuters adds to the legal decisions it publishes, paraphrasing the individual legal conclusions (what lawyers call “holdings”) that the headnotes identified.

In this case Thomson Reuters is the original creator, the copyright holder of those headnotes that ROSS used for training their AI without permission or license.

The tool didn’t output any of the headnotes, but Thomson Reuters sued ROSS anyways.

The author switches sides here again. The original creator, Thomson Reuters and copyright holder), was the one whose work was used without permission and for profit by ROSS. So this is a good thing Thomson Reuters sued, right? Wasn’t the author arguing that original creators should have their work and effort protected and be compensated for its use?

Requiring developers to license AI training materials benefits tech monopolists as well.

So does the author want content creators to be able to charge for their work, or be forced to give it away for free and not charge others licensing fees to use the original creator’s work?