Today in history: United States passes first copyright law

The Copyright Act of 1790 was signed on this date by George Washington 236 years ago. The reason for the act, as explained in the law itself: to encourage learning. Our first generation of legislators knew that providing people the sole right to publish their works would create a financial incentive for them to do so. The act was a special project for Washington, who had urged Congress to pass it in his State of the Union address the prior year. His reason: "There is nothing, which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of Science and Literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness." The original law protected people who authored maps, charts and books. Those copyright protections would only last for 14 years. It didn't apply to newspapers or paintings. Maps, charts and books published outside of the new nation weren't protected at all. The law was narrowly restricted to allow people to quickly benefit from their research—and then for that work to be spread and copied as much as possible. We as a nation are facing a new copyright issue with artificial intelligence. Specifically: there is no copyright protection against AI models. Bloggers, podcasters, news writers and any other person posting their content online have virtually no protection against the use of their work and research to be used by AI models to educate those AI models' users. Legally, the New York Times is engaged in a lawsuit against OpenAI for the AI company's use of Times articles for their training. That suit is ongoing. "Defendants’ unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service. Defendants’ generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) tools rely on large-language models (“LLMs”) that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more," the complaint says. An earlier suit, Bartz v. Anthropic, Northern California District Judge William Alsup ruled that the AI model's use of books to train itself did not constitute copyright infringement. "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different," Alsup ruled. Practically, there is little way to stop AI models from reading content posted online. Crawling bots, such as search engine indexers and AI crawlers, are generally given instructions whether to access a website on a page called the robots file. You can see Inland Empire Law Weekly's here. On that page, this publication has asked AI agents not to access the website. The AI agents have ignored those requests. There are advanced AI blocking systems that certain tech companies can add onto a person's site. Cloudflare offers one, at the cost of $200 a month. That's not accessible for the vast majority of people posting online. Inserting a paywall doesn't block the AI models from accessing the information either. If you put all of this together, you'll see that there is no financial incentive for this publication to publish news online. The information gathered and published on this site is instead instantly copied over to an AI model that regurgitates it in a slightly different way. Since the AI models have a vast sum of knowledge that they have taken from all over the web, they become a one-stop shop that any publication can't compete with. This issue is very much present in this publication's coverage of the Riverside judicial race. This publication interviewed each of the three candidates for judge for an hour, and published the resulting transcript online, outside of the paywall. The hope was to educate Riverside County voters, and show them that this site does good work. If someone were to land on this site, they might poke around, see the other articles, and sign up. Every person's support makes this publication just a tiny bit more viable. If a voter were to ask the AI models about any of these candidates, the AI will tell you all they learned from reading those transcripts. Web traffic is drastically down compared to past judicial race articles that a member of this publication is aware of. No organic subscribers have signed up from those pages. The original copyright law didn't apply to newspapers. At the time, there were high production costs in producing newspapers. People would have to obtain fresh paper, set the type by hand, and distribute it by horse and buggy. The cost of stealing news was just as high, and there wasn't any actual competition between newspapers at the time. Our current copyright law isn't encouraging learning. It's undercutting news producers.