Tag Archives: #intellectual property

The cost of AI

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A variant on Moore’s law is the observation that the financial capital required to launch a new business decreases exponentially as technology gets cheaper.

Pre-internet, and using a notional geometric scale for the purposes of illustration, you might have needed $5m to found and build a new venture. The World Wide Web probably reduced that to $500k, while cloud computing brought it down to $50k. With the expansion of SaaS and API solutions, that cost might have been $5k to get going. Now, vibe coding and $500 of AI prompts can probably launch a new website, build a back end database, implement an e-commerce solution and deploy agentic AI bots to go and find your first customers.

This is a great outcome if measured by a lower barrier to market entry. It also enables founders to “fail fast, fail cheap”, and incentivises innovation by financially de-risking the process.

But even though the cost of AI tools is extraordinarily cheap in terms of the computing and processing power they deliver, there is a huge cost to our rapid adoption of AI that needs to be accounted for.

First, we are seeing corporate lay-offs among tech firms and parts of the service industry that no longer need as many human bodies and minds to operate at scale. So there is a human, economic and societal cost of increased un(der)employment.

Second, traditional skills and expertise are being hugely reduced in perceived value – why pay a graphic artist to design an image when I can use dall-e for free?

Third, as more and more creative tasks are being outsourced or delegated to AI (“create a short story about an F1 race in the style of Ernest Hemingway”) we risk losing our own innate creativity (that comes with experimentation, curiosity, play and reflection). This in turn devalues the creative process itself (thanks to cheaper, AI-enabled production).

Fourth, AI (and the Large Language Models on which it is trained) has no great respect for intellectual property. It doesn’t recognise boundaries between copyright material, content that is subject to creative commons, content that is in the public domain, and content which is publicly available. Again, if copyright owners and original content creators are not recognised or compensated for their work, why would anyone aspire to creating anything original?

Finally, there is the cost of resources (energy, water, rare earth metals) needed to maintain huge AI processing plants and data centres. (But at least this demand is accelerating the development of renewable energy.)

A few years ago, I posted a blog about the importance of the human factor, in the face of technological progress brought by automation and AI. I still remain cautiously optimistic that AI will bring huge benefits, despite the rampant growth of AI in the three years since I wrote that piece. But we are currently in an awkward and comfortable transition phase. If more jobs are lost to AI, and if human-led output is increasingly devalued, perhaps we will need to revisit the debate about Universal Basic Income and other policies to facilitate this transition.

Next week: Music, music everywhere…. and none of it very memorable 

AI & Music

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In a recent episode of a TV detective show, an AI tech dude tries to outsmart an old school musicologist by re-creating the missing part of a vintage blues recording. The professor is asked to identify which is the “real” track, compared to the AI versions. The blues expert guesses correctly within a few beats – much to the frustration of the coder.

“How did you figure it out so quickly?”

“Easy – it’s not just what the AI added, but more importantly what it left out.”

The failure of AI to fully replicate the original song (by omitting a recording error that the AI has “corrected”) is another example showing how AI lacks the human touch, does not yet have intuition, and struggles to exercise informed judgement. Choices may often be a matter of taste, but innate human creativity cannot yet be replicated.

Soon, though, AI tools will displace a lot of work currently done by composers, lyricists, musicians, producers, arrangers and recording engineers. Already, digital audio workstation (DAW) software easily enables anyone with a computer or mobile device to create, record, sample and mix their own music, without needing to read a note of music and without having to strum a chord. Not only that, the software can emulate the acoustic properties of site-specific locations, and correct out-of-tune and out-of-time recordings. So anyone can pretend they are recording at Abbey Road.

I recently blogged about how AI is presenting fresh challenges (as well as opportunities) for the music industry. Expect to see “new” recordings released by (or attributed to) dead pop stars, especially if their back catalogue is out of copyright. This is about more than exhuming preexisting recordings, and enhancing them with today’s technology; this is deriving new content from a set of algorithms, trained on vast back catalogues, directed by specific prompts (“bass line in the style of Jon Entwistle”), and maybe given some core principles of musical composition.

And it’s the AI training that has prompted the major record companies to sue two AI software companies, a state of affairs which industry commentator, Rob Abelow says was inevitable, because:

“It’s been clear that Suno & Udio have trained on copyrighted material with no plan to license or compensate”.

But on the other hand, streaming and automated music are not new. Sound designer and artist Tero Parviainen recently quoted Curtis Roads’ “The Computer Music Tutorial” (2023):

“A new industry has emerged around artificial intelligence (AI) services for creating generic popular music, including Flow Machines, IBM Watson Beat, Google Magenta’s NSynth Super, OpenAI’s Jukebox, Jukedeck, Melodrive, Spotify’s Creator Technology Research Lab, and Amper Music. This is the latest incarnation of a trend that started in the 1920s called Muzak, to provide licensed background music in elevators, business and dental offices, hotels, shopping malls, supermarkets, and restaurants”

And even before the arrival of Muzak in the 1920s, the world’s first streaming service was launched in the late 1890s, using the world’s first synthesizer – the Teleharmonium. (Thanks to Mark Brend’s “The Sound of Tomorrow”, I learned that Mark Twain was the first subscriber.)

For music purists and snobs (among whom I would probably count myself), all this talk about the impact of AI on music raises questions of aesthetics as well as ethics. But I’m reminded of some comments made by Pink Floyd about 50 years ago, when asked about their use of synthesizers, during the making of “Live at Pompeii”. In short, they argue that such machines still need human input, and as long as the musicians are controlling the equipment (and not the other way around), then what’s the problem? It’s not like they are cheating, disguising what they are doing, or compensating for a lack of ability – and the technology doesn’t make them better musicians, it just allows them to do different things:

“It’s like saying, ‘Give a man a Les Paul guitar, and he becomes Eric Clapton… It’s not true.'”

(Well, not yet, but I’m sure AI is working on it…)

Next week: Some final thoughts on AI

Literary legacies

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As more classic works of literature come out of copyright protection, and enter the public domain, publishers and booksellers can look forward to sales of re-packaged titles, for which they won’t have to pay royalties. With the right combination of content and marketing, it’s as good as free money.

Under the Berne Convention, copyright in published works is the life of the author plus 50 years, although many territories have extend this to life plus 70 years (100 in Mexico!). These periods may be subject to extensions if the executors of literary estates are able to renew the existing copyright (under previous copyright regimes) or by issuing revised editions of existing works which are sufficiently different to the original so as to constitute an entirely separate publication – but these are exceptions.

By allowing copyright to lapse, this should mean key works will always be in print, and even more obscure titles can be revived with little to no production cost. For nearly 20 years, Google Books has been scanning works out of copyright and putting them online. But even this process can run into copyright limitations, and questions of provenance (as illustrated by the treatment of George Orwell’s “1984”). But this has also encouraged some enterprising individuals to sell “reprints” of facsimile copies of scanned titles, when the buyer thought they were purchasing an authentic copy, or a contemporary edition (i.e., newly typeset and printed).

Intellectual property law may be complex, and in need of reform to reflect modern technology and contemporary society. But as copyright works pass into the public domain, there remains the issue of moral rights. These give writers the right to be identified as the author of a work (“attribution”), and to protect their work against inappropriate use (“derogatory treatment”). Moral rights also protect writers against “false attribution” – i.e., a publisher can’t claim a work was written by an author who didn’t actually write it.

Moral rights vary from country to country (e.g., Germany, UK, USA, Australia), but generally do not survive when copyright expires. Which can mean that unscrupulous publishers may feel emboldened to “modify” original texts at will, given some recent examples of key 20th century novels. Surely not what authors and their legacies should be subject to?

Next week: Public Indifference?

Whose IP is it anyway?

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Why should we claim ownership of our IP? This was the topic up for discussion at the recent Slow School dinner on Collaborative Debating presented by Margaret Hepworth. I won’t reveal how a collaborative debate works (I recommend you sign up the next time Slow School runs this class…), but I do want to share some of the issues and insights that were aired. In particular, the notion that shared knowledge is the basis for greater prosperity.

The use of Creative Commons means knowledge becomes easier to share (Photo by Kristina Alexanderson, image sourced from flickr(

The use of Creative Commons means knowledge becomes easier to share (Photo by
Kristina Alexanderson, image sourced from flickr)

First, the discussion centred on IP issues relating to ideas, content, knowledge, creative concepts and theoretical models. Not surprising, as the participants were all independent professionals, consultants, bloggers, creatives, facilitators, teachers and instructors. So we didn’t address the areas of patents, registered designs or trade marks.

Second, as someone who has worked in the publishing, data and information industries for nearly 30 years, I believe it is essential that authors, artists, academics, musicians, designers, architects, photographers, programmers, etc. should be allowed both to claim copyright in their work, and to derive economic benefit from these assets. However, I also recognize that copyright material may often be created in the course of employment, or under a commercial commission or as part of a collaborative project. In which case, there will be limitations on individual copyright claims.

Third, the increasing use of Open Source and Creative Commons means that developers, authors and end users have more options for how they can share knowledge, access resources and foster collaboration through additive processes and “common good” outcomes. A vital component of these schemes is mutual respect for IP, primarily through acknowledgment and attribution. Equally, an online reputation can be established (or destroyed) according to our own use of others’ material, especially if we are found to be inauthentic.

Leaving aside the legal definitions of IP and how copyright laws work in practice, the discussion explored the purpose and intention of both authors (as “copyright creators”, narrowly defined) and end users (as “licensees”, broadly defined). There was general agreement that sharing our content is a good thing, because we recognise the wider benefits that this is likely to generate.

But there is a risk: merely acknowledging someone else’s authorship or copyright is not the same as accurately representing it. Obviously, plagiarism and passing off someone else’s ideas as your own are both copyright infringements that can give rise to legal action. Even with the “fair use” provisions of copyright law, a critic or even an acolyte can mis-interpret the content or attribute a meaning that the author did not intend or even anticipate. As one participant noted, “Copyright is not just concerned with what we claim ownership over, but what others may claim as their own.” Not for nothing have we developed “moral rights” in respect to authorship of copyright material.

Although we did not discuss specific issues of copyright remuneration (e.g., through royalties, licensing fees or financial consideration for copyright assignment), there was a proposition that establishing copyright protection can lead to social, intellectual and even economic limitations. The understandable, but often misguided need to protect our copyright (as a form of security) is driven by fear, underpinned by scarcity models. Whereas, a more generous approach to copyright can actually lead to greater shared prosperity, based on the notion of the abundance of ideas and knowledge. And since, as one speaker put it, “there is no such thing as an original concept because all ideas build on previous knowledge”, the inherent value in IP is in how we contribute to its nurturing and propagation.

At the end of the discussion, and reflecting on my own recent experiences with copyright infringement and geo-blocking, I found I had shifted my position – from one that tends to take a more absolute view on copyright ownership, to one that identifies the need for some further modification to the current copyright regime, along the lines of the following:

  • Copyright ownership should not entitle the owner to abuse those rights – if anything, the copyright holder ought to be placed in a position equivalent to a trustee or custodian, to ensure that they act in the best interests of the IP asset itself, not merely their own interests. That should not preclude the owner from being compensated for their work or being allowed to commercialize it, otherwise, why would anyone bother trying to create new ideas or content?
  • Establishing copyright in ideas and creative concepts needs to be supported by a notion of “intent” or “purpose” (a bit like mens rea in criminal law). For example, if the intent is to merely prevent anyone else using or sharing the idea, then any copyright protection might be limited to a much shorter duration than the usual “life of author plus XX years” model.
  • Equally, under a “use it or lose it” provision, if copyright owners (and/or their publishers, distributors and license holders) elect to take their content out of circulation from a market where it had been widely available, then they would need to establish good cause as to why the copyright should not be open to anyone else to use and even commercialize (subject to reasonable royalty arrangements).
  • If we accept that all knowledge is additive, and that the proliferation of collaboration and co-creation is because of the need to share and build on what we and others have already created, how can we ensure the integrity and mutual benefits of open source and creative commons initiatives? One analogy might be found in the use of blockchain technology to foster contribution (adding to and developing an existing idea, concept, model or platform) and to support authentication (to validate each idea extension).

Perhaps what we need is a better IP model that both incentivizes us to share our ideas (rather than rewards us for restricting access to our content), and encourages us to keep contributing to the furtherance of those ideas (because we generate mutual and ongoing benefits from being part of the collective knowledge). I’ve no idea what that model should look like, but surely we can agree on its desirability?

Next week: Finding purpose through self-reflection