As Walled Culture has reported, a number of major publishers have brought legal actions against generative AI companies, alleging copyright infringement. These cases are still grinding through the courts, but one publisher, Penguin Random House – one of the so-called “Big Five” publishing houses that dominate the industry worldwide – is not simply sitting back and waiting for the judgments to be handed down. The writer Jonathan Coe posted on the Bluesky social network, that Penguin Random House UK has placed an interesting text touching on copyright and AI on the imprint page of Coe’s new novel. An article in The Bookseller on the move says that Penguin Random House will use the new wording “across all its imprints globally“. Penguin’s text starts with the usual copyright dogma:
Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes freedom of expression and supports a vibrant culture.
Of course, none of those things have anything to do with copyright, as is proved by the fact that they all existed before modern copyright was invented in 1710. They all happen completely independently of copyright, which is simply a monopolistic framework that has been bolted on top of them by new laws to allow a group of intermediaries – originally publishers, but including now recording companies and film studios – to generate a profit from the creativity of others. If anything, copyright tends to inhibit creativity, freedom of expression and cultural vibrancy through specious legal threats against new creators alleging “copying” of existing works. Penguin goes on:
Thank you for purchasing an authorized edition of this book and for respecting intellectual property laws by not reproducing, scanning or distributing any part of it by any means without permission. You are supporting authors and enabling Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for everyone.
Last week’s Walled Culture post showed why buying books from traditional publishers supports authors only in the nominal sense that a small fraction of the money paid by readers can eventually flow to authors. But it rarely provides a decent living for them: Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) demonstrates this using a wide range of research that underlines the harsh financial reality of a creator’s life. The final part of Penguin’s new copyright text is as follows:
No part of this book may be used in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. In accordance with Article 4(3) of the DSM Directive 2019/790, Penguin Random House expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception
As noted above, the courts are still deciding to what extent AI systems can use copyright material for training purposes without asking for explicit permission. So far, a local German court has ruled that at least one generative AI training dataset is legal thanks to EU copyright exceptions, and has made comments that could imply that AI training is permitted under EU law more generally. Until we know the details of how courts will interpret laws like the DSM Directive, Penguin Random House’s new text is just bluster. That’s no surprise: the copyright world often claims privileges well beyond the already-excessive ones it has gained over the years. What is disappointing is how often those additional privileges are later granted by compliant politicians.
Featured image by Stable Diffusion.
