A group of 17 well-known authors — too many to usefully list here, but you’ve probably heard of, and certainly live in a world influenced by, the likes of John Grisham and George R.R. Martin — recently joined the stampede to sue artificial intelligence firm OpenAI. Following earlier plaintiffs, these authors allege that use of their work to “train” Large Language Model products like ChatGPT amounts to “systematic theft on a mass scale.”

OpenAI counters that letting its models read and learn from the authors’ books is perfectly According to Hoyle under, among other things, the “fair use”  provisions of coypright law (which courts have held protect such “reading” by search engines).

It looks like a legal thicket. But I’m not a lawyer and this column isn’t legal advice. My interest in the matter stems from my standing as a lifelong reader.

I REALLY like books. Over the course of my life I’ve purchased thousands of volumes in print or electronic format, borrowed more from lending libraries, read a good many of them (not as many as I’ve tilted at, I confess), and learned a lot from them.

Whatever the legal grounds for the lawsuit, its essence comes down to a claim that the function of a reader (whether that reader is “human” or “artificial”) is to buy authors’ books … and do nothing with them except perhaps display them prettily on household shelves, if even that.

When you read a book, your brain inevitably stores a mental copy of that book, in part or whole. You remember it. If it’s a well-written book and you’re an attentive reader, you also learn things from, and find yourself influenced by, its content.

Those things, according to the litigious authors, constitute theft, and if you do much of them you’re engaged in such theft “on a massive scale.”

Oddly, nearly all of the involved authors cheerfully confess to theft of that kind on their own pars. Few if any claim complete originality for their own work, and most  would get laughed out of any room they made such claims in.

Why should we care whether the brains reading, remembering, learning from, and acting on the influence of a story are made of meat or silicon?

Does — should — the purchase of a book confer absolute and perpetual veto power upon the author to control how readers use what they learn from that book?

If it did, none of the authors involved in this suit would have anything to sue over. We’d have never heard of them. Their works would remain unpublished and likely unwritten.

Their fear of replacement by AI is certainly understandable, but their demand for control of work they’ve released into the learning wild is unreasonable.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Earlier this year, William Smith writes at the Pioneer Institute, “[t]he federal government announced the formation of a working group to ‘develop a framework for the implementation of the march-in provision of the Bayh-Dole Act.'” Smith thinks it’s a bad idea — the title of his piece is “University Science Research Is Under Threat.”

The very simplified version:

Under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, universities can use taxpayer money to do research, then patent any useful results and make bank on their discoveries by licensing those patents to commercial entities.

The “march-in” provision says that if a university doesn’t license its patent quickly enough, the federal government can “march in,” take control of the patent, and license it.

The Biden administration’s interest in using the “march-in” provision is to lower drug prices by grabbing patents and licensing them to companies that promise to sell the resulting products cheaply.

I have a better idea, and it’s not based entirely on my objections to the whole concept of “intellectual property,” which I’ve written about elsewhere:

Government-funded research should be treated as “work for hire,” and its results should always, in every case, go instantly into the public domain.

The idea isn’t far-out or fringe. It’s how government-employee-generated writing and text are already handled where copyright is concerned.

The main argument against it is that companies are less likely to make products that they don’t get a 20-year monopoly on through patent protection.

My response to that argument is a two-parter.

Part one: Almost any company will make almost any product that it expects to make profitably, even if other companies can also make that product. Name the fast-food joint that won’t offer burgers because they can’t be patented, or the shoe company that won’t copy every un-patented aspect of the latest sandal craze for a little market share.

Part two: If these patents are  licensed, the rightful recipients of the licensing fees are the taxpayers who unwillingly “invested” in the research, not the researchers who already get paid by the taxpayers to do it and the universities that already got funded by the taxpayers to facilitate it.

Thirty companies sending out, and every taxpayer opening, 30 envelopes a week, each containing a check for one cent, seems rather burdensome and complex. The best way to “repay” the taxpayers’ “investments” (other than not forcing them to make those “investments” in the first place) is to put the research in the public domain and let those taxpayers benefit from the lower prices and wider variety of choices that monopolies rob them of.

It’s time to get past the idea that monopolies and government research winner-picking are the wellsprings of innovation. They aren’t and never have been.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As of September 17, Axios reports, US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has “directed the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms to no longer enforce the chamber’s informal dress code for its members.”

A dress code that’s enforced by the Sergeant at Arms doesn’t sound very “informal” to me. The long-time standard, per the New York Times, has been “suit and tie for men and dresses with covered shoulders or pantsuits for women.”

The women’s dress code is, of course, more modern than the men’s, for the simple reason that no women served in the Senate until 1922 (when Georgia’s governor appointed Rebecca Latimer Felton) to serve for one day — it was another decade before Arkansan Hattie Caraway became the first woman elected to the body).

As for the men, I don’t really understand why “professional attire” for Senators in the 21st century would necessarily indicate an outfit designed for British gentlemen of leisure during the Victorian era.

If we’re going to have Senate and House dress codes, let them be specific, mandatory, formal, and enforced. My suggestion:

The Senate will maintain a wardrobe department, staffed by professional designers and fitters. Each morning before the session opens, Senators will draw wooden balls from a bag, each marked with one of two letters: “C” or “S.”

Those who draw the letter “C” will be required to dress as circus clowns — garish makeup, giant shoes, multi-colored wigs, the whole nine yards.

Those who draw the letter “S” will be required to dress as super-villains, selecting from a wide variety of costumes based on the longstanding American comic book tradition.

There will of course, be some overlap — one may safely to show up as the Joker regardless of which ball one draws. I can already tell you that Ted Cruz (R-TX) will positively rock as the Penguin, and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) is already a ringer for Harley Quinn (also a clown-supervillain twofer!).

As for the House, a similar setup, but the balls will be labeled “B” and “H” for “Bear on a Bicycle” and “Henchman.” Just to keep the circus/comic book theme, you know.

My suggested dress code would serve the purposes of not just modernizing things and adding a little pizzazz to what’s already a professional wrestling atmosphere, but of forcing American politicians to dress in a manner comporting with their actual behaviors and job descriptions.

It would probably also drive C-SPAN’s ratings way up.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY