A disclaimer, just to clarify things up front: I have no opinion on the truth or falsehood of allegations — made anonymously by multiple women and reported by multiple UK media outlets — that comedian/podcaster Russell Brand is a serial rapist.

I happen to have disliked Brand during his earlier comedy career (just a matter of personal taste), and to enjoy his current podcast, “Stay Free With Russell Brand.” That is, or at least should be, irrelevant. While I’m subject to the same “where there’s lots of smoke, there’s usually fire” predisposition as most people,  I personally try to resist that tendency. I don’t know if he’s guilty. I don’t know if he’s innocent. I’m not going to PRETEND to know.

I do, however, know (or at least believe) a few things about how matters like this should, may, shouldn’t, and must not be handled by various people and organizations.

You and I are, of course, entitled to our own opinions. “Presumption of innocence” is a legal concept applicable to court proceedings, not a prior restraint on our right (assuming we’re not jurors) to believe whatever we want to believe. We should (if we’re interested) pay attention while reaching our conclusions. We may (if we’re lazy), but shouldn’t, decide not to do so and just go with whatever our feelz say. We must not take it upon ourselves to, for example, assault Brand in the street.

Media covering the matter should (but often don’t) do so with care and attention to the facts. They may, but shouldn’t, ignore inconvenient facts to get a more salacious story out of other facts. They must not (at least within the existing legal framework as it relates to libel/defamation) lie about Brand, knowingly or from reckless disregard for the truth.

Media platforms which characterize themselves as “open to the public” should be “open” to Brand. They may, but shouldn’t, choose to ban or “demonetize” members of that public, especially on the basis of as yet unproven allegations, as YouTube has done with Brand. They should, as the Rumble platform has done, respond to government demands that they “deplatform” members of the public with a firm “no, we will not act as censors on your behalf.”

Governments (if we allow them to exist — we shouldn’t, but that’s a different subject) should carefully, and with respect for all the rights of the accused, investigate and adjudicate accusations like those made against Brand. They must not lean on media to slant its coverage of such matters, or on media platforms to ban or “demonetize” those accused of crimes.

That last one is the most important. I’m of the opinion that  government agents or agencies which engage in such behavior should be banned and demonetized. People should be fired. Agencies should lose their funding. Governments should be (as peacefully as possible) overthrown.

If Brand is a rapist, he should pay — AFTER that is proven, not before. Either way, he’s not nearly as dangerous as the machine that’s going after him.

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

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