Legal scholars: AI companies should pay a levy to the press and creatives
If AI generators do not copy content, copyright law does not apply. To prevent serious consequences, a legal scholar has a proposal.
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German legal scholar Josef Drexl advocates for obliging providers and operators of AI services to pay a levy that would be distributed to authors and creators. Companies should be able to accept this, because “the development of high-quality generative AI models is crucially dependent on being trained with human-generated works,” says the director at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. Generative AI relies on human creativity, he explains, to justify the demand. If people produce too few works that AI models can also be trained on, they will increasingly “hallucinate” and could possibly even collapse.
Copyright does not help against displacement
Drexl bases his demand not only on the technical foundations of AI technology but also on our social order: Democracy needs human thought, especially in journalism, he writes. Journalists not only inform, “but uncover grievances with their research and thus control the rulers.” Creators in the cultural industry play a similarly important role. Generative AI cannot perform this work. Therefore, “radical proposals” are needed, because “AI displaces human-created works from the market without copying them.”
The proposed flat-rate levy has the advantage that there are neither proof problems nor lengthy negotiations necessary. Moreover, creators whose works are not used for AI training could also benefit from it. They would deserve it just as much, because they are equally exposed to competition from AI-generated content. Therefore, for his plan, it is irrelevant whether AI generators produce identical content under certain circumstances or merely displace human works. Existing copyright law – which underpinned, for example, a widely noted ruling in a GEMA v. OpenAI case – alone cannot solve the problem.
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Drexl elaborates on his proposal in a discussion paper . In it, he also suggests a citizen levy for journalism, which is intended to function similarly to the broadcasting contribution. Voters would then decide annually which press publishers should receive money from the fund thus filled. For this, compliance with quality standards, for example, should be a prerequisite. In addition, a minimum percentage of publishing costs should be based on the remuneration of journalists. “This would create a counter-incentive to rationalization using generative AI,” his research institute summarizes the goal. The idea is not new, but so far there have been no efforts to implement it.
(mho)
