‘If I read a set of textbooks and I create new knowledge, is that fair use?’
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
Hats off to The Times who, notwithstanding the lawsuits being brought by fellow News Corporation subsidiaries Dow Jones and the New York Post against Artificial Intelligence companies Perplexity and ChatGPT, published a well-balanced report on Microsoft's proposals for an overhaul of copyright rules last Tuesday.
To some degree, the Microsoft call for a re-think of copyright law mirrored our commentaries on 18 March and 8 January this year called respectively, ‘Memory and Copyright’ and 'Copyright, and Ownership for All'. As Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella indicated in his quotation above, the case for an overhaul goes right to the heart of the tension between sharing knowledge and ring-fencing ownership.
It is an irony that the main ownership beneficiaries of human creativity are businesses, not individuals. Creativity always starts with people: so the business rights to ownership of that creativity generally arise from the humans who relate to them — their staff, who have generally had to sign away their rights to intellectual property in their employment agreements, their customers and their interviewees (if they are media companies).
Business is very skilled at seizing rights and building walls around those rights, but Artificial Intelligence has created a massive challenge by harvesting data and creativity from sources so wide that they have no limits.
The SHARE research into ‘Stock for Data’ seeks to find a route through this tension between sharing knowledge and ring-fencing ownership by enabling the widest possible participation in sharing the wealth-creation benefits derived from harvesting data and creativity, and in providing a degree of influence over the way that process develops.
When the ‘Stock for Data’ concept was first set out, AI was in its infancy; the principle source of returns from data harvesting arose from marketing. Authorities tried to control this by introducing GDPR, but it was clear from the start that this would only be a partial solution. Individual businesses harness data in quite a controlled way, so at that time it was realistic to think in terms of an algorithmic solution for linking the issue of stock to particular sources of data. However Generative Artificial Intelligence has taken that to a completely new level.
It’s also presenting us with two massive challenges:
- It’s accelerating the polarisation of wealth at an extraordinary pace. For example, the market capitalisation of Microsoft is now well over $3 trillion; and
- It’s eroding employment opportunities at an alarming rate. The Sunday Times quoted the new Chair of the Labour Market Advisory Board Paul Gregg, together with Professor Geoffrey Hinton and Elon Musk, in suggesting that Universal Basic Income (UBI) might be needed to deal with the impact of Artificial Intelligence. But in our view, UBI can only be described as mass welfare subservience, an appallingly unattractive future for humanity even if governments could extract the massive tax income necessary to finance it.
Tackling the polarisation of wealth is a really important issue for human stability. Gillian Tett, Provost of King's College Cambridge, illustrated this by drawing a parallel in a speech on Saturday afternoon between the complacency and blindness shown by the upper classes in 1913, as described at the time by John Maynard Keynes, and our current socio-economic situation. A similar good news cocktail of globalisation, capitalism and rapid technological development was the experience in the early 20th century, just as it is now for so many wealthy people in western democracies today.
That complacency was brought to a sudden halt by the First World War, which was followed with such a sense of revenge, alongside increasing populism, that it gave rise to the Second World War twenty years later: which only then resulted in a forward-looking outcome. In her lecture entitled ‘1919 or 1945? Lessons from the Keynes archive for our future’, Gillian Tett warned of the parallels for the current day, quoting George Santayana, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.
The big issue which broke the back of complacency a hundred years ago was intense wealth polarisation, and that situation is still with us today, both within our own countries and across the world. We don't need Universal Basic Income to keep people in their place until the next disaster occurs: we need universal participation in the wealth creation which technology is now making possible.
In a sense there is a universality parallel to be drawn between this participation in technological wealth creation and the case of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line. This was the first immortalised human cell line, and it remains one of the most important cell lines in medical research. No consent was required to culture the cells obtained from Lack’s treatment, and neither she nor her family were compensated for the extraction or use of the HeLa cells. They became a universal benefit for all humanity through the medical research which they have enabled.
In May 2023 I had a conversation with ChatGPT to explore the logic for mass stock participation and to test its views: the answers were quite revealing. Although the robot said it didn't have the authority to issue Microsoft stock, I was encouraged to contact the company so that it could be taken further.
Over the past eighteen months we've worked hard at setting out the case for stock participation in tech giant ownership, and an interim research paper has been prepared. We’re now ready to start the dialogue with the people who could help to make it happen.
Vested interests will certainly stand in the way, as they did for John Maynard Keynes’ analysis a hundred years ago. Dilution of existing stockholders will undoubtedly be one of these, but antiquated copyright law could also provide a stumbling block.
So, we need to return to the debate on where the origins of human creativity are to be found. As mentioned earlier, they're not in businesses, many of which are expert at seizing intellectual property rights, controlling them through tight legal agreements and trading them as the opportunity arises.
They are to be found in people from all walks of life. The inspiration for creativity invariably derives from wider human experience, and that's what gives rise to our call for universality.
So, Satya Nadella has a strong case for his argument for a total overhaul of copyright legislation, but the quid pro quo is that he and other tech giants need to unlock wealth participation for all. In that way, we can tackle acute polarisation of wealth once and for all, and look forward to a steadily more balanced and peaceful world.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio