By Laura Reiley
As generative AI systems become more deeply woven into the fabric of modern life – drafting text, generating images, summarizing news – debates over who should profit from the technology are intensifying. A new paper in the Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property argues that the current copyright system is ill-equipped to handle a world in which machines learn from, and compete with, human creativity at unprecedented scale.
Frank Pasquale, professor of law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School, and co-authors Thomas W. Malone, professor of information technology at MIT Sloan School of Management, and Andrew Ting, professorial lecturer in law at George Washington University, describe a legal innovation called “learnright,” a new intellectual property protection that would give creators the right to license their work specifically for use in AI training. The basic idea behind learnright was first proposed by Malone in 2023. The new paper shows how the concept could actually work legally and economically.
The researchers say the idea stems from a growing imbalance. Today’s largest AI systems are trained on vast datasets scraped from the internet—millions of books, articles, songs, photographs, artworks and posts. Some of the authors of those works are now suing AI companies, arguing that using their copyrighted work to train a commercial model without permission is a violation of the law.
