It has made it so tech companies and publishing empires no longer have responsibility for what is published on their applications, websites and what they now call “platforms.” Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.
Digital Millennium Copyright Act 25 Year Anniversary – SF Journal
Piracy is the foundation of the commercial internet. It is all just stuff. The digital world is a non-destructive medium. I can copy and paste anything and it is all mine, evidently free to use (except if it is owned by Getty Images). It matters not whether someone “owns’ it. Indeed, no one owns the stars. My experience of your art is just as valid expression of art as your art. The experience of art is often now monetarily more valuable than the art. Copyright laws are meaningless. This is why music fans can create a YouTube channel and make more money off of a musical artist than the artist. In 2025, I can create software that gobbles up your art and creations and create new creations. They call this Artificial Intelligence or AI. It is just the latest version of the piracy that has been going on since the beginning of the internet.
While early photography was analog, using silver and glass plates and large box cameras, it always seemed fascinating to me the observation of some of the Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century when they first interacted with this technology. When they saw the photographs they thought the white man was stealing their souls. They may have been on to something. Today large tech companies are not so much stealing souls but making money off of them. The most important events and parts of peoples lives are being “monetized” and in a way stolen. Who really owns your address book, contacts and photos from that last birthday? “Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.”
In the realm of recorded sounds, a similar dynamic happened at the beginning of the twentieth century. New Orleans trumpet player Freddie Keppard feared that if he was recorded, people would steal his ideas. He was definitely on to something. The development of “jazz” was moved forward by recordings and people playing along and transcribing solos of the greats. Evidently, if you wanted to cop Freddie Keppard’s licks, you had to go to Bourbon Street. “Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.”
It is now 2025 and the mining of original creative content by the tech companies is on full throttle. The pirates are in control of the ship as they have always been. The AI bots are sucking up all the work of the creative class and “monetizing” it. I was reminded of this when author David Baldacci made a video of how his novels have been ingested and now can be spit out by AI. In his own words “[they] backed up a truck to my imagination and stole everything I ever created.” These services now spit out novels that read as if they were written by Baldacci, with similar plots, dialogues, and even character names. “Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.”
Novelist David Baldacci: ‘AI Stole Everything I’d Ever Created’ – YouTube
Where this will all end, no one really knows. The control of information, the manipulation of people and the censorship of ideas is as great as ever while at the same time the billionaires mine and pillage the movements and work of just about everyone on the planet. I did have a strange dream the other night. I dreamt that a driverless Waymo taxi pulled up to our house in San Francisco and a robot passenger got in the backseat of the car. The taxi drove off. Not a soul onboard. “Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.”