It wasn't too long ago that we all had to walk on eggshells to make sure we did not overuse quotations from copyrighted material. We need to make sure that we fell within the fair use doctrine. Four years ago, I was tagged by Getty (to the tune of $600) for using one photo in a powerpoint I created to illustrate a point (they didn't buy my fair use argument and I didn't want to risk a much higher potential fee (and attorneys' fees) by challenging them in court.
Fast forward, in this day and age of AI, what ever happened to copyright? Is it, as Balzac wrote: ""Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught"?
And consider [with help from Grok here] some of the surreal scenes along the way, especially the "suicide" of Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher and whistleblower who publicly criticized the company's use of copyrighted data to train AI models like ChatGPT. He was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, 2024, in what authorities initially ruled a suicide with no evidence of foul play. Balaji had left OpenAI in August 2024 after four years, citing ethical concerns over potential violations of U.S. copyright law in the firm's data practices, and he was reportedly being considered as a witness in ongoing lawsuits against the company, including those from The New York Times. His death sparked controversy when his parents questioned the suicide determination, filing a lawsuit against San Francisco in February 2025 to challenge the police investigation and seek further details, amid persistent doubts from the family and public figures like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, who speculated on podcasts and interviews that it might have been murder despite official findings. No conclusive evidence supporting foul play has emerged, and the case remains a point of debate in tech and AI ethics circles.
Must watch video: Tucker Carlson interviewing OpenAI's Sam Altman on this "suicide" (start at min 19):
And now, Lee Fang asks what happened to copyright enforcement in this age of AI. Excerpt from "What Happened to Piracy? Copyright Enforcement Fades as AI Giants Rise."
Much has changed since advances in artificial intelligence have made the technology the focal point of Silicon Valley innovation. Smith is now president of Microsoft, and the company and its partner OpenAI—which exclusively runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing network and was backed with $13.75 billion in investment funds from Microsoft—are at the center of a very different type of copyright dispute. This time, as the power of the tech industry still looms over Washington, D.C., prosecutors are less interested in going after those suspected of engaging in illegal downloads of copyrighted work.
That is because it is now the tech giants that are accused of exploiting pirated content on an industrial scale. Meta, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, xAI, and OpenAI are competing to vacuum up as much data as humanly possible in a race to develop their respective AI models. The most prized training data, it turns out, are vast quantities of copyrighted material, largely in the form of published works such as academic articles, novels, and nonfiction books.
After decades of FBI warnings about copyright violations and the dangers of piracy, suddenly the federal government is no longer interested in such crimes. That has left law enforcement in the hands of civil litigation class actions, many of which have been filed by authors and writers noting that tech giants are now plundering their works for AI training without authorization, payment, or notification.
The court cases have cast a spotlight on a stratospheric level of hypocrisy.
