[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given it hard, now get it in gear. It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law and I have my own startups in podcasts.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Welcome to Passage to Profit, the road to Entrepreneurship, where we talk with entrepreneurs and celebrities who tell their stories about their business journey and also share helpful insights about the successes that they've had. And now it is time for Intellectual Property News, my favorite part of the show. Admittedly, I'm an intellectual property lawyer, so maybe I'm a little biased. Today we're going to be talking about what else? Artificial intelligence and copyright. And we talked about a collection of artists that wrote a letter to Congress. It was 4,000 artists signed this. These were performing artists. Now the newspapers are starting to get into the act. So I'm looking here at an opinion from USA Today, and they're talking now about how USA Today company is suing another company in order to stop them from brazenly using their intellectual property. So the company is called Cohere Inc. And Cohere Inc. Just actually in its AI products, takes the articles from newspapers verbatim and presents it in the content, which is like the most brazen copyright violation that I've seen. Right. So most of the time, AI will take data points from different places and it'll put them together and you won't really be able to identify the actual work that was the basis of the copyright issue. But Cohere just takes the whole thing and tosses it in there. So, Elizabeth, what do you think about all of this? Where, where do we stand on this.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Issue that used to be called plagiarism?
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Isn't that the truth?
[00:02:11] Speaker B: But I do want to say this article was written by Danielle Coffey, who is an opinion contributor. Let's give her credit where credit's due.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: When Pinterest first came out, my first thought was this is a copyright nightmare and there are going to be so many lawsuits because you take somebody else's content and you put it out as yours or put it on your site or whatever. And how. Who's policing that? How is that working? And we're in such new territory. I don't. We've talked to so many people about this and the consensus is we need legislation. But the other thing is that these Companies that are just taking AI, a lot of them like Google and open source AI, and they have tons of money and they're huge.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Right. And I use AI. I think it's a great tool. We're looking for ways to implement it at the law firm. So I'm not anti AI, but I just think there needs to be some guardrails because we do want to protect our creative community.
And my concern is that there's just going to be so much content generated by these computers that it's just going to overwhelm our artists and our artistic people. And they're not going to want to create anymore.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: No, they're always going to want to create. They're just not going to be able to create and stay alive because they won't be able to feed themselves.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: And so they're going to go do something else.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, back in the day they had patrons for the arts, rich people that would support artists. But I don't know.
[00:03:32] Speaker A: So things are changing and I guess we'll see how this lawsuit works out. There's been a concerted effort by the technology side to really say, well, if you want to stay ahead in AI, if you want to beat the other countries that are like, especially China, you have to loosen up on the copyright stuff. Otherwise we're not going to be able to move as quickly and we're not going to be able to compete with China where they don't recognize intellectual property rights. Anyway. I'd like to get some opinions on this. Ian, you're a tech guy, so you probably hate everything I just said, but what do you think about this situation in particular using copyrighted material to generate AI content?
[00:04:12] Speaker C: Well, so a couple of things. I mean, one we actually saw, I think it was last week, potentially the week before OpenAI was lobbying US government to relax some of its stance around copyrighted materials. And they actually used the exact same argument. They said, listen, if we are not allowed to train on copyrighted materials and use copyrighted materials, other people, AKA China, are going to be able to. And it's a competitive disadvantage. So I think that that argument is being tested right now. But, you know, I think, I think the other thing to your point is that there's, there's a whole class of people out there who make their living through the creation of work. And so we have to think about the equities involved with both sides. Now, I will say this, broadly speaking, one of the rules around artificial intelligence, but also machine learning, which was, you know, what, what we were all talking about in the 2010s to 2020 era before we, we jumped on the AI bandwagon. The simple rule is whoever has the most data wins. And so if you think about multiple competing companies, for instance, like self driving car companies, whoever has the most data generally will, will win that race. Pun somewhat intended. And so with AI companies as well, whoever has the most data to train their models will in theory have access to a competitive advantage. And so, so, so then you have to ask the question, well, if that's a truism, and to be clear so far, certainly from a machine learning standpoint that that's played out, whoever has had the most data, AKA you know, Google has historically won any machine learning contest, competitive contest, so if that same thing holds true for AI, you then have to say, well, okay, how does copyright fall into that? So I think it's an ongoing discussion. I don't think that there's been a clear conclusion in that regard. Although what I will say is that there's at least rumors, if not actual proof that a lot of the early training for these AI models have been quite, quite fulsome and they've pulled anything and everything they possibly could in order to train on those models.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: Good points. I like what you said. It's kind of like a wait and see. It's probably an evolving discussion. The challenge is the technology is moving so fast and it's probably going to move faster than our Congress. Right. So, you know, so I guess all we can do is really monitor it. Donna, what are your thoughts?
[00:06:37] Speaker D: I look at it a little bit more from an end user standpoint. As a content creator and having been in various platforms learning how to use all of this, and as an author, one of the biggest concerns is if you write a book and you're utilizing AI, who owns the copyright? Is it the AI? Is it you? Is it a prompt engineer that you're, you were working with? And where does that really fall at? And legislation doesn't have that in place. And I can't tell you how many times I've been in courses where they've said, we've had countless conversations with different attorneys trying to figure this out because there's no hard and fast ruling yet. And what's really interesting is unbeknownst to us, every time we upload anything to the cloud, whether it be our own pictures and for storage, we're programming AI in a different way and it's all machine learning. So if we're putting that information out there freely, is there intellectual property can it be copyrighted in that way? If we're willingly doing this, Maybe not knowing. So those are some of the things that I look at and see.
[00:07:47] Speaker A: Well, you certainly raise a lot of interesting issues, but just to the last one. Yeah. Just because you're loading it up to the cloud, you still have ownership rights in that. Right. And that's really the question is if they're using it without your permission, if they're using that photo in some manner without your permission and it's not fair use, and the company, the AI company, is making a profit, then I think that's where, you know, the tension is. So far. The courts seem to be holding that there has to be a human participation, a human component to the content to get a copyright. But it's still an area of evolving law. And, you know, I think it is a matter of concern for content creators especially, so. So thank you for that. Jessica, what are your thoughts?
[00:08:33] Speaker E: Yeah, I mean, my entire business is based on video and written and photographic content. So it's something that we make a bit of money licensing. And it's a lot of stuff that I've built up this knowledge for, for years. And I'm definitely concerned with my content that we're producing being scraped and then us not getting credit, us not getting views and it being used somewhere else. As my presence gets bigger and bigger, I'm also concerned with, as this gets all more advanced, people using my likeness to. To create content for their own channels and their own gain without my permission. And that also becomes quite scary because that could just be used for absolutely anything and people won't know it's not me. And then if they get scammed out of something or they buy something that wasn't mine, then they come to me because they're mad and I'm like, that's not me. And how. But how am I supposed to. How are people supposed to differentiate that? And I don't really, honestly, I don't think that's fair because I've worked really hard to build up my presence and my knowledge, and for that to be taken and used in various different ways is going back to your point, Elizabeth, like, why would I keep creating? So it's interesting and scary.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: Speaking of intellectual property, if you have an intellectual property issue and you'd like some help with it, you can certainly contact Gearhart Law. We're available@gmail, gearheartlaw.com and if you have an idea or an invention that you want to protect, you can contact us, or you can go to learn more about patents.com, download a free white paper and maybe even set up a consultation with one of our attorneys. So Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer Noah Fleishman and our program coordinator Alicia Morrissey and our studio assistant Rissi Kat Bussari. Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
