But as ever-larger, more concentrated corporations captured more of their regulators, we’ve essentially forgotten that there are domains of law other than copyright — that is, other than the kind of law that corporations use to enrich themselves.
Copyright has some uses in creative labor markets, but it’s no substitute for labor law. Likewise, copyright might be useful at the margins when it comes to protecting your biometric privacy, but it’s no substitute for privacy law.
When the AI companies say, “There’s no way to use copyright to fix AI’s facial recognition or labor abuses without causing a lot of collateral damage,” they’re not lying — but they’re also not being entirely truthful.
If they were being truthful, they’d say, “There’s no way to use copyright to fix AI’s facial recognition problems, that’s something we need a privacy law to fix.”
If they were being truthful, they’d say, “There’s no way to use copyright to fix AI’s labor abuse problems, that’s something we need labor laws to fix.
-How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best
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