Who Will Control U.S. Copyright Laws?

The U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which is under the Executive Branch, is going to be advising President Donald Trump on the Artificial Intelligence Action Plan. The OSTP created an open call for public comments regarding changes to the copyright laws.

On the one side, there are tech companies that are developing AI who wrote to the OSTP. On the other there are members of the creative communities that are fine with the copyright laws as they currently stand and let the OSTP know their feelings.

And in the middle between the two is Donald Trump, the man who posted on his Truth Social page on January 16, 2025:

“It is my honor to announce Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, to be Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California. They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!”

If he thinks that group is going to bring back Hollywood, then what level of confidence can people who work there have when it comes to a decision he will make that can have profound consequences when it comes to how they earn their livings? The AI Action Plan will affect whether or not there will be copyright protection of their works or a harvesting of it by AI companies.

Modifications to the copyright laws are of concern to people who create movies and other creative products (like books), especially as what’s under consideration here is modification beyond the “fair use” doctrine that existing law covers.

“Fair use,” which courts consider on a case-by-case basis so it doesn’t cover everything, limits the amount of material that a third party can use, like someone writing a review or using the material for educational purposes.

So, for example, if Borges’s Pierre Menard copied (or “reimagined”) Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, which is under copyright (she published it in 2003 so it is covered until 2093—the year she died (2023) plus 70 years), he would be in violation of “fair use.”

If Menard were to write an essay about the book and used a limit number of direct quotations to make a point, that would not be a violation—especially as the essay would be a new creative use.

What AI has to do with any of this is related to “training” the system, or “machine learning.”

You train the system by inputting a whole bunch of data—which can be things like all written versions of Don Quixote, films including Man of La Mancha and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, images, texts, audio clips. Then the system processes, organizes, and validates that information.

If “fair use” is about “sampling” (and even sampling in music requires permission of the owner), machine learning is about taking in vast quantities of material.

So if you are building an AI system, you want as much material as you can get because you want the output—and recognize that the debate about AI is not about building smart computers but about what the algorithms can create, whether this is a new version of Don Quixote or an entire Hollywood production without Hollywood.

If you are a creative artist, you care about “fair use” because you don’t want AI systems to use your work to compete with, well, your work. Or to completely displace your work.

After all, even though AI systems may not be all that great right now at creative endeavors, it is just a matter of time until they will be very, very good.

Google and OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) are among those who wrote letters to the OSTP laying out their positions, which want as much access to material for training as possible.

They shamelessly calculated the OpenAI letter to appeal to the political instincts of the present Administration. It opens with a quote from a Trump Executive Order, and seques into how OSTP will consider an AI Action Plan “that will, as Vice President Vance stated recently at the Paris AI Action Summit, maintain American leadership in AI and ‘make people more productive, more prosperous, and more free.’”

Boxes checked. But then to really drive home the importance of this, OpenAI writes that the U.S. is being challenged by “a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) determined to overtake us by 2020 [so] the Trump Administrations’ new AI Action Plan can ensure that American-led AI built on democratic principles continues to prevail over CCP-built autocratic, authoritarian AI.”

OpenAI, after going on and on about the risks associated with the CCP AI, provides a proposal that wants “A copyright strategy that promotes the freedom to learn.”

Note, that’s a freedom for the AI to learn.

According to OpenAI, “The federal government can both secure Americans’ freedom to learn from AI, and avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the PRC [People’s Republic of China] by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.”

Google is far less politically partisan in its letter to the OSTP.

It writes, “Balanced copyright rules, such as fair use and text-and-data mining exceptions, have been critical to enabling AI systems to learn from prior knowledge and publicly available data, unlocking scientific and social advances. These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalance, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation.”

While that may sound measured, realize that things like movies and books are “publicly available data” and Google’s perspective on whether there is significant impact on rightsholders and the rightsholders’ perspective are probably at 180 degrees.

To that end, some 400 people in the entertainment industry also signed a letter to the OSTP, ranging from Judd Apatow to Olivia Wilde, Cate Blanchett to Taika Waititi (“and other industrious, creative content professionals”).

Its position: “We firmly believe that America’s global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries.”

It points out that it is economically important: 2.3 million American jobs; $229 billion in wages. But the bottom falls right out because the sentence—and realize this is in the second paragraph of the letter—goes on to point out the industry provides “the foundation for American democratic influence and soft power abroad.”

• The current Administration has little interest in “soft power” and
• The denizens of “the very troubled place” are not those the Administration wants to have any power

And it gets worse. They maintain:

“It is clear that Google (valued at two trillion dollars ) and OpenAI (valued at over $157 billion) are arguing for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America’s creative and knowledge industries, despite their substantial revenues and available funds.”

From an economic standpoint, that valuation of Google (which is actually the valuation of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, but apparently actors aren’t too concerned with details like that) makes the Hollywood $229 billion look like couch change in a sofa at Mar-a-Lago.

The Hollywood group has a sensible approach. It says “There is no reason to weaken or eliminate the copyright protections that have helped America flourish” and that “AI companies can use our copyrighted material by simply doing what the law requires: negotiating appropriate licenses with copyright holders.”

What Google might call “lengthy negotiations with data holders.”

Who will the OSTP side with? Well, its Team Soft Power vs. Team “Prevail Over CCP-built Autocratic, Authoritarian AI.”

When Donald Trump got into a Tesla on the White House lawn he commented, “This is a different panel than I’ve ever—everything’s computer!” Dazzling!

It isn’t hard to imagine Trump (78), Voight (86), Stallone (78), and Gibson (69) climbing into a Model S and taking a road trip to Hollywood where they announce “fair use” isn’t fair, and therefore done. Perhaps the team will join one another in Expendables4Ever, where AI renders them all digitally de-aged  fit in fighting form. Elon can be the tech support guy who always gives the team the edge they need to beat the bad guys.

Then Hollywood will be “BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!” because “Everything’s computer.”

Cover image by Microsoft Bing Image Generator.